So, as I’ve mentioned before, I work from home now. I wish I could say this means it doesn’t matter when I wake up, or that it doesn’t matter if I shower and put on pants, but the truth is, I do still have to be awake and aware at 9am (notice I didn’t mention the pants).
For many years now, it’s been a dream of mine to work from home. I really wasn’t comfortable working in corporate situations, and, truth be told, it’s a big reason why I don’t work in that situation anymore. When I left my last corporate gig, I made it a goal to never wear khaki pants again. To me, they symbolized the oppression I felt during my tenure as a phone monkey. So for the last few years, my work wardrobe has consisted of jeans and a t-shirt most of the time. And now that I work from home, I even spend a good part of my day in pajamas.
Based on this alone, one might assume I don’t do shit all day. The truth is, though, that I do more work during a 24-hour period than most people do in a regular 8-hour work day.
Which is why it’s now quarter-to-three A.M. and I’m still awake. For the last four hours, I’ve been working on getting about 4GB worth of data moved from one computer to another. And that’s after spending my entire 9-to-5 work day today doing the same thing. So my total hours spent working today is 12 hours.
And it was the same yesterday.
And the day before that.
And, during the weekend, which should, by all rights, be a completely work-free zone, I spent another good 8 or 10 hours working on client’s computers.
If you were to count in the time I spent familiarizing myself with iPhoto’s new features (read: tagging people in my pictures), as work-related activiity, I’ve only had about 15 hours of non-working, non-sleeping hours in the last three days.
But, still, it’s awesome! I love the fact that I don’t have to drive somewhere every morning. I love that I don’t have sit and listen to coworkers babble about themselves all day (I swear this has made the most difference in my productivity—I feel like I should be allowed to do nothing for about 4 hours every workday, because if I were in an office with other people, that’s how much time I’d lose to random bullshitting). And, of course, most of all, I love working in pajama pants.