Working From Home

February 19, 2009 01:26 AM

In IT, and specifically software development, the fact that we can do much of our job from literally anywhere is one of our great luxuries.

I've been working from home for 8 months. In fact, one of the reasons I took this job--in addition to the fact that I get to focus on SharePoint development, rather than bouncing back and forth between plain old ASP.NET and SharePoint and third-party application support--is that I'm working from home. I should point out that I am actually a full-time, salaried employee--this isn't contract work.

(Also, I should point out that, yes, I do actually work--contrary to Chad's claim that I sit around all day surfing the web and stuffing my face with pork rinds.)

Working from home is, I have to admit, really amazing. But every time I hear someone say, "wow, you get to work from home?" with a shocked or jealous tone, I cringe. That's because, while it's a great benefit, it takes some adjustment. You will either be tempted to abuse this freedom, or, in the absence of a strong routine, become your own worst micro-manager and taskmaster.

Time Management

I really wish I worked from home, so I could take a break, grab the guitar, kick out the jams, then jump back into programming. - @ViNull

A job with flexibility is great, but the key to flexibility is that it requires as much giving as it does taking.

To some extent, I can set my own hours. Obviously, I need to be working in the 9-5 time frame to stay connected by phone, Skype, IM, or email. Sometimes I need to go in for a meeting. But otherwise, I'm not restricted as long as I meet my requirements and get my 40 hours in.

That freedom is something I've had to adjust to, especially considering I'm very much on the Lawful end of the alignment spectrum. In all honesty, the pressure is mostly self-imposed, and partially an artifact from my previous job, where the key measure of productivity (and our then-understaffed department's need for more employees) was the number of hours we worked.

Setting your own hours, then, means work is always there, all the time, waiting. In an office, you'll occasionally have the unproductive day where you just can't seem to get anything done--but as long as you show up at 9 and leave at 6, you call it a day with a clear conscience. After all, you were there for your allotted time. But working from home, it's all about the hours--so if you take a break, the clock stops.

I learned this before I started this job, while doing contract work on the side--literally, every free minute is time that you could be working, so when you fall behind, it's constantly hanging over your head. You have 168 hours in a week--it's up to you to decide which 40 of those are work. But no matter how you shuffle things, you can't get around the fact that you only have 168 hours in a week. Hours cannot be magically created ex nihilo.

However, you need some breaks to think clearly. I've tried to work out a schedule where I can break occasionally, take a short lunch, and be done at a decent hour. (And not just "take breaks," but take disciplined breaks. Every minute I'm not working is a minute I have to make up elsewhere.)

It usually doesn't happen as well as I'd like, but I try. If I manage it well, I have a good week--sometimes I even get ahead, if I've got a lot of interesting programming work to plow through. If I fall behind, I have to work until 7pm or put in a ten hour day on Thursday or Friday--and usually my whole week is crappy, just from the self-imposed stress.

Social Interaction

It may come as a shock to those of you who know me, but I'm not a particularly social person.

I'm single. I have a small circle of friends. I have roommates, but at the end of a long work day, there isn't always a whole lot of mingling--usually they disperse to their rooms. And despite the fact that I am logged on to six IM services through Pidgin all the time, I barely use IM at all. Mainly because my social style is "sit around and wait for someone to talk to me," which works about as well as you would expect.

So working from home drastically cuts my social interaction. It was tough at first--exacerbating problems that were already present more than anything else--but I've learned to deal with it.

My antisocial behavior aside, even in the best conditions, you will go stir crazy. You may think it's annoying when your coworkers all drop by your cube to BS about nothing in particular, but it's actually a healthy part of the work experience, so long as it's happening in moderation. Remove this from your work day, and you have to find another way to cope.

I find myself needing to get out of the house, too. Not necessarily in the sense of social events (although that helps--I'm somewhat uncomfortable in large crowds, and I think it's gotten worse since I'm no longer getting exposure on a daily basis). But a non-social change of scenery helps things immensely--and yet, I don't always make a point of getting out regularly.

Also, I've come to realize that I rely on Twitter. I hate to admit it, but I've found that I use it primarily for entertainment. I follow a some local .NET guys and SharePoint guys, but I find I don't pay as much attention to them. Twitter's delayed, 140-character format just isn't conducive to holding discussions about development for me--I'm wordy and SharePoint is not a concise subject. And quite frankly, that's not my cup of tea anyway--I hate debate of all kinds and don't want my conversation during the work day to be too distracting. So I find I pay the most attention to local geeks Twittering about nothing in particular.

Perhaps worse, I've caught myself only using Twitter to make witty retorts. And not even that often. Which is, of course, the wrong way to use Twitter. You may have tons of followers, but if you never post, they don't know you're there. But this leads to an odd illusion--if you're following the conversation but never posting, you will still feel like an integral part of the conversation. So I'm going to try to get better about that.

Aside from Twitter, I've also found that I lurk on various forums a bit more. I actually created a "Forums" folder on my Firefox bookmarks bar, and I hit them whenever I have a few minutes between tasks or compiling. And while I include Twitter in that Forums folder (despite the fact that I use the Pidgin plugin), I don't include things like digg, Fark, or Slashdot. It's not that they're bad ways to spend a few minutes of downtime, but they're not as explicitly social, so I don't necessarily want them to be two clicks away.

Either through Twitter or forums, the flood of random babble is like a sort of social background noise. It's like having your TV on when you're alone in the house. It may be a canned, one-way, pre-recorded human voice, but at least it's a human voice.

The grass is always greener

Work environment envy is common even when you're not talking about working from home. But no matter how nice someone else's work environment is, there's still an element of work to it. (If there's not, then they're probably sadly lacking job security.) And the more nontraditional your work environment it is, the more you have to adjust your lifestyle--so much so that staying both productive and yet sane may present its own unique set of challenges.

Despite the challenges, it really is a nice way to work, and I wouldn't trade it in for a cubicle (seriously--in the interest of brevity, I cut out a whole section from this blog post where I only listed the little perks). So, yes, you can be a little bit envious when I say I work from home. But please, don't assume it's all fun and games and doing nothing.

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