Working from Home: Why It Rocks
artisansystem.com
artisansystem.com
For whatever it's worth, my working from home schedule was almost exactly the same as yours - Maury included.
I also feel like I am far more productive when working from home. Partially due to the lack of interruptions as well as the fact that my home office has been built specifically for the the exercise of writing software.
I added a picture of my desktop set up to the article, so I have a pretty nice setup too.
They are real life stories, no one knows what is inside the envelope and we are all in it together wondering what it will say.
It allows us to experiment with our human reading skills. Do the individuals know themselves as well as we know them. Is she honest when she says it could /only/ be him? Is he honest when he says he knows it isn't him.
The amount of shock at the result is illustrative of the idea that the world around us can be exactly the opposite of what we believe it to be -- or want it to be.
there are many hobbies i wouldn't necessarily roll into a career. friendship and human contact is one of them. work for me is about loading my weekly design ideas and code changes into the "RAM" of my brain and getting into the flow. there is plenty of time around that to schedule meaningful human interaction, which is usually meaningful precisely because it isn't professional work interactions. i never try to code while interacting with others, though i do like to work in RAM while doing solitary things like swimming or falling asleep.
The interrupters have a more social-oriented personality hate working at home.
The ones like me who always seem to be getting interrupted, prefer working at home because we find all our solutions the hard way, Googling and experimenting, and would only ask someone else as a last resort. So we get much more done from home.
Where the discipline comes in is in working a full day, since often you can get done in 3 hours what would take you a full day in the office.
I totally agree that people are generally more on one side of that spectrum or the other. That said, the problem with way too many organizations and methodologies is that they don't take into account that it's not a static thing -- i.e., to be productive as a team requires a balance of both. Periods where there's little to no interruptions and periods of high-interactions.
Alas, one very key facet is that the majority of managers tend towards the extreme of the interrupter end of the spectrum.
As a segue, I've always found it interesting that a lot of the best CEO's actually get up really early in the morning so that they can get a few hours of "real" work done before jumping into the over-scheduled, interrupting rest of the day.
Re: Full days work
This is another area where the Taylor-istic mindset has completely corrupted notions of "work".
Reminds me of the study of taxi drivers. A lot of them worked backwards from what they wanted/needed to make each month to come up with the number that they needed to make day. Then, they'd usually work until they hit that number and then go home. But, that completely misses the burstiness of the business -- some days you're in the zone and cranking while other days it's a waste because things are dead. They could make more money by working long days when the pickings are good.