Work Life Balance

<< Jeff Answers My Unit Test Question | Home | A missing piece to CMMI >>

Work Life Balance

Chris Sells has been writing on working at home, and Scott Hanselman has as well.

As for myself, my employer frowns on working at home, although I am on a laptop, and we do have a VPN. Several times I have gotten permission to work from home simply so I can focus on one project at a time and actually accomplish things.

My normal course of action is to keep accepting small tasks that 'should be done easily' and then have them pile up as the daily fires appear and consume my time.

Ultimately, my to do list threatens to suck my computer into the void due to its massive gravitational weight and I have to blow everyone off and get the plate clean again.

I'm not sure if working full time from home would work from me, I certainly doubt my employer would buy into it. But currently, I'm sitting at the office trying to play the same game of catch-up. It's 10pm and I'd rather be home to do this work.

Print posted @ Wednesday, October 24, 2007 10:09 PM

Feedback

# re: Work Life Balance

I think you could 'knock off' for the night, Scott. Go home, get some sleep and come back fresh in the morning.

Don't worry, that catch up work you are doing will still be there in the morning.

However, you raise an interesting issue.

I can understand some employers being reluctant to allow employees to work from home.

Employers may feel that employees spend more time accomplishing personal tasks when 'working from home' than on work tasks.

Employers may also fear that working from home would reduce the capacity of employees to interact together. This may have a negative impact from both an efficiency perspective and from a team building perspective.

Finally, employers may fear that sensitive data may be compromised if that data is allowed to leave the office.

However, there are some strong arguments for allowing employees to work at home.

If employees are disciplined about their work ethic, allowing them to work from home allows them to focus on important tasks without distraction.

Also, working from home allows employees to get up and take a short break without appearing 'lazy.' This helps employees to stay 'fresh' and thus achieve more with the time spent on the task.

If I could have it my way, I would do it this way - spend four days in the office and one day at home.

During the four days in the office, I would attend primarily to tasks which require a significant degree of collaberation with colleagues or others.

I would save all tasks which do not require much contact with others for the day at home. Then, I would get them all done in the one day without distraction.

Cheers

Andrew 10/26/2007 7:51 AM | Andrew

Comments have been closed on this topic.

Development In a Tesseract