Should be a busy day followed by a busy night. I am, however, looking forward to a relaxing weekend – I need to rest a bit!

However, the writer makes an interesting point:

E-mails and text messages and BlackBerrys and all their digital cousins may have given us the illusion of freedom — we tell ourselves that we are unfettered by traditional offices, that we can go anywhere we please — yet in the end they have created a nation of Robert Hylands. We’re never off the clock; that cell phone may ring at dinnertime, that allegedly urgent e-mail may arrive at 11 p.m., that instant message from the regional manager may pop onto the screen when we’re on vacation with our families.

Like almost everyone else who works in a professional setting these days, I have a way of accessing my e-mails from my “home office” (which consists of a desk in the corner of my bedroom and two bookshelves on the side of the desk). And the truth is that when I get home from work, aside from my Yahoo and Gmail e-mail accounts, I also open up my work e-mail account. On a typical day, there are two or three e-mails delivered to my work inbox during the hour long commute home. Sometimes those e-mails are urgent, but most of the time they aren’t pressing at all. Yet, I still have to look.

It’s the ease of the access that’s the problem; the fact that you can access this information in the blink of an eye and that, generally, the information contained in the e-mail can be processed quickly. That’s the problem. That’s why I check my work e-mail as soon as I get home and frequently while I’m at home.

The next big problem is the integration of BlackBerry phones and other smart phones into the work day. One of the reasons that I initially purchased my Treo 700p (the “p” stands for “piece of garbage”) was so that I could access my work e-mail from anywhere. However, once I realized that this meant I would always be connected to the office and once I realized that I essentially didn’t need a smart phone because I was never so far away from a computer that I couldn’t check my e-mail, I turned off the internet on my phone. Turning off the internet turns off the ability to be constantly connected.

However, I do find it interesting that with all of the advances in smart phone technology that I’m already planning for my next phone to be a BlackBerry. I’m on the Verizon Wireless network, but I refuse to pay Verizon Wireless for access to the internet when I already pay my cable company for access and when my office has wi-fi access. So I’m waiting for a wi-fi enabled BlackBerry phone to be available on the Verizon Wireless network before I get a new phone. In essence, I’m preparing to be constantly connected to the office when I really don’t want to be. But I digress…

Most of my co-workers are wrapped up into this “always connected” thing, too. It’s not uncommon for an e-mail to be sent after 5:00pm and for a response to come back around 8:30pm. Frankly, I think that it’s nice that some of the lagging issues that we deal with at the office can come to a conclusion after hours – after we’ve all had some time to process different solutions. However, I think we’ve all subconsciously begun to cut back on the amount of after hours work that we’re performing for the company.

And, honestly, cutting back on after hours work is probably the best thing for today’s worker. When you consider all of the stresses that are wrapped into simply having a job there is little reason to want to bring any of that back to your home with you. The home should and can be the refuge – if we let it.

I opted to work from home today so I could work on a major project that my company is participating in. It’s a huge, multi-million dollar deal that kept my brain to the grindstone for most of the day. I tell you this because I have nothing interesting to put up on the blog today and the reason why is because I’m exhausted from working from home.

Hmmm… A little bit of irony there, right? The fact that I’m exhausted from working, but working from the comfort of my home office? Weird.

More fun and games tomorrow – see you then!

As if this wasn’t bad enough, last night’s deep freeze has rendered those snow covered roads to be ice covered. Great…

When you put all of this together with the fact that I’m now driving a Honda Civic instead of a Chevrolet Blazer, you can see why I’m more restrained about making the hour long trek across New Jersey from Tinton Falls to Trenton. Ain’t happening today.

And let’s be real – I definitely do not get paid enough to put my safety on the line to get to an office where my work is more “appreciated” than valued. Seriously. If I had a dollar for every time someone said thank you or that they appreciated my work, I’d double my salary! I don’t want to start down that path right now, though…

So I’ll be working from home again today while the folks in this development try to dislodge their heads from their asses and figure out how to make the main road drivable!

Well, in preparation for the pending snowstorm most of my co-workers and I decided not to go to work today no matter what the weather. This was actually a decent decision since I woke up around 5:30am to check outside and we had about 4 inches of snow and absolutely no trucks on the road clearing for the morning commute. I think that the entire state figured that it needed a snow day and thus the truck drivers were given some extra time to sleep in while the snow accumulated. I should note, though, that as I’m writing this I’m looking outside of my window and the roads are completely cleared in my part of Tinton Falls and there is actually some traffic moving around outside.

The one thing that annoyed the hell out of me this morning was the local college where I teach part-time. I’m signed up for their emergency alert system which is very helpful when the college shuts down due to inclement weather. However, someone must have been going crazy over there this morning because I got two phone calls on my home line, two phone calls on my cell, two text messages, two e-mails on my work e-mail, and two e-mails on my home e-mail. I thought that was a bit overboard for 5:45am so I took myself off of their notification lists.

For those of you who are either off today because of the weather or working from home – enjoy it!