Achieving Balance: Compelling Reasons to Rent Office Space

We’re living in the heyday of the home office; many entrepreneurs, keen to cut expense wherever possible, forgo renting office space. It seems more “practical” to simply work out of the home—until one finds one’s self amid a whirlwind of chaos, unable to sufficiently focus.

In reality, while the home is an excellent place to start a small business, keeping it there forever can actually substantially damage your odds of success. There are many compelling reasons to rent office space for your business once it gets sufficiently off the ground, such as:

• Creating a clear separation between work and home. The importance of this division is not emphasised nearly enough in our modern work ethos, but it’s vital to both one’s personal and professional success. Entrepreneurs who work at home have a very hard time leaving their work at work, because home life and work life are occurring in exactly the same place. This leads to working long hours, feeling constantly unable to relax (i.e., trying to sit down to watch the TV, only to find yourself looking towards the home office constantly, thinking of all you “should” be doing), and unable to “shut down” at night. This frequently leads to insomnia and eventual burnout.

It also damages your home life; your partner, children, family, and friends will begin to feel like you’re never truly “there” with them, and eventually stress and tensions will mount in the home, making it a rather hostile environment to try to work in.

• Renting office space minimises distractions. If you’re working from home, chances are in trying to be efficient, you will be running back and forth doing laundry, dishes, making lunch, attempting to mind children, etc., as you try to work. This sounds practical, but it’s really not; the human brain is much, much worse at multitasking than most people think it is, so attempting to do so all the time will almost surely degrade your work performance.

• Renting office space reduces feelings of boredom and isolation. Human beings are not designed to stay in one place all of the time, seldom interacting with others in a face-to-face manner. We evolved as sociable, inherently nomadic creatures, and as such, many people who work at home come to experience feelings of isolation, loneliness, boredom, and even depression. This, of course, has an extremely deleterious effect on one’s motivation to work.

As stressful as the daily commute may seem at times, the act of going to work, interacting with people along the way, and experiencing a change of pace and scenery is good for us. Just look for offices to rent that are reasonably close to home, so you don’t feel as though you’re losing a large chunk of time to the daily journey.