I check my work e-mail constantly – if I’m awake and not at the computer already, I cruise by every 20 minutes or so to see if something has come in.
Sounds depressing, I know, but:
A) The kind of work I do is usually under insane deadlines. Not looking at an e-mail promptly can mean the difference between having 2,000 copies of a beautiful report ready to distribute at an international conference in Berlin and having nothing.
B) I work with people in many time zones. I have a grid posted above my desk that shows the time in Cairo, LA, DC, and Karachi so I know whether the folks I’m working with are likely to be awake or not. When it is 10 pm here, it is 3 pm in DC – the people there may need something from me before their COB, so failing to check e-mail before I go to bed is not an option.
C) I love my work! Sure, there are drawbacks to working the way I do, but no job is perfect, and in my case the advantages far outweigh the disadvantages. Since I work from home, I’m here when my son gets home from school; I can throw a load of laundry in any time while I’m working, and - best of all - my son witnesses firsthand that his mom is a professional. If I didn’t check e-mails on a virtually constant basis, I could not do my job, and I’d have to give up all the good things that go with it.
Not currently. My boss says it is “unacceptable” to do remote work under any circumstances, so I’ve actually considered locking the freaking laptop in my desk instead of lugging it around. After all, its paranoid security measures mean I can’t even use it to watch DVDs…
For other jobs, yes I’ve done it, but it was jobs where I had admin privileges on the computer and where working from home occasionally wasn’t just ok but sometimes recomended (for example after a long trip, or if you though you were coming down with something). In these other jobs, I wouldn’t do it after or before being “at” work (my homes at the time were minutes away from the office) - only if it was part of a “work from home day”. I had one where I’d sometimes check outside of working hours: if I was traveling, and because the company considered installing your (legal, eh!) games on the computer “reasonable travel entertainment”, I’d wake it up for a game and check email - because it was the same machine.