I love my
one day a week when I can work at home. ‘Hjemmekontor’ as it’s called in
Norwegian—literally, ‘home office’. Home office day. Has a nice ring to it. I
usually work at home on Wednesdays these days. All I know is that it seems to
be a lot more common now than it was ten years ago. I started working at home
around eight years ago; I was one of the first employees at my hospital to take
advantage of the opportunity. I get so much work done at home. I am disciplined
and structured enough to make it work; I know people who are not and who shudder
at the very idea of working at home. I love it because I am not distracted by telephones,
knocks on my door, or other interruptions that make up the daily life of the
workplace. And I am not complaining about those interruptions—they are part and
parcel of the work world. But if I want to think, write or be creative, home is
the place I need to be.
I work at
home the way I do at my workplace, from 9am until noon with a break for lunch,
and then the rest of the day until around 5pm. Today I did some food shopping
at lunchtime, and on my way upstairs to our apartment with my two grocery bags,
I ran into two other people who live in our building. They were also working at
home. It struck me that more people may end up working from home in the next ten
years than will be working in a formal workplace. And wouldn’t that be ok? I
would welcome it. With computers, smart phones, fax machines, webcams and
pagers, aren’t we well-connected to our workplaces? Aren’t we sufficiently
connected? We are on an honor system, yes, that’s true. If we say we will be at
home to those who work for us, we have to honor our promise. I want to honor it,
because I want my co-workers to know that I am available to help them whenever
they need me during work hours. After hours is another story. After hours—those
are my hours, and they are ‘do not
disturb unless it is a crisis’ hours.
There are a
lot of advantages to working at home. There is no formal dress code; pajamas
are quite ok, as are tattered jeans. Makeup is unimportant. Additionally I can
take a five-minute break from time to time to find my camera to take photos of
the pigeons who sit outside my kitchen window—my camera is in the next room a
few feet away. If I was at work, I would miss those shots because I don’t carry
my camera with me to work. Perhaps I should start to do so. In any case, I cannot
come up with one disadvantage to working at home, unless of course one brings
up the loss of social contact. But being a scientist, I am alone a good portion
of my day anyway, so I don’t normally experience an overabundance of daily social
interaction at work. And I’m fine with that. I know others who would miss
having their daily group around them, and who would not enjoy being at home. I also look at working at home as preparation for retirement. And since I’ve been doing this
for eight years, I am used to it and I know I'll be fine the day I no longer have a formal workplace to go to.
