I am now in my sixth week of the new job, which is 100% from-home except for occasional runs up to Pennsylvania to work face-to-face with my largest dedicated user base and the rare in-town trip to the Mothership for IT support or big corporate gatherings. I know I don't yet have what will be my regular working routine down. I'm still getting ramped up on domain knowledge and it will be some time before I am really working in a normal steady way. That said, I can generalize a bit about the experience and there are definitly some things that Just Work.
The environment part, for openers. You might think "it's your house, moron, of COURSE it works for you." But the fact that I happen to live here is not what's interesting. It's what had to be present for things to work. I was issued the and required the following:
- a moderately decent laptop
- a secureid
- a configuration file for OpenVPN
- a corporate conference calling number.
I was already the owner of:
- a good desk and chair
- a cable modem
- an 8 port hub
- a KVM switch
- dual monitors
- a high quality printer/scanner/copier/fax machine
So, I went home, plugged in, dropped the OpenVPN configuration into a conf directory and no-kidding I had access to everything I need just like I was in the office. It took a couple of trips back to the Mothership to finally get me all of the access I needed to admin my laptop, but I now have almost the exact same access to corporate network resources I would if I were physically in the office.
But how about access to coworkers? Well, my group all stay logged into a private IRC server all day and daily update a wiki with our progress. This allows everyone to ping the group with their needs/questions, be less intrusive than aim and get answers in better real-time than email when it's needed. So far, this has my needs covered and means I actually bother to attempt to answer my own questions before I ask the group. There's very little temptation to have 4 people clustered around a monitor since it's er... well, pretty near impossible.
I have been warned against several behaviors. People say don't work in your pajamas. I sometimes do. People say don't work on a machine you use for personal things -- I do that too. And with that machine a Ctl Ctl A Enter away, it would be hard to keep out of it if it were a problem anyway. My worst distraction is that the ground floor has to be clutter-free. I can't work amid seas of little-girl detritus and I can't make a cup of tea, walk away and leave a sink full of scummy dishes. It's not that cleaning is a secret vice or anything. I can ignore DIRT. It's just clutter that makes me nuts. So the first 15 minutes after my tribe leaves the house for work and daycare, I straighten up. As long as the place wasn't too much of a disaster, then I'm good to go.
The only really difficult problem I'm currently having with the new job is the level of physical inactivity. Unless I schedule exercise or deliberately leave the house, I scarcely MOVE all day. I've worn a pedometer and it's amazing how sedentary working at home makes me. I climb 5 times as many stairs as I did in an office (our only bathroom is upstairs), but I probably walk half the distance since I don't even go from house to car to office and back. It's freezing outside and it will be spring before my bike comes out of the shed, so I'm looking for lunchtime yoga or something to fight this since overall it's actually rather damaging.
Anyhow, so far, working from home is just lovely, thanks.
Posted by karen at December 12, 2005 12:27 PM