According to my reconing, I have been working from home, or Telecommuting for the last 11 years, and I hope that I can keep it up for the next 20! Or if I retire at 65, the next 19 years at least.

I used to hear those commercials where the announcer blares out of the TV saying “Be your own boss, make your own hours… imagine how great it would be to work from your home!”

I have to admit, there was some attraction to working from home, be it stuffing envelopes, selling things on ebay, or something like having a refrigeration repair and installation company. The draw of being my own boss and setting my own hours was just an illusion however…. one not talked about by those selling the dream. You know, buy the book… follow the plan, blah blah blah.

And then a miraculous thing happened to me, at my workplace there was a move to allow workers to work out of their homes. Sign me up for that!

And, I did sign up.

At the time I was working a graveyard shift, so what the company did was to have an ISDN line installed in the house for my use if I needed to use it in an emergency. What I mean by that is that in the hours I was at home, I was “on-call” so to speak. So if I needed to fill in for someone on the weekend, or during some hours during the day I could.  Really I could have done almost all of my work from home, except they didn’t have the phone queue set up to forward to employees homes. So when a call came into the support center I or someone else would have to be there to answer it. So in the beginning, this wasn’t truly working from home, fortunately the full blown working from home wouldn’t be that far away.

There were a couple of issues that rose when I did get into working from home full time when it came to technology. The company that I worked for was a unix-flavored OS oriented company and did not want to have employees use any Microsoft products.  In fact the CEO of our company was well know for his Microsoft top 10 list… funny stuff, but it put some restrictions on what software, operating system and so on that I could use.

At the time I had purchased a new computer and with it came Microsoft’s newest operating system Windows XP.   Due to the security or lack of security with XP, the company wanted us to use Windows 2000, or Windows NT.  A quick trip to the computer store fixed that problem, and a couple of hours installing the new OS on the system (which according to the manufacturer of the computer was a downgrade and not supported… that’s another story entirely) I was up and running and ready to install the Unix client software.

A nice thing that the company’s IT department did was to provide access to our home directories on the Unix servers from windows.  Funny enough it was the product that I supported when I joined the company. I was hired to support PC connectivity to the Solaris Operating System. So as far as the connectivity to the servers, it was pretty much old hat.

I tried to keep my use of the X-Windows to a minimum.  I found that replicating the desktop over the connection I had with my ISP was just slow as slow could be. I decided to run the programs I needed to do my job on my local machine, and put my work files up on the server (and keep a backup copy on the local machine…. very important thing to do, as I learned later).

One of the most important things in Telecommuting is the lack of commuting… it should just be called TeleWork. My commute for last 11 years or so has been from my bedroom to my office. Which brings up an important point.

If you are going to be working from home, make sure that you have a space, or spare room dedicated as your workspace and nothing else.

What is the reason for this? It helps you focus on your work. Don’t just stick a desk in your bedroom and work from there, although it is possible to do, it can be distracting and you may wind up spending more than 8 hours a day doing work because you find it hard to pull yourself away since you never really have a chance to “get away” from work. If you have an area, or spare room to work in, you can turn off the lights and leave work. Or should I say you have the option of leaving, it doesn’t always work that way.

Sick days are also interesting, when you work from home you are more likely to work when sick.  Why?  Because you can go to work in your PJs, and have less of a chance of making your coworkers sick as well. This practice is not suggested though, if you are sick, don’t work, call in and get some rest.

In future posts about Working from home, I’ll go over the technology used/needed for every day teleworking, procedures to be the most effective, and ways to keep your family from thinking you can drop what your doing at work and do other stuff anytime, like gardening or laundry etc…

Catch you on the next post.