Working From Home

For the last two weeks, I've been working 4 days a week at home. If it works out (and I see no reason why it shouldn't), then I plan to swap over to full time work-from-home.

There really is no overwhelming reason to travel to the Sun Menlo Park campus. The two people I work with the most are remote. One works from home on the U.S. East coast and the other is at home in San Francisco. Virtually all communication is via email, phone and IRC. I could just as easily do that from my home.

Some of the advantages of working from home:

• The commute is shorter. Even though I left for work at 6:30am and left for home about 3:00pm, I was typically in the car each day for 45 minutes to an hour. Now I just have to walk to the room we've designated as an office. Five seconds each way tops.

• The bathroom is nearer. Now if caffiene wasn't such a good diuretic this wouldn't be a problem. It's certainly easier now.

• Saving money on petrol. This isn't such a big deal for me because I've lived in England and Australia, and realize that current American petrol prices are still much lower than the equivalent in those countries. Still it's nice to be doing my small part to reduce pollution.

• Not having to work on the very busy Sun internal network. Not having to share web proxies with thousands of other people. My browser has never felt so snappy. Not having to launch applications over the network from very busy servers. More snappiness.

• Helping out at home. Being easily available to do something like pick up Duncan from school if I need to.

Some of the disadvantages of working from home:

• Services I just took for granted. Things like printing. There are nice fast double sided printers at Sun offices. My HP Laserjet 1100 just doesn't compare. The solution is I just don't print so many large documents anymore. Probably another good eco-thing.

  Downloading large software bundles. I didn't use to think much about burning new CDROM's/DVD's with the next build of Solaris on them. From home, this is no longer quite so straight forward. The downloading is now something I do overnight.

  Sun also has flexi-offices. If the need arises, I'll still be able to go in, reserve an office and do what I need to do, then come home again. It's not quite the same thing as some of the people that are really remote.

• Interaction with others. I miss hallway conversations. Lunch in the cafeteria.

• The home office setup. This still needs work. In the afternoon, the sun comes in and can be blinding. I need better shades. Definitely fixable.

I'm not looking forward to the day when I have to totally give up my Sun office at Menlo Park. I've accumulated a lot of stuff over the last twenty years that I'm going to have to give away, thrown away or box up and put in the attic. From memory, the last time I moved offices, it took 16 moving boxes. For the next time, I'll need to dramatically reduce that.

I'm also going to be on the lookout for work-from-home tips. I noticed that the Lifehacker archives has some. They now go to the top of my list of things to read.

[Technorati Tag: Home Office]

( May 26 2006, 07:57:44 AM PDT ) [Listen] Permalink Comments [2]