Working from home one hour a day

When I took over a new role early this year, one of the tasks I have to do is to compute and publish (via email) a set of figures every morning by a certain time. I struggled to meet that daily timing. So, I tried a different strategy. I completed the tasks first at home before leaving for the office. I connect to the network via VPN or virtual private network where I am able to access all the tools required like emails, software, shared folder etc. Thankfully, the company I’m working for support flexible working arrangements. So far it works out well (in terms of me being able to complete this task early enough every mornings), Alhamdulillah.

Since I leave for the office later, I’m no longer trapped in the morning peak hour traffic! I save 30-40 minutes a day. That’s about 3 hours a week and 13 hours a month! If more companies allow (dare I use the word ‘encourage’?) their employees to work from home and flexible hours, it’ll help to reduce the congestion problems our capital city faces. This ‘extra’ time allows me to bath and feed my kids (as opposed to bundling them from the bed straight to the car), do chores, and sometimes even run errands.

However, to be fair, it’s not all beds of roses. Working from home (for an employer) does have its setbacks.
- Broadband connection may be slow, especially when sharing. There is risk of getting disconnected in the middle of a task.
- Limited resources. For example, about two weeks ago, there is a problem with my laptop and I couldn’t switch it on at all. It was too late to drive to the office to find a spare machine. Luckily, I have a backup who could help with my time-sensitive task that morning. But that’s only for emergencies (which that was), meaning I can’t expect this person to help out often. Besides, I don’t want to be perceived as unreliable.
- The kids may bug me either for my attention or my laptop when I was in a crunch time.

Because the task is quite time-sensitive, it could get quite stressful. When it takes 1 minute to click open a file, I’ll start worrying and fidget a lot. There’s this one time when my backup was not available and I had problems to access some information I need to complete my task, so I rushed to the office, but obviously I was very late. Some staffs in my departments had to stay back till 8. I felt very guilty.

I guess what I’m saying is, whilst there’s clear benefits to working from home, it also presents its own challenges. It’ll be nicer to have tasks that are not too time and operation-sensitive, but these are part of my roles, so I’m okay with it.