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Let Beethoven Rock Your Isolation Blues
There’s no isolation like silence.
By Mark Landsbaum
Do
you ever find yourself talking to yourself, simply for lack of companionship?
Does a knock at the door startle you, accustomed as you’ve become to your tomb,
er, that is, your home office?
If you’re exhibiting such symptoms, you’ve
got the “I work out of my home and I really love it, really I do, isolation
blues.”
There’s nothing like too much of a good thing to drive you up the
wall. It’s great to work at home, but for the home office-bound, there’s also no
shortage of walls. What to do?
When considering solutions, there are the
usual suspects: Lunch with clients. Lunch with suppliers. Lunch with Mom.
Meetings out of the office. Workshops out of the office. Just standing outside
of the office.
But come on now, we can do better than that. Think outside
the box. Recharge your batteries by embracing the unlikely. Be brave. Go where
no home office entrepreneur has gone before.
Go to the beach. Or the
park. Or the mall. Or the bus terminal. The point of these admittedly radical
solutions is to escape your four-walled prison and plop down amid a swarm of
humanity. It’s true enough in such venues that, even equipped with your laptop
computer, you may not be as productive – if you’ll be productive at all. But
that’s not really the point, is it? You’re already productive.
What you
need is to cure your isolation. So, surround yourself with folks. Take an
occasional respite in a public place. Enjoy people watching. Engage in casual
conversation with utter strangers. Remind yourself that you’re part of a
community, even if they are strangers. Odds are, not all of them will remain
strangers.
There’s no better way to break out of a rut than completely
changing the scenery. Don’t just do a meeting out of the office. Do it up
special. Some unlikely locales can provide just the change needed from your drab
everydayness. Many hotel chains have revamped their lobbies to encourage
informal business meetings. Some of the higher-end hostelries can be a genuine
treat, in a high-tea sort of way. Indulge.
You don’t always have to flee
to escape. Forcing contact with actual live human beings is effective too. You
may over-rely on e-mail for your lifeline to clients and suppliers. Break the
mold. Be bold. Pick up the telephone.
Between low-cost Internet-based
phone services and gazillions of free cell phone minutes, you can afford it.
Make a vow today to actually speak audible words to one client or contractor
every day. It’ll reduce your reliance on your own voice for confirmation that
you remain among the living.
A few more tips:
-
Visit a neighbor. It’s permitted. The boss won’t
care, since you’re the boss.
-
Walk – don’t drive – to the supermarket. Since
your exercise generally consists of bending to tie your shoes, the walk will do
you good. And you’ll actually see people.
-
Pump up the volume. There’s no isolation like
silence. Turn up Beethoven just short of window rattling. Hey, maybe a neighbor
will knock on your door to complain. Two birds with one stone!