Aucbvax.2412
fa.works
utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!works
Thu Jul 23 01:54:42 1981
Re: Working at home, workaholics and productivity
>From Joe.Newcomer@CMU-10A Thu Jul 23 01:20:54 1981
Fascinating! I guess the several hundred professionals I met
represent a skewed sample. When one is thinking about a problem,
it is usually not possible to turn one's brain off at 5pm. The
really annoying thing is when you think of a solution at 9pm and
want to do something about it! Or if I want to spend a plane
flight or overnight hotel stay productively, but that involves
even something as simple as keeping up with my correspondence (I
didn't log in for three days and my mailbox currently has 97 new
messages!)
I'm not sure what a "workaholic" really is. For example, if I
went home at 5pm every night and engaged in my favorite hobby
(say, building ships in bottles), and did this until midnight,
nobody would call me a workaholic (an aside here: the correct
form is "workic"...think about it). Even if my concentration
on building ships in bottles was more intense than my "normal"
work. Now, I love building ships in bottles. Every ship and
every bottle is a new challenge. So one day, I find a company
that sells handbuilt ships in bottles. I go to work for them.
I have found somebody crazy enough to pay me for pursuing my
favorite hobby. If I go home and build ships in bottles, am
I a workic? Now, I just happen to have found somebody crazy
enough to pay me lots of money for pursuing my favorite hobby,
which happens to be computer science research and engineering.
In addition, I get resources which make it possible to pursue
my hobby with the same tools I have at work.
If I were a radio ham working for an electronics firm, and
they loaned me some tools such as signal generators, and I just
happened to also use signal generators in my work during the day,
nobody would think it odd. I would certainly think it silly to
use a text editor, document formatter, etc. at work and have to
use a typewriter or keypunch at home. I need a powerful terminal
to make these available. Why can't I have these at home? If I
had an artificial limb, I would not leave it at the office when
I left; to me, the keyboard, display, and underlying filesystems
and networks are an extension of my hands and mind. I should
lobotomize myself because I'm not sitting at my desk, and just
happen to be sitting at home, or on an airplane, or in a hotel
room?
joe
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