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> In contrast, Zappos' office seems to say, "You're already home."

I think the worst thing you can do to an employee is start merging the idea of "home" with the idea of "work". It implies sleeping at your desk and never really "leaving". At least, that's how I'd see it, if I still had a FT job.

Full disclosure: I work from home. It's confusing and I'm hoping to get a separate office soon.



> Full disclosure: I work from home. It's confusing and I'm hoping to get a separate office soon.

I'm 100% with you on that one. Working from home, particularly with the same equipment and environment for both fun stuff and professional stuff, is really weird and I find it can dilute my sense of when I'm wearing my professional hat and when I'm on my own time. The result is that both can get disrupted by the other more often than I would prefer. I sometimes get to the end of what feels like a long working day, and find that I have only logged a few hours that are billable to a client. Several other things happened during the day, and while I hadn't registered how much time they were using up before, the time sheet does not lie.

We've actually been setting up a new home office just these past few days, because not having a separate space finally got too weird now both of us are working from home. Just walking into the room, where everything is perfectly tidy and the shelves contain business stationery and the books are technical ones and the hardware is serious business stuff, changes my perspective and makes me want to concentrate on getting useful stuff done Right Now. I still wear suits to meetings with clients for much the same reason, even though I know they wouldn't care if I was just in jeans and a T-shirt: it's my professional face, and it brings with it my professional mindset.

I once read about a guy who had an office in his back room. Every morning he would get up, dress in his work clothes, walk out the front door, walk around the side of his house to the back door, and let himself into his office, even though he could have just walked through the home. I wouldn't go that far myself, but I totally understand why he did it.




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