{"id":131,"date":"2005-12-27T12:03:37","date_gmt":"2005-12-27T17:03:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mathewingram.com\/work\/index.php\/2005\/12\/27\/moderation-in-all-things-including-tele-work\/"},"modified":"2005-12-27T12:03:37","modified_gmt":"2005-12-27T17:03:37","slug":"moderation-in-all-things-including-tele-work","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/2005\/12\/27\/moderation-in-all-things-including-tele-work\/","title":{"rendered":"Moderation in all things — including tele-work"},"content":{"rendered":"

The morning of the transit strike in New York, I told a colleague that I expected a rash of stories about the benefits of telecommuting. There hasn’t exactly been a “rash” (whatever that is), but the New York Times did one<\/a> over the holidays — which I first noticed because my friend Mark Evans blogged about it<\/a>. It’s a good piece, because it points out that tele-work hasn’t really caught on as much as many expected it to, despite the widespread adoption of high-speed Internet connections.<\/p>\n

Why? As the article notes, the main obstacles are psyschological. For example, lots of bosses assume (or at least suspect) that if a person working for them isn’t at their desk, then they are goofing off. Technology isn’t much help in that department, unless you include things like keystroke-loggers and similar types of monitoring<\/a>, which is pretty Orwellian. And on the other side, there are benefits to being in the office that are impossible to duplicate over an Internet connection, even with instant messaging — you can’t bump into someone, which then jogs your memory (or theirs) or go for an impromptu cup of coffee.<\/p>\n

Those intangibles are important. And as Mark notes, working at home takes discipline (a friend of mine actually put on a suit to go down the hall to his at-home office, so he would be in the right frame of mind). But at the same time, the benefits of working at home are undeniable — lack of commuting stress<\/a> being just one of them. Another friend who does both says he works at home a couple of days a week because he gets a lot more done, but goes into the office a couple of days a week so that he can network with his colleagues. <\/p>\n

And that’s why a little bit of both is the perfect mix, I think: a day or two at home, a few days in the office. The best of both worlds. Stuart MacDonald makes a good point in a comment on Mark’s post<\/a> — a blend of both works fine in many cases, provided everyone is on the same page goal-wise (in other words, no bosses counting who’s at their desk and who isn’t). <\/p>\n

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The morning of the transit strike in New York, I told a colleague that I expected a rash of stories about the benefits of telecommuting. There hasn’t exactly been a “rash” (whatever that is), but the New York Times did one over the holidays — which I first noticed because my friend Mark Evans blogged … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Moderation in all things — including tele-work”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crsspst_to_mathewingramblogwordpresscom":false,"mf2_syndication":[],"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-131","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/131","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=131"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/131\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=131"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=131"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=131"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}