How Working From Home Saved my Life

We all know what working is like, or more so, the 9–5. The pressure to succeed, the drive, the competition, I fell victim to that, hard.

It didn’t help that I lived in one of the biggest cities in Canada, in Toronto you feel the energy. It’s constant, and everyone around you feels it to. I couldn’t help but watch people on the street and see the stress on their faces before I had even finished my morning coffee.

Not to say it’s all bad, but downtown, corporate life, there is no escaping it.

Where I lived I could see the CN tower, so you would think that getting into the downtown core everyday would have been a walk in the park, literally. My day consisted of this: wake up 6:00 am, coffee (always coffee), shower, go to work for 8:30 am, get home at 6:30 pm, eat dinner, gym, sleep, repeat. I really didn’t have a social life until Saturday night, after I had caught up on sleep for most of the day.

So what, you’re working like a slave so you can pay for a place you esssentially just sleep in? Listen I loved my job, I still do. But it gets to a point when the work-life balance crap comes to fruition.

So I thought on it and moved, I moved across the country — why not? I had the choice however, to continue on and find a job that would still pay me well to essentially never go home or meet new people. Or, take a leap of faith and work the way I wanted.

I can tell you now from experience, take the leap of faith. Take control, it feels way too good. I still do what I love, but I also do what I want. I am a marketing specialist and content creator, so I chose a good industry that caters to working remotely.

I can schedule appointments whenever I want, I can meet a friend for lunch, I can go for a run in the middle of the work day. The whole time knowing that if I had kept going, like everyone else, I would be stuck behind a desk.

I still get my work done, and it’s even better now, because i’m happy. At the end of all of this, when you have accomplished what you needed to accomplish and you don’t rely on that pay check anymore, are you going to be happy? I told myself no, and now i’m making up for lost time.

It was freedom I was after, all the while secure knowing I could still pay my bills. But now instead of complaining about the traffic I can rave about a cute coffee shop I discovered. Just don’t get stuck in the standard way of living, its overdone anyway.