Before I started working from home full time (you’ll either hate me or pity me for that) my office was in one of the many featureless, slightly derelict brick buildings you see on all government campuses. I didn’t actually work for the government, just borrowed office space from them because it was convenient to the research population being studied by the grant I was a part of.

There was a very “haves” versus “have nots” attitude in this office and the actual government workers were perpetually suspicious of what role us “WoCs” (Without Compensation; non-government employees) actually employed. Were we spies monitoring their work? Who did we report to? Why was no one clocking us on our lunch hour? Or in my case, why doesn’t she ever take a lunch hour?

Despite three years of the sitting in the same office space with the same people I never developed relationships with my office mates that extended past cordial, largely because of the perceived unfairness at the different work standards my academic employer held compared to their government imposed-rules.

One thing I did do a lot of was watch, listen and observe their work patterns. Government workers are often stereotyped as automatons with no incentive to aspire or innovate, locked in tedious positions and off at least one Monday a month for holidays. But many people at this office were in fact, early-to-mid career climbers, trying to go back to night school for advanced degrees or had held their position for more years than I have been alive and were very close to earning a full pension at retirement.

Everyone always appeared busy and was contractually locked into their desk from 8 am until 4:30 pm with a sanctioned (but monitored) one hour lunch and two 15 minute breaks.  Still, I found myself often thinking, how many hours a day of this forced schedule are really spent working and not just at work?

Because there was very little flexibility as far as clock in/clock out time, I noticed the employees found other ways to bend the rules that bound them. For starters, no one ever took a minute less than a full hour lunch (and rarely a minute more). Fifteen minute “stretching breaks” became exercises in physical fitness that required leaving the office to walk around the hilly campus. Every morning began with a 20 minute coffee break and every afternoon ended with a 20 minute discussion of the day’s events (about 15 of which included those events scheduled to happen after work). Add to that a conservative 20-25 minutes a day spent doing non-work activities such as scheduling doctor appointments, talking on the phone to children after school, filing reimbursement claims for daycare or checking Facebook.

So of an 8.5 hour work day

We minus:

-1 hour for lunch

-30 minutes for breaks (15 min x2)

-20 minutes for coffee

-20 minutes for after hours discussion

-25 minutes for miscellaneous activities (Twitter, color coordinating Post-Its)

=

5.91 hours of actual potential productivity

I’ve been thinking about this a lot of late, actual versus scheduled working hours, because as someone newly commissioned to work from home I often wonder, how many hours a day do I spend “working”  and how many hours a day do I spend…doing things that I consider work (as in burdensome/obligated) but my employee handbook might not?

Since my office doubles as my dining room table I have the luxury/distraction of things like the load of laundry that needs to be done or the dirty dishes in the sink. With no commute I can begin working well before 7 am. With no one watching the comings and goings of my office front door, I can sneak out for a quick jog or a walk to the Farmer’s Market with my four-year-old.

In a double-edged blessing/curse to be discussed in many  a future post, I even have the option to keep my pre-schooler home with me half days while I work and he reenacts Normandy in the living the room with the couch cushions.

But how many hours a day do I actually “work”?

Whether you are self employed, telecommute part time or full time, anything short of the traditional 9 to 5 office job requires a lot of self policing. More importantly, it requires that policing to be honest and not taking payments on the side. It also means considering alternative or supplemental ways of measuring productivity besides hours spent deepening the indent in your office chair cushion. I myself make a lot of task lists with daily and weekly projections that I use to square myself off against. In addition, my boss ask that I send her at the start of each week a TBD list so she can see the bigger picture of where my time will be going to and less the hour-by-hour accounting of what goes where and when.

If you work from home, do you struggle with honestly and fairly measuring your own productivity?