I’m looking at spending at least part of my 4-day weekend working on some publication projects that need to be sent to the printer on Monday. (Actually, they probably needed to be sent to the printer today, since the office I’m handling these for wants them in the mail on the 20th – but they just sent me the text at the end of the day on Monday, and half my day today was consumed by meetings.)
I’m a one-person office and juggle a lot of stuff. I do some work from home every day thanks to my laptop – and that’s good, because it often means getting the piiddly shit out of the way. But I don’t often have to bring big honkin’ things home. I estimate that it will take me 6-8 hours to get this project done.
Work=home as bedroom d’ cats and office d’ cats are both a floor above shop d’ cats. Before becoming self-employed, I did sales which required much at home work on prints and proposals, so the line between home and work has become blurred to the point of “when I wanna go to bed” is when work stops, and when the cell phone vibrates on my nightstand, it’s worktime. Yes, my relational life sucks. Why do you ask?
I bring home work to do every night, but I only actually work on it 2 to 4 hours total for the whole week. A signficant part of my job is carefully reading stuff and making decisions based on that stuff or teaching other people that stuff. When I am at work, it is pretty crazy with phone calls, meetings, and little crisis that pop up every 30 minutes or so. When I am at home, when everyone else is asleep, I can sit down at the kitchen table, spread out my stuff, get out my notepad, put on some XM or VH1 Classics, and I can get more quality work done in 30 minutes than I could do in 1 or 2 hours at work. Since I like my work, it is actually kinda relaxing and I feel all peaceful going into work the next day.
I once heard a successful exec. comment on this. I think it may have been T. Boone Pickens.
He said, if he observed an employee regularly taking work home, rather than assume that the person was concientious, he figured there was one of two things wrong: Either the person wasn’t using their workday effectively, or they really had too much work for one individual and, either way, he needed to look into it.
Brought work home (not as in “work from home one day”, but as in “work on saturday”) the 4th, 5th and 6th of July, 2002. I was working in Philly; had to do a ton of data-crossing which would have taken several days anyway; doing it over the weekend allowed us to grab the data late (on Wednesday; I also worked from home on the 3rd doing the same project) but have it ready for Monday when it was due. Since anyway I had to work on the 4th and the 4th doesn’t mean anything to me but the 7th does, I also was “on call duty” for the 4th. I got the 7th off in exchange for being on duty on the 7th.
All the freakin’ time. I think I spend about 6 hours each day not working.
But then, that’s how it is, teaching and having very little in the way of resources to back you up. I love it, but sometimes it is a little soul-draining…
Guarantees an empty seat next to you…I’d go for it!
I never do; even when our project gets much busier in the coming months, I will do any extra work at the office since I don’t have a computer at home and I need one for testing.
And quite often, I don’t unpack my work bag until Monday morning, back in the office. Still, my intentions to get a bit ahead are good.
I’m basically a secretary with some other responsibilities. I did get the IT gal to set me up with PC Anywhere so I could work from home on the weekends if I’m inclined.
Once or twice a year I run into a problem that’s so interesting that I can’t let go of it, so I work on it at home. And once every year or so there’s something that needs done that gets me to come into work on the weekend (a 30-mile drive).
Usually I’m only capable of six or seven hours of concerted effort in a day. After that, my brain gets fried, and I’ve learned to just back off and let my subconscious chew on things while I go off and do something else.
Its par for the course in the industry I’m in. There are those that not only take work home but take work everywhere which is highly annoying as evidenced in the below clip.
Sounds like something I say at work. Our management has a workweek of 50 hours minimum, and working in excess of 55 is seriously frowned upon; however, I can think of several at different stores who work 70+ hours a week. The ones I know well enough, I tell them, “Working 70 hours a week doesn’t mean you’re dedicated and hard-working; it means you’re slow and inefficient.” It means you can’t delegate well, or you can’t plan your workweek well, or your higher-ups keep piling stuff on you and you can’t say no, or something else is wrong.
I’m not saying this applies to the people here, but in my specific instance, it’s always been true.
