Working from home

In 1988, when I first started my first job in IT, there was no concept of working from home; you needed to be at your desk, in front of your dumb terminal, connected to the mainframe. 

The first time I rememberer doing any aspect of my job from home would have been around 1995, when I did some spec writing on my home computer on a number of evenings (it was a pretty fraught project!).

It would have been 1997 when I first stayed at home and was paid for it - again writing specs, but still with no need to be hooked up to the office - but I don't think I ever actually routinely spent part of my working week, working remotely, until 2003. There was no broadband in Kirkby Lonsdale but I had a ridiculously expensive ISDN set up that allowed me to access work, albeit painfully slowly. 

In all this time, I never really had any issue with working from home: I'd do my email, make phone calls, prepare documentation, whatever was required. It only became an issue in 2004 when I was assigned to a project in New York. I'd fly out Sunday to Friday once every few weeks but apart from that, I was based at home. 

Lord, it was complicated. For a start, I was on New York time, so the day would start around 1pm but not finish until late in the evening but my real problem was with my conscience. In the office, you clock in - really or figuratively - at some point in the morning, you do your working day, with a break for lunch, and then you go home. Unless you're a solicitor, you don't have to worry about how you spend every minute: you might go to the loo, make a brew, or chat to a colleague.

At home, I found it more difficult. I felt like I needed to account for every minute, to counter my worry that people might think I was just lounging around the house in my pyjamas. Eventually, though, I found a routine that worked. For a start, I'd make a list of what I reasonably expected to get that done, allowing for the fact that I'd lose half the day to email and phone calls. For my own sanity, I'd jot down what I'd done during the day so if at the end my list was not complete, I could see why. And finally, I allowed myself to do something every hour - for up to ten minutes - that wasn't work related: make a drink, put the washing on, nip to the shops, whatever.

The habit of making a daily list and tracking what I get done has stayed with me to this day and, when I do work from home, I still do something unrelated every hour (and actually, that's good time for thinking). Today, I was working at the Minx's house, so one of my non-work activities was doing the washing up!

Extra: the light in The Minx's bathroom was excellent, this evening. This lighting and pose put me in mind of the cover an album by Deutsch Amerikanische Freundschaft although when I checked later, it wasn't very similar at all.)

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-11.8 kgs
Reading: 'In Aleppo Once' by Taqui Altounyan