There are many reasons that I work at home. One of them is having a birthday today. My daughter Hannah was born 11 years ago to day (at about 3:00 pm). I was fortunate to have 3 months leave before returning to my social work job. But when I did return to work, it was very hard. Part of it was leaving my baby and pre-schooler with someone else. But another part of it was that Hannah was a challenging baby. She didn’t sleep well unless held and in fact pretty much cried most the time unless she was held. She was four … years not months… old before she slept through the night. Her dad and I were tired a lot.

Finding a way to work at home didn’t change her temperament, but it did allow our family to function much better. I could nap during the day to catch up on sleep lost during the night when she’d wake. I was able to give time and attention to both my kids because I didn’t feel drained after a days job and household duties. I would have to say that the flexibility that comes from working at home is the single greatest benefit…at least for me.

So Happy Birthday Hannah and thank you for being a catalyst in my work-at-home career!

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Luis Suarez is free. In a recent article in the New York Times website he shared his story of how he cut down on his email dependency. Instead of email, he now uses tools offered by his company (IBM) and RSS feeds to connect with colleagues. He does have a point. Here are some interesting email stats that show just how pervasive email has become:

According to the EmailStatCenter:

• 274 is the average number of personal emails people receive weekly. - David Daniels, Vice President JupiterResearch (Dec. 2007)
• 304 is the average number of business emails received weekly. - David Daniels, Vice President JupiterResearch (Dec. 2007)
• 74% of email uses have 2 email accounts. - David Daniels, Vice President JupiterResearch (Dec. 2007)
• 87% of consumers’ online time is spent reading their emails. - David Daniels, Vice President JupiterResearch (Dec. 2007)

I advocate scheduling email time and limiting it to 2-3 times a day, but I don’t always take my own advice. Email is a compulsion. If you’re not quite sure what to work on, you can check your email. If you don’t want to tackle a task, you can put it off by checking your email.

But I would like to manage email better and I’m intrigued by Luis’ solution. Part of it is that I’m tired of handling old email. Some email just can’t be sorted. But in order for his ideas to work, others have to buy into it. In my case, I’d use instant messaging and Twitter. That means that other people I work with need to have the same IM service and sign up for Twitter.

The advantage that Luis has is that IBM has its own in-house networking system similar to Facebook. But even that becomes cumbersome for me because I have multiple “jobs”. As it is I belong to more social networks than I can handle. I don’t think I can manage joining several work-related networks as well.

Still, I think I’m going to figure out a way to make it work. But first I’m going to check my email.

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