A Fifth of Telecommuters Work Less Than An Hour Per Day

How much telecommuters work, depends on each case. In my case, I have been working from home for the last 7 years. I am highly motivated because I want to maximize achievements in the rest of my life.

Mostly, I work in small teams with other remote friends, on fixed price contracts and on my own projects. Fixed price contracts means that the faster I can finish work, the more profitable it is, and the more time I get for my own projects. For my that is a brutal incentive to get things done.

This is my current pattern. works for me, but may not work for others:

- I don't watch TV, except occasionally while lunch. In general I don't like TV.

- 4 years since my last vacation. I hardly can forget about work.

- I don't follow any daily routines. Typically work around 5 - 12 daily hours, usually until late in the night. I find this way the more productive for me. Overall, that translates to around 40 hours of fair intensity work per week. I wish I could do more, but I have found that to be the sustainable amount. Surpassing that, leads to burnout, and less productivity overall.

- I take a few short breaks during work. A walk in the garden, cook something simple, browse hacker news, etc. I have found that necessary to stay productive. That seems to take over the occasional talks in a on-site work. For example, I once did a project in odesk, with their invasive surveillance system, and without taking breaks. Got a five star rating in the end. But the experience was so dismal, that I almost decided to retire from programming. I was often dreading every minute of work.

- I maximize use of time. When I can't stand more work, I do 1-2 hours of intense jogging. Or get out, take a walk at a pleasant place, take lunch at some place, etc. In this way, I am always highly motivated in what I am doing.

- I have found that I am very self sufficient. I used to need some hangout-with-friends time, but I don't need that anymore. Now I mostly feel that as a waste of time.

- I work on weekends, and usually take the Mondays off. When I visit places, I prefer to avoid the usual tumult of the weekends.

Good workers don't need to be managed but are self-directed by their own desire to do a job well done and commitment they share with the vision of the company.

There is tremendous value in coming in to the office to see your colleagues face to face but sometimes not all work requires it. Perhaps these workers finished their work early as I have often heard that telecommuters are far more productive. If they didn't loop back with their managers then I would question that relationship or the worker. I wouldn't attribute telecommuting as a killer to productivity though.

Working at home require twice the discipline needed when you work at the office. There are lots of distractions.

Yeah, the internet sure sucked before Facebook came along and added... nothing.

You have a daily stand-up at 9:30, so even though you get in at 9, you don't bother starting anything because the stand-up will cut it short as soon as you get rolling. The stand-up is supposed to be 10 minutes, tops, but regularly balloons into a half-hour behemoth. You make your daily sojourn to Starbucks with the other developers and get back to your open work area at 10:15. There's a business user waiting for you. You develop internal tools and the brass is too cheap to employ a support staff, so you are level 1. They're supposed to open a support ticket and assign it to you instead of walking over to your desk, but you've already sent them packing the same way three times this week, and it looks like they're ready to cry, so you open a new browser window and ask what the problem is. You end up having to pull in a sysadmin, and after an hour, the two of you determine that it's a problem with a third-party service, so you open a support ticket with them and tell the business user you'll keep them updated.

It's now 11:15. The developers start lunch at around 11:30 - noon every day, so there's no reason to get started on anything now. You get back from your hour lunch break at 12:45. There's a meeting on your outlook calendar at 1 o' clock, but you read the description and decide to skip it since there are already enough developers on the docket to give enough input. You're just gathering momentum at 1:05 when the Project Manager who organized the meeting appears at your desk, asking you to come to the meeting.

"I have a lot on my plate; the other two devs know enough about the system to keep the ball rolling."

"Well," she counters, "I really need everyone's input for this meeting." (Just like every other meeting.)

"There are 20 people on the invite list... if there are any problems, I'm sure I can just follow up with you after you send out the meeting minutes."

"Look, I really need you here for this; this isn't a skippable meeting." (None of hers are.) Finally you fold--you didn't take this job because you were a go-getter who knows how to tell people "no" repeatedly. The meeting is scheduled for 1PM - 2PM, but (like most meetings at this company), it goes until 2:30.

You get back to your desk and there are a dozen new IMs and e-mails blinking on your screen. You fantasize about just closing everything and working, but you've been here long enough to know that un-answered IMs and e-mails will result in people walking over to your desk, just like the jilted business user from this morning. For a couple of months you managed to put your foot down, mark yourself as "busy" in Outlook for the afternoon, and tell people that you simply won't deal with any non-critical problem during that period, but hearing complaints about issue turnaround time come through your boss was too much of a drain.

You answer IMs, follow up on e-mails, flip through high-priority code reviews and take care of other necessary busywork for about an hour and a half.

At 4PM, you get started on your work.