Leave Your Cubicle Behind

Everyone wants to escape the cubicle but not everyone knows how to do so.  There’s plenty of books and websites out there that can help you but many of the ones I read seem to lack concrete steps to really help you escape the cubicle in any meaningful way. Most of them revolve around starting a web business but that’s not always something everyone wants to do. It’s not something everyone has to do either.

While there are plenty of ways to escape the cubicle, we all want to escape for one reason: TIME. We all want time. Time to garden, travel, sleep, hike, knit, or play scrabble.

The first step in learning to escape the cubicle is pretty simple and straightforward- figure out why you want to escape the cubicle.

People escape the cubicle for many reasons but the reason why you want to do it will determine what path you take in escaping.  Wanting to be your own boss and start a web business takes a lot more work and a different set of tasks than simply wanting to reduce your hours at work to spend more time with your kids.

So today’s lesson is figure out what you want. If you want to follow the first path, be able to travel the world, and work from a laptop on the beach, you’ll need to think of two things: do you have any skills that can allow you to work anywhere (writer, web designer, photographer) or what kind of online business would you like to start in order to make money online.

The second path you can take is to simply reduce your time at work or running errands to have more time to do whatever it is you like to do. This path is a bit simpler but also requires you to learn how to sweet talk your boss a little bit, or, if you are the boss, to relax and step away from your workaholic lifestyle.

In part two of this series, I’ll start talking about what actions we can take beginning with general things that all of us need to do in order to on our path to leave the cubicle behind.