A Blessing and a Curse

Working Late
Originally uploaded by dcumminsusa

I am fortunate that I have manager that allows me to work from home even though that is not the standard practice of my employer. I have been working from home for nearly three months straight now.

It's been really nice, I'm always home when the Girlfriend gets home. No commute to deal with (although my normal commute is about 10 minutes) and I have no dress code to adhere to.

However, there are a lot of people in my department that assume that when someone is "working from home" what that really means they will answer an email every few hours to give an appearance they are working, but they are really taking the day off.

I, on the other hand, have been over-working myself while working at home. One reason is to counter-act the above assumption. I get an email, I reply ASAP. The phone rings, I answer it.

However the real reason for my long hours is part lack of discipline and partly the nature of my current project. It's too easy when I get up in the morning to turn on the laptop and start answering emails while the coffee is brewing.

I'm also working on a global team; literally. Two of us are in New Mexico, another three are in Arizona, another one in Oregon, and another one in Israel. You expand my immediate circle by one more order of magnitude and suddenly Malaysia comes into play. In order to make sure the guy in Israel is feeling like part of the team, mornings work best to work with him (time difference is 8 hours ahead). The folks in Malaysia are 14 hours ahead, sooo that means at around 5pm my time... they are just starting their work day. Emails come pouring in and phone conversations start up.I have meetings and phone calls with them until about 8 or 9pm every night. This makes for a 12 to 13 hour work day.

I have also found that by working at home I have less interruptions, i.e. less breaks and that I miss queues for things like... lunch. I can often be working and realize it's 2 or 3pm and I have not eaten since breakfast.

I'm planning on returning to the office again real soon so I can take it easy again.

All this work is really getting in my way of playing around on Flickr, Facebook, Twitter and the rest of the InterWebs.