The Telecommuter Manifesto

Many new telecommuters expect to work less, since their time will be spent more productively.  While that certainly can be true, if you aren’t careful, you can also end up working a whole lot more.  The reason is that although telecommuting is generally described as working from home, an equally accurate description would be living at work.

Unless you set work hours for yourself, you might find it hard to leave at the end of the day.  You might be tempted to work until dinner is ready and then jump right back into it as soon as you finish eating.  Or you might start putting in a extra few hours at night instead of reading, watching TV, or spending time with your family.  With your work area only a few feet away, you can have trouble getting away from it.

I once lived in a loft apartment while I was telecommuting.  It was a great place, right in the city, with as open a floor plan as you could hope for.  Therein lied the problem.  No matter where I was in my apartment, I could see my work desk and was reminded of my job.  After a few weeks it started to drive me a little crazy and I realized that I needed to make some kind of change.  Setting work hours was just the trick I needed.

Now, I follow a morning and evening routine just as if I had an office job.  I wouldn’t go to the office before I got showered and dressed or had eaten breakfast, so I avoid my work area until those things are completed.  When lunch time comes, I step away and take a real lunch break.  (Even 10 minutes away is a nice pick-me-up)  When quitting time comes, I shut down my computer, turn off my work phone, and walk away.

I do, of course make exceptions to my work hours just as I would at the office.   If I have a big deadline or important meeting I’ll start early and stay late.  During those busy times, it’s great that I work from home, since my work is right there.  But for the rest of the time, having set work hours makes my telecommuting much more enjoyable.  It actually increases my productivity as well.  Rather than half heartedly working in the early morning and late eveneing, outside of my normal work hours I’m totally off and during my work hours I’m 100% committed to getting my work done.  Twelve half-assed hours are much less productive than eight (or less) in which you use your entire ass!

A funny thing happens when you transition from an office worker to a telecommuter.  What were once routine tasks that were hardly given a second thought suddenly become an area of increased attention for your management.  Recording time is one such example.

Not all workers record time, so this may seem like a non-issue to you.  Other similar tasks face the same scrutiny though, so please read on.  Those of us who work on an hourly wage, or for different clients, government contracts, etc have to record our time worked on various tasks.  Even salaried worker face this requirement.  I work on salary, yet still must allocate what I’m doing with each 1/10 of an hour, i.e. my day gets divided into 6 minute increments.  Generally, I’m only working on a single project, so this isn’t much of an issue.  I simply record a full day’s work to a single account.  But during extremely light or heavy work times I may be splitting time between multiple accounts.

When you work in an office, nobody seems to question your time.  Even people who spend more time at the coffee pot than at their desk have no trouble getting their time approved.  But when you work remotely, entering your time honestly still seems to draw suspicion.  Suddenly round numbers, like 8 hours, seem much too convenient to be true.  Superiors may wonder “Did he really work a full day or does he just want me to think that?  I’ll bet he’s watching TV in his pajamas…”  Of course, such considerations are ludicrous.  It isn’t that working remotely is apt to make you less honest about your time.  In fact, you’ll probably be getting a whole lot more done in much less time without the distractions of the office.  The real issue here is one of insight and control.

Without the ability to oversee you or check in on you throughout the day, your manager can control you less and must trust you more.  Never mind the fact that they may find your colleagues at that aforementioned coffee machine, at least in that case they can yell at them to get back to work.  By being out of their sight, to an extent you are also out of their control, so expect them to grasp for control in new and subtle ways.  Increased scrutiny of your time card is just one small example.

This issue reaffirms the importance of a special trusting relationship between you, as a telecommuter, and your manager.  For some, prestablished trust may suffice.  For others, trust will grow with telecommuting tenure.  Still others may never earn the trust they were giving without question in the office.  Even with trust, managers are inclined to manage.  Since they cannot do so in some of the ways they are accustomed to, be prepared for them to branch out in new ways that may indrude on important, but seemingly trivial tasks, like recording your time.

There are many different types of jobs that fit the generic definition of telecommuting.  In the strictest sense, simply working from home doesn’t make you a telecommuter since your not “commuting.”  Even still, some people who work from home can relate to many of the same issues as telecommuters.  As such, I like to count them among my target audience as well.

That being said, I generally consider someone a telecommuter if they perform their job from a remote location.  This doesn’t necessarily mean that work is performed from home.  I started thinking of myself as a telecommuter as soon as I started working on assignments for a remote division at my company.  Even though I still went to the office, for all other intents and purposes, I was a telecommuter.

Though I now work exclusively from home (my company office is 1,000 miles away) I still consider those first experiences as telecommuting.  With the spike in gas prices in the summer of 2008, many office workers started working from home a few days a week and likely considered themselves telecommuters as well.

Other definitions of telecommuters include everyone who can separate the work that they do from the place they do it.  Is Scott Adams a telecommuter?  I doubt he has any restrictions on where he draws Dilbert, so I would say that he is a telecommuter.

It’s interesting to note that the amount of time spent working or the types of tasks performed aren’t part of the definition.  So whether you’re drawing cartoons or writing a syndicated column a few hours a week, or coding algorithms or performing data entry for hours on end, you too may be a telecommuter.  It’s not what you do, it’s where you do it.