On Telecommuting

Telecommuting as everything in life has its pros and cons.
See pros here.

For employees, the most important cons are:

• Lack of face to face human interaction - interaction with your peers, with your boss, with the world.
  The more days a week you telelcommute, the less, with time, you will relate to alive people.

  Imagine yourself sitting in front of your pc every day for the next three years, five years, ten years.

  Yup, you get more IMing, maybe more calls, certainly more calls if you are a call center rep working from home. You, however, in a bigger schema of things, do not need to dress up, especially if you live alone, you do not need to learn how to read emotions of others. is not an emotion, it has become a dot at the end of a sentence. If people were laughing in life as often as they add “:)” to their written communications, the world would’ve been a better place.
  You rarely need to master your speech making and how to impress others. Then, when you really need to impress (whether just one person or a public), you suddenly hear yourself talking and not recognizing your own voice.

• Lack of response to your ideas and to that cool thing you “just did!”
  Your co-workers and boss on the other side of IM are working on their “cool things” and your IMing to them soon can be taken as annoyance or interruption.

• Lack of professional development and keeping up with ‘industry’
  While you can learn a lot from blogs and Google, the real news and knowledge you often get only when learning from/with your peers and exchanging ideas in a conversation, or brainstorming where everything goes.

• Lack of recognition
  If you are the one who thrives on recognition (and there is nothing wrong with that), you will find yourself in a weird place of silence. No matter what you have accomplished today, your spouse will appear more tired than you are (because he/she went to work!) (like you didn’t) and too tired to truly appreciate what you have done. Your boss will get to your report when he gets to your report and by that time it might be an old news and not as “recognizable”.

• Need to discipline yourself
  Easy to say, not that easy to accomplish.
  First you learn to fight the urge to eat more from a friendly (or not friendly) fridge, in parallel, you learn that the TV is your work time sucker, then that laundry and cooking really have to be done in non-work time. You will have to learn to wake up early regardless of the fact that there is no one to time you. At the end, it is only with yourself.

Telecommuting as everything in life has its pros and cons.
For employees, the most important pros are:

• You do save your commute time –
  two hours a day that you save (depending on how long your commute is and how long it takes you to put make-up on every morning) can take you a long way. This adds up to three months saved over a year — that is a whole year saved over four years! Just think what you could do if you had a whole year to use up.

• You save your grief over getting out in a cold morning, shuffling snow, warming your car up (if you live in cold enough areas) and having three mugs of coffee at work just to get yourself together after your early morning experience, and that is day after day, after day.

• You save your nerves and do not have to waste your life on “that idiot” on the road (he/she, by the way, may be thinking the same about you).

• You can use the time you saved to:
  • get more work done
  • give more time to your loved ones
  • give more time to yourself
  • start doing something you have always been dreaming about and never had time to do
  • volunteer and make the world a better place.

For now, let’s say it varies whether you save money or not. Theoretically you do — less gas, less $5 coffee in your life, less ‘casual clothing’ from Nordstrom. But then, often you start making less money, and often your utility expenses go up significantly — to heat up your “home office” in the winter in New England (that is where I am) with ever rising oil prices is not a joke. You can not always deduct your increased “work related” expenses. We will talk about different cases on whether “your dog can be a tax deductible expense” in the next posts.