Many people with regular jobs look at the digital bedouins tapping away at their laptops in the coffee shop at 10:30 in the morning and think to themselves, “Nice work if you can get it, but I need my real job. Alas.”
And while full-time, slipper-wearing, video-conferencing-from-your-backyard web work isn’t possible for all employees, you may find that you can edge your regular job toward a more web worker-like structure.
First, analyze your actual day-to-day work.
Do you have tasks that require both sustained attention and limited interaction with colleagues? These kinds of tasks are perfect candidates to be saved up and batch-processed on a telecommuting day. Take note of how much time you’re spending on this stuff to discover if you have enough of it on a regular basis to warrant working at home on it.
Next, examine the things you do when you log in from home to do after hours and on weekends — restarting servers, performing site fixes, remote support. If these are things you also do during a normal workday there is no reason that you couldn’t accomplish them on a telecommute day.
Explore the capabilities of your office phone system. Most systems have a forwarding setting that allows you to make the phone ring wherever you are. And while being in touch might undermine the “sustained attention – low interactivity” goal you set for your telecommute days, it also helps to assuage the fear that you’re “working from home” instead of actually working from home.
Armed with these facts about exactly what you’ll be doing at home, how you’ll be able to do these things, and how your manager will be able to check up on you, you’re ready to write a proposal. Emphasize the benefits of the arrangement to your employer: it’s a great benefit that costs them nothing to offer, they can check up on you to their heart’s content, and you’ll be getting more done.
Now march into your manager’s office and ask to work remotely one day a week. Come on. You can do it. Let us know how it goes!
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