Working from home has lots of benefits: no commute, you don’t have to dress for the office, play your music loud, etc. However, in order to keep up (and improve on) your productivity while working at home, it is essential to come up with and enact a strategy for dealing with distractions.

Distractions at home can take many forms:

• Children and/or Spouse
• Household chores (washing three days of dishes is a handy method for procrastination when you are really desperate)
• Phone/Mail/Bills
• Television/Video Games

The common theme among these distractions is that they are things that are commonly found at home that you would not normally encounter in your place of work. There are good things and bad things about the average workplace - one positive thing is that the normal distractions you would face at home are not there, enabling you to (at least in theory) be more productive. Thus, in order to telecommute productively, one must find a way to achieve some level of concentration in an environment that is at first glance not so conducive to it.

So without further ado, here are a few ideas for ways to handle these distractions:

1) Close Your Door

Make sure that your workspace is separated as much as possible from the potential sources of distraction (ie: television, kitchen, play room) and make sure that the word gets out that whenever your door is closed, you are working and are not to be disturbed. You can even set up with your spouse or children that if they need to speak with you and want to see if you are free for a minute, they should IM you, email you, call your cell phone, but not knock on the door. Take advantage of the proximity of your home office to the rest of your home, but in all other ways, treat it like a real office (where these other distractions probably wouldn’t exist and where your kids could never just come in and say hello).

2) Headphones

The idea here is that even when you are working behind a closed door (or if you are sharing a home office with the family PC and cannot have the door closed as often as you would like) there will still be distracting home-sounds that make their way into your work area and could potentially disrupt your thought process and work flow. To combat this, try some headphones, especially the type that is designed to cancel noise. For those who like to work with music, this is a no-brainer (and a good idea even if you work in a regular office). However, even if you don’t like to listen to music all the time while you work, wearing headphones can help you to focus more on the task at hand, ignore distractions and let the background noises fade a bit. (And if you do have to share your home office with someone else, wearing headphones can be like a second door - it is a sign to the other person that you are working now and should not be disturbed).

3) Schedule

The two tips above are intended to help you insulate yourself from the distraction-filled environment that is your home-office, and help you to create for yourself some thinking-space. However, there is another aspect of working from home that these do not take advantage of. One very nice thing is that you do have more flexibility to help watch the baby, run an errand, play with the kids when they come home from school or do something else that is only possible at home and would not be possible in the traditional office. Or perhaps you might need to take a break from what you are doing and watching TV or a DVD (which is done more comfortably at home and not in front of your co-workers) is exactly what you need to do. How can you make these distractions a part of your work day in a way that will improve, not hurt your productivity?

The answer is to schedule out your daily activities. You may want to have this rigidly set (ie: on every Monday I will work from 9am to 11:30am and then take a 45 minute break), or you may want to do this flexibly, creating a To Do list every day, listing the tasks that you want to accomplish and how long each will take (I have found David Seah’s Printable CEO, and Online Emergent Task Timer excellent tools for this type of informal task planning). Whichever way you do it, this will help you to set boundaries for yourself regarding your goals, and will help you to use the distractions that surround you as tools for making progress in your work and goals for completing your tasks, rather than as a means for procrastination.

Rameikis writes about some of the social aspects of work that she feels are lacking for telecommuters (my emphasis):

Working from home and conducting all of your business by phone and through email is not an easy thing. For all the fact that telecommuting has been touted as the way of the future since the early 80s, industry has been very slow in developing effective attitudes, strategies and policies for creating a environment where effective working relationships can be both built and maintained over long distances and across time zones (where some team members are going to bed just as others are getting up).

What invariably suffers from the fairly outdated management principles still in practice is the sense of community. There is no water cooler. No photocopier or coffee station. Developing and maintaining personal connections with the people you work ‘beside’ is not nearly as natural when you have never actually met as it is when you can meet face to face on an almost daily basis. The team building and moral boosting plans they come up with invariably require proximity: you must work at head office to participate in any of them, which leaves the remote workers (more than half of the company’s employees) feeling like second class citizens within the corporation.

I can definitely identify with what Rameikis is talking about here. In some ways, there really is no substitute for face-to-face contact. So much of communication is based on visual clues that even if you make it a point to speak on the phone with colleagues (instead of using email and IM exclusively) you will never have the same level of personal connection with your coworkers than if you were sitting next to them in the same room. (I do not have so much experience with video conferencing, but I have been told that the same holds true there as well).

While chatting on IM is nice, I do not think that this problem will be easily solved, even if some “outdated management principles” are changed to fit some of the needs of today’s remote worker. For the time being, it is something that a person has to be aware of if they are going to be working outside of the office for an extended amount of time. And if you need it, it is up to you to find some other type of social outlet that you would have otherwise sought at the water cooler or coffee station.

Shoshana Zuboff writes about how it is not enough to just speak about how we should develop alternate forms of energy, or how people should just use fewer resources and drive less. In order to affect a more drastic (and permanent) change to the way that we use our resources, some societal norms need to change to accommodate new working and living lifestyles. One of the main things that must change is the current normative practice of centralized working:

But the most compelling and far reaching response to the climate crisis is to bust up our current patterns of concentration. Distributing work is the most obvious piece of low hanging fruit. It’s a win in every direction. It will create more value–and wealth– because it reorients employees from organizational to individual space so they engage with customers, not each other. It’s one key to reducing overhead and restructuring costs, helping to make support widely affordable. And, it’s essential to a quantum shift in carbon emissions. In other words, it’s in the critical path of the new capitalism and the needs of our planet. Other dimensions of infrastructure can evolve quickly to complement new patterns of distributed work. The platforms already exist for new distribution systems that bring products and services to our homes. Rapid prototyping will enable small scale low energy production that occurs locally or even at home.

The solutions to climate crisis will not come from simply doing the old model– only less. Forcing more social competition over the shrinking pie of fossil fuels will destroy what’s left of our social fabric. Yes we need to develop alternate energy, but those innovations will be most effective in the context of a whole new distributed model for life and work. The two vectors of capitalism and climate are converging on this one idea: don’t reduce, distribute!

Read More on The Support Economy (found via The HR Lawyer’s Blog)

John Wesley writes (Why the 9 to 5 Office Worker Will Become a Thing of the Past, found via War-N) about how the traditional work day (”9-5″) is very inefficient for many of today’s workers, and ends up with less productive, less satisfied employees.

A continuous 8 hour work day is a relic of the past. It makes sense for physical labor and manufacturing work, but with information workers it doesn’t account for the mental energy cycle…In the case of the modern information worker, nearly all tasks involve creative or strategic thinking…

I can’t speak for all workers, but I’ve observed that productivity levels generally peak twice a day — first thing in the morning and shortly after lunch. The most productive period is the beginning of the day. People are capable of creative tasks like writing and solving complex technical problems. After a couple hours of intense work, energy levels drop and workers downgrade to less demanding tasks like responding to email and tinkering with existing creations. Towards the end of the cycle, the mind is so cluttered and drained that workers resort to “work related activities” that appear productive but don’t contribute to the bottom line. The afternoon cycle is similar but the productivity peak isn’t as high. For different people the peaks and valleys will vary, but overall I’d estimate only 3-4 hours a day could be classified as highly productive. This number isn’t caused by slacking. You can’t force an information worker to be highly productive when the energy isn’t there.

While the 9-5 work day is a relic of manufacturing labor, it does also make sense if there is a need for people to all be present at one location at one time. (Though I do remember a partial solution at a company where I once interviewed: Everyone had to work 8 hours a day, and everyone had to be present on-site between the hours of 11am and 2pm. Thus there is a time when everyone can have meetings, and there are also accommodations in place for those who are early or late risers.)

Wesley suggests as a solution that the work day should be planned around times when the worker’s mental energies are at their peaks. This means that the 8 hours may not be consecutive, and will most probably be scattered in bursts throughout the day. As a computer programmer, I personally find this to be very true - I often find myself reading blogs (or playing DTD) during the middle of the day not as a way to avoid work, but rather as a way to regroup my mental energy after one task, in preparation for the next.

The solution that makes the most sense is a remote work arrangement because it reduces employer costs and allows employees to adjust their work schedule to their mental energy cycle. When a worker becomes mentally fatigued, they can go off the clock and engage in recharge activities that are personally productive like exercise or relaxation. When energy returns, the worker can start working again at a high level, effectively cutting out the low productivity period of the cycle. Employers don’t pay for unproductive time and employees get to work in a more natural pattern that adjusts to their personal lives.

A good point is made at the end of the article that the biggest barrier to larger scale adoption to telecommuting is inertia and office politics. I would contend though that there will always be certain industries that are better suited towards telecommuting (and outsourcing), such as computer programming, and certain industries that will never fully transition to this (hospitals, psychologists, universities and schools, power plants, manufacturing, etc).

From the Telework Exchange (found via Shawn Malone), a study was just released based on responses from 200 managers from 45 different federal agencies regarding their attitudes towards teleworking:

Survey results indicate that only 35 percent of Federal managers believe their agencies support telework, despite a 2001 Congressional mandate that requires agencies to implement telework programs.

Despite these initial results, there is hope. The study demonstrates that attitudes toward telework improve dramatically as managers become more exposed to alternative work arrangements. Fifty-four percent of non-teleworking managers have favorable views of telework. That number jumps to 75 percent among managers who telework themselves.

The message is that more managers should try telework and understand its value.

The study recommends giving more managers the option to take part in teleworking pilot programs (since the managers who telework view it more favorably than those who don’t) as well as educational efforts across government. I would however hesitate at recommending that large numbers of managers start telecommuting to work - after all, at least not on a full time basis (after all, you do need some face time when you are managing)