Working from Home
by JS
This semester is a first for me. I only have classes two days a week, so my schedule is rather light and flexible. I’ve taken to working from home on days when I don’t have class, which is both a bad and good habit. The tendency, when working from home, is not to work. This is often a bad thing, but I’ve begun to realize that it can be good as well. For starters, as a graduate student, not enjoying my work is a major concern. We don’t get paid enough, or have future job prospects that can justify work we don’t enjoy [best case scenario is to be a tenured professor at a major research institution with plenty of grant funding, an uncommon result to say the least]. So the amount of procrastination I do at home is a useful barometer for my subjective interest, something I can use to identify whether I have to make a change to my future plans.
A second advantage is that when I’m not working explicitly, ie typing something up, I’m usually thinking at some level of abstraction concerning the problem at hand. Today, for instance, I worked on a problem set for a course on programming languages. Besides the usual time it takes me to get up to speed on Latex after a few months of not using it, the problem set went rather smoothly. This is primarily because instead of trying to write up my solutions at the same time I was solving the problems, I opted to solve the problems the night before, while I was ostensibly procrastinating.
The real drawback of work at home is the lack of social time away from work. Working at home is isolating, and for some people, this is a particularly vulnerable point. Perhaps that is why the coffee shop near where I live does such brisk business. I tend to stay at home in part because my desire for socialization is often outweighed by an essential fear of social situations.
