Hoja 24

 Digital technology-email and smartphones most of all-have vastly improved workers' capacity to be productive outside of a traditional office. Even so, most white-collar work still happens in an office. In practice, modern communications technology is used just as much to link physical workplaces together-as at Slate, which maintains two offices, one in New York and one in D.C.-as to disperse them. One reason is that, according to a new survey of office workers conducted by Wakefield Research for the IT consulting company Citrix, most bosses are dubious about the telecommuting. Half of workers say their boss disapproves of remote working, and only 35 percent say it's tolerated.

Skeptical bosses will likely have their doubts re-enforced by the same survey, which shows that 43 percent of workers say they've watched TV or a movie while "working" remotely, while 35 percent have done household chores, and 28 percent have cooked dinner.

Physical proximity might not be necessary for much work, but it does remain a hard-to-replace deterrent against The Price Is Right while on the clock.

My experience working primarily from home for an extended period several years back was that it's a surprisingly efficient way to drive yourself insane. The need to make petty decisions-where to work, which chair to sit in, should I even bother to get out of bed, do I need to be wearing shoes right now-became overwhelming. I'd spend completely unreasonable amounts of time wondering what to do for lunch, and while working on a book dedicated a surprising amount of energy to meeting my self-imposed daily word quota in time to catch movie matinees.

But there is also a compelling case to make that working at home makes people much more efficient, because it allows workers to take care of annoying little chores while still getting their jobs done. Remote working-at least occasional remote working-can be great precisely because of the opportunity it affords to get a certain amount of non-work stuff done. It's much faster to shop for groceries at a quarter to three than to stand in line during the after-work rush. Far too many people work similar schedules and want to eat dinner at dinnertime. My neighborhood supermarket turns into a nightmare from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. Sunday late afternoon, another popular shopping time, is even worse, with the aisles often featuring Soviet-style shortages of key commodities. If you just start working a bit earlier (no commute, after all) and pop by the store during a lull when lines are short, you can get both more work and more shopping done in a fixed amount of time. Even better, if more people did that, then shift workers with genuinely inflexible schedules might also be