SOHOs Working Virtually

Jeremy Zawodny, a Yahoo employee, has an interesting description of his workday on his blog:

My work day starts when I wake up and ends when I convince myself to go to bed. Much less of my communication is face to face compared to back then. There's the phone, e-mail, messenger, and so on. But there's a lot of non-work stuff that gets injected in there too. Life and work blend together far more this way. And I see nothing wrong with that except that the burden is on me to keep things in check. But with that burden comes the freedom of more flexible hours, locations, and so on. Few of my meetings are repeating, regularly scheduled affairs. That, of course, helps a bit too.



If someone actually asked me "how many hours a week do you work?" I'd have no idea how to answer.



Welcome to the virtual workplace and, in some ways, the virtual job/life mix.

The post is intended to describe the difference between working in a high tech company versus an old economy corporation. But I'd say his description applies equally well to the work lives of many SOHO (small office, home office) entrepreneurs. For them, life and work are woven together. Their workdays bear little resemblance to a traditional 8-to-5 workday.



For more on this topic, see: Small Businesses Go Virtual.