NEW DIRECTIONS: CAN REMOTE WORKING MEAN DREAM LIVING?
Research suggests that over half of us will be working from home in the next 20 years…. four readers tell fiona wright how they make it work
WE FIND OUT
paula sheridan, 52, is married with one adult son. she lives in the andalucían mountains in spain. she relocated from london and runs ihubbub, a home business network.
view from my desk panoramic views of incredibly blue skies, wild olive trees, peach orchards, my swimming pool glitters between the trees and
i can see mountains in the distance.
ten years ago i was working for a hotel group in newbury as a marketing and pr manager. i had an operation for shoulder pain that went wrong and i
had to resign from my job. my husband, ken, hated his job as a water company md, flying all over the world, so we decided to set up ihubbub, a website that provides listings and business opportunities for home-run businesses. about three years ago, when the business was really established, we realised we were no longer tied to rainy, cold, gridlocked britain and could run our business from anywhere. we were torn between italy, france and spain, but plumped for southern spain in the end because it was gorgeously hot nearly all year round, easily accessible from the uk with regular cheap flights, and large properties with swimming pools were easily affordable for us with no mortgage. we sold our house in the uk and rented a finca in the andalucían mountains, where we’d been on holiday. we fell in love with our farmhouse, in
the sierra blanquilla valley, on sight and bought it almost immediately. i don’t think most of our clients and customers had even realised we’d moved – that’s the beauty of the internet.
how my job works most of my communications with advertisers and clients are online so i can communicate with anyone anywhere in the world. in all probability they think i’m in some grey london office, gearing up for rush hour on the trains, when in actual fact i’m wandering around my amazing garden with my headset on, gathering olives from the orchard or drinking white wine spritzers from my shady veranda, with my laptop perched on
the table in front of me. if i need to see clients in person, i can easily get cheap flights from malaga. skype, email and social media have all made everything so much easier, there’s no reason to be tied to one place purely for work. moving out here has actually made me much more efficient. i start early in the morning and want to get everything done. i’m really motivated because i want to enjoy the fantastic weather, swimming in my pool.
‘Clients imagine I’m sitting in a dull London office, not wandering through my Spanish orchard picking olives’