working at home

when I think about the contrast between working at MS and being a full-time writer, the most obvious difference is working at home.

I'm a night owl so working at home is the pinnacle of my most treasured benefit: flex-time. my most productive hours are generally between 10pm and 2am. this schedule doesn't jive with the 'normal' working hours particularly well. I don't know what percentage of the population find that they are more productive in the evenings, but there are quite a few of my brethren out there. I hope that someday everyone will respect that not everyone works best on a 9-5 schedule.

in Masters of Doom, David Kushner writes that John Carmack's ideal schedule is 4pm to 4am; that sounds like a little bit of heaven. funnily enough, Kushner writes that Carmack would criticize the people who came in early for "never being here" (i.e., they didn't work late into the evening). this is ironic since night owls are the ones who usually suffer from the perception that they aren't toiling hard enough. when I was working in the software industry, I used to greatly benefit from the crunch times. since I functioned best during the evening, I didn't mind so much when I had to work late.

however, there are also disadvantages to working at home. the most obvious drawback is the lack of camaraderie with colleagues. of course, by 'camaraderie' I mean playing the Robotron 2084 machine in a Redmond kitchen and talking about how whacked the software industry has become.

not having to commute is a great benefit, but not being 'forced' to leave the house can also be a negative. I'm thinking that I'll have to sign up for some regular activities so that I have some semblance of a schedule and occasionally get out to actually interact with some people.

the second obvious difference between a corporate environment and working at home is the lack of external motivation. although, on the surface, it's great to not have to worry about someone else giving you a hard time, another turn of the screw reveals that self-motivation seems to be most effectively nurtured if you are already prone to be hard on yourself. in my case, I've discovered that this is true - I find that I get more upset with myself than most of my formers managers ever did.

so there's another bit of irony for you. it seems to me that the people who will work best on their own are precisely the people who's most nagging manager is internal.