Way back when, I worked in a large open plan office, a Hieronymus Bosch landscape of noises and smells and petty politics. It wasn’t for me. Eventually I escaped, seduced by the greener grass of working from home. Solitude, comfort, fridge – this was going to be designer nirvana! No more commuting or committees or line managers for me, just great swathes of time to do with as I wish!

I would begin each day by starting some work, spend the day doing some work, and then end the day ending some work. Perhaps a modest break for a sandwich. It would be a perfectly pleasant and solid chunk of time in which to design some designs, calmly and diligently spinning whatever plates I fancied towards their respective deadlines. This would be my routine. There are many like it, but this one would be mine.

Reality is slightly different. It turns out that I overlooked one minor detail: the doorbell.

Invaders from the Outside can appear at any moment. There’s the postie, who has cottoned on to my homebodiness and made me the the street’s de facto parcel depot, responsible for redistributing various shipments of clothes and books and enormous sacks of whey powder. There’s the grocery delivery guy, with whom I’m obliged to discuss The Parking Situation Around Here (neither of us wants to have this or any conversation, but it would be unseemly not to). There’s the window cleaner, who announces his arrival with an abrupt damp SMACK against the window beside my head. There’s the grinning charity doorstepper and/or psychopath-scam-burglar, impossible to tell which.

There are thousands of people out there, all hellbent on dragging me to the front door and away from my train of thought. Oh what I’d give for a receptionist.

Even without this encroaching horde, interruptions find their way to me. My studio is scattered about the place (desk upstairs, books downstairs; surfaces anywhere I can find them; printer located within view of the kitchen bin so it doesn’t get ideas above its station), so my work is all jumbled up with the demands of the house. Everywhere I look, looming piles of things that need to be fixed or put away or filed or signed or returned or cleaned.

How is anything supposed to get done where there are so many things that need to get done?

Every now and then, something in the kitchen will beep at me, another machine nagging to be emptied. I believe it was Saul Bass who once said, “I want to make beautiful things … but first I have to clear that big mass of grey fluff out of the tumble dryer filter”. How is anything supposed to get done where there are so many things that need to get done?

And then there’s The Boy, an adorable manifestation of interruption. Analyse the symbolism and subtext of The Shining all you want, that film is about one thing and one thing only: working from home during the school holidays. The tension between work and play is tough, and finding the balance between the two can be exhausting.

Right now though, we have a system: if the door is shut and daddy is singing along to Robyn in a shrill falsetto, do not disturb; let daddy be dull in his own way and he’ll chase you around the maze after you’ve had your tea.

In fact, he’s the one constant that gives my day any coherent shape. Meals, social engagements, drop-offs, pick-ups – the intense timetable of a six year-old provides fixed points around which everything else simply has to fit, be it work or white good.

So I suppose I do have a routine, it just happens to be a new one every single day, existing somewhere between utter chaos and the school run. They may be smallish swathes of time, but at least they’re mine.

Daniel Benneworth-Gray is a freelance designer based in York, @gray