Whew boy, the life of the unemployeed consultant. I believe life's first consulting lesson is that you can't underestimate the amount of time it's going to take to get your work space such that you can comfortably get something done. It's one thing to come home and hack for several hours, but apparently another completely when you're going to hole up in your home office to put in your 40+ a week. Wires that never bothered you when you were putting together weekend hacks suddenly are incredibly annoying, and things as simple as getting your toolset from, in my case, the previous life's office, replicated in the home office isn't quite as simple as you might assume.

And of course there's the issue of getting your shingle hung on the Internet (ie, your company's website) while trying to get in your first few contract proposals. Nothing to stop you from going ahead and bidding on the bacon first, but without a good site to back up your work makes you feel a little naked. Of course a good site with database-powered example applications is a contract's worth of work right there! All of those intranet sites that you used to be able to show to in-house and visiting clients gone, just like that.

That said, when -- and if -- I do land a few fairly (as in, "fair price") paying gigs, I can tell this is going to ultimately be a much more productive environment. Quite a bit easier to transition from hanging out with the fam-dam to putting in a few high-quality, late-night hours in the office! That is to say, it's going to be easy to make sure I'm working my most productive hours instead of spending them en route to the office or at home watching the evening news. Or even worse, having them dashed to the rocks by interruptions by coworkers who have decided now's the hour to talk about last weekend's big game. (Not that there's anything inherently wrong with that -- Poor Ramsey got clobbered!)