Wednesday, May 04, 2005

Concentration

We're doing some renovations that have caused the door to my office at home to be somewhere other than where it should be. On top of that, my office isn't completely put back together (it's pretty much scattered around the house until some more of the renovations get done). With no door, there's no barrier to the children running into the office and wreaking havoc (or, more specifically, bugging me while I'm on the computer).

As you can imagine, the task of concentrating under such conditions is nigh unto impossible (at least for me). Since I sit in a cube at work, I don't have a door there, either. Fortunately, I don't have any children at work, though I certainly have co-workers (who certainly aren't as bad as my kids).

As you can imagine, concentrating can sometimes be difficult, both at home and at work. At home, though, it's a more temporary thing, since the door that I normally have keeps things somewhat quiet.

It's surprising to me that employers don't go out of their way to convince their employees to work from home more (specifically, programmers). I'd expect that their productivity would be much better. In fact, for some positions that I've held in the past, I've been able to work from home on occasion. If my experience is typical, there's a considerable amount of productivity to be gained by working from home.

Most of the concerns about telecommuters are bogus and have more to do with a lack of management skills than with "cheating" workers. Trust goes a long way toward boosting morale, and telecommuting is one way to prove trust very easily.