Novel Advice About Telecommuting

David Zinger has written a nice little post on his Slacker Manager blog with advice based on nearly thirty years spent working from home. You will not find words of wisdom about having a separate space, setting a regular schedule, or configuring your network, but you should definitely listen to what he has to say.

My favorite piece of advice: Enjoy it. I'm trying to do this more, and I certainly notice the joy of being able to kiss the baby goodbye on her way to preschool or being able to rest my feet on my devoted co-worker Bettie the Dog during the day.

But I think that enjoying it is also noticing the freedom I have to decide to work on what is truly most important at that moment. Too often when you're in a real office you can get caught up in whatever the wave of disaster is. Generally when people come to me with a big problem, I can process the request into the to-do list, triage it to see if it really is a big problem.

More often than not, it's something that can wait an hour or two. So rather than dropping everything because someone has cornered me in my office, I can get to a graceful stopping point on what I was working on, then turn my attention calmly to the urgent issue and kick that jam out, too.

It's not exactly eating bon-bons while throwing laundry in at Starbucks, but I appreciate that aspect of my workday every day.

Yay, telecommuting!