Looking to start a work from home
Digital technology, especially email and smartphones, have vastly improved the ability of workers to be productive outside of a traditional office. Even so, most administrative work is still done in an office. In practice, modern communications technology is used both to link physical workplaces (as at Slate, which has two offices, one in New York and one in DC) and to disperse them. One reason is that, according to a new survey of office workers conducted by Wakefield Research for IT consulting firm Citrix, most bosses have concerns about telecommuting. Half of workers say their boss disapproves of remote work, and just 35 percent say they tolerate it.
Skeptical bosses are likely to have their doubts reinforced by the same survey, which shows that 43% of workers say they have watched TV or a movie while “working” remotely, while 35% have done housework and 28% have cooked. dinner.
Physical proximity may not be necessary for much work, but it’s still a tough find to replace against The Price Is Right while on the clock.
My experience working primarily from home for an extended period of time several years ago was that it’s a surprisingly efficient way to go crazy. The need to make petty decisions—where to work, which chair to sit in, whether to even bother getting out of bed, whether to wear shoes right now—became overwhelming. I would spend a completely unreasonable amount of time wondering what to make for lunch, and while working on a book, I would devote a surprising amount of energy to meeting my self-imposed daily word quota in time to catch movie matinees.
But there’s also a compelling case to be made that working from home makes people much more efficient, because it allows workers to take care of annoying little tasks while still doing their jobs. Remote work, at least the occasional remote work, can be great precisely because of the opportunity it provides to do a number of non-work things. It’s much faster to buy groceries at a quarter to three than to stand in line during rush hour after work. Too many people work similar hours and want to eat dinner at dinner time. My neighborhood supermarket turns into a nightmare from 6:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m. Sunday afternoons, another popular time for shopping, is even worse, with aisles often showing shortages of key products Soviet style. If you simply start work a little earlier (after all, you don’t have to commute to work) and stop by the store during a break when lines are short, you can get more work done and more shopping done in a fixed amount of time. Even better, if more people did that, then shift workers with genuinely inflexible schedules might avoid some line problems, too.
And telecommuting allows you to tackle household tasks that take up a lot of time but don’t really involve a lot of work. Seeing your clothes spin in your washer or dryer is perfectly compatible with productive work. But between the washing step and the drying step comes a time-sensitive phase of “putting the wet clothes in the dryer”. Taking just a few minutes off work to do the swapping allows you to get the job done efficiently and leaves your real spare time free for exciting activities like getting out and about. Many recipes, similarly, involve considerable periods of simmering or roasting during which it’s nice to be in the house but you don’t really have to do anything. In a “work, then shop, then cook, then eat” paradigm, it’s challenging to eat anything that can’t be made quickly. But if you can simmer while you work, then a great deal of housework can be accomplished with minimal reduction in professional output.
The fact that such practices remain officially taboo reflects how far we haven’t come as a society since the days when we expected every full-time professional to be supported by a full-time homemaker.
More broadly, the Wakefield survey suggests that employers may be missing out on an inexpensive way to provide workers with something of value. Sixty-four percent of respondents who have not worked remotely “identify at least one extremely popular benefit or pleasure that they would be willing to give up to work from home just one day a week.” The fundamental fact of the modern economy is that no matter how much technology advances or the wealth of society improves, we do not add more hours to the day and still need sleep. Given the circumstances, tactics that help people save time are not only valuable, but more so with each passing year. Smart companies need to find ways to recognize that and allow their employees enough flexibility to manage their time effectively.