Wednesday, 24 Jul 2002

WARREN, Vt.

If you were wondering, after yesterday’s report, I do have some non-canine colleagues; they’re spread out all over the country (and Canada). Over this past year, I have worked closely with a team comprised of folks in British Columbia, Washington, D.C., the other Washington, Mississippi, Tennessee, California, and several other U.S. states. It is an interesting setup, a truly virtual office, and it has both benefits and drawbacks.

Next week, many of us on the team are getting together for one of our periodic modeling meetings. Although these meetings can be a grind, I tend to look forward to them. Face-to-face time is certainly helpful when dealing with colleagues, and allows for that personal touch that is usually lost over email. Unless each email is composed very carefully, the format cannot reliably and accurately convey the author’s tone. Humor and irony can be dangerous techniques to use over email. I generally refuse to use “emoticons,” especially in my work emails, for while they are a safe way to imply a joke or irony, they may well leave the impression that the author is a bit goofy. :-). When I send emails to my colleagues I try to be sure that I’m not sounding angry or demanding (unless, of course, I am feeling angry or demanding).

Phone conferences tend to become a way of life for the home-office worker. These are certainly productive, and can help a virtual office come together. Our team has a weekly modeling call which allows each member of the team to communicate with the others in real time. Given the tendency of these meetings to drag on, though, a decent speakerphone is a must.

Today, I’m anxious to hit the ground running. There was a bit of spinning of my wheels yesterday as I tried to move forward on several fronts at once. This happens to everyone, but I think that it makes me feel a bit more anxious than many. If you work in an office, people at least know that you were there at your desk pounding away for eight hours. When you work out of your home, concrete progress on your tasks is the only thing that your clients can be sure of. Working from home is a little bit like being a student all the time. The upside is that if you need to take a break, you can generally do so at any time. The downside is, you constantly have deadlines hanging over you, whether it’s the weekend or not. What’s more, you are rewarded for the results of your effort and not for the effort itself.

If working from home is like being a student, most of my tasks are like a term paper or a thesis: large projects with a deadline that is usually several months away. When you consider that I may have four or five projects going at once, you can infer that the process is not exactly stress-free.

The author’s side of the mountain.

Another reason to get a jump on the day today is that I promised my office-mates a walk in the woods later on. In my case, that’s right out my back door.

Getting to choose your own location is definitely one of the most significant benefits of working from home. Until recently, I worked out of a home office in Boulder, Colo., a location that I loved. Housing costs and traffic jams finally drove me out of that region a couple of years ago, and my wife and I moved to central Vermont. It’s been difficult to adjust to the lack of sunny days here, but now that we have gotten used to it (mostly), we’re quite happy in our new location.

And we just have to walk through our back yard to bushwack up the little mountain called Warren Pinnacle. That is an important goal of mine for the day. The car repair is proving to be costly so I need to stretch my stressed-out legs.