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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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