To make things better, my schedule is very flexible. I can pick up kids from school sometimes, take a short nap in the afternoon if I need one, and if I get up in the middle of the night and work is on my mind I can get to it, not on a tiny laptop screen over the vpn, but on 42″ of widescreen monitor madness in the comfort of my skivvies.

Working from home is a dream come true for me.

It hasn’t always been so great for Shannon, my wife. Sure, I’m around more (which she likes), but that doesn’t mean I’m always mentally available to her. The boundary around my work life, once distinct in a very 8-4:30 sort of way, is gone. Work is always there, just a few steps from my bedroom, sandwiched in the little guest bedroom down hall, waiting for me, luring me away to fix just one more defect, answer one more email, or simply lurk in IRC to see what’s going on with my colleagues in other time zones.

I used to come home from work and leave it all behind. Somewhere in the 35 minute drive from the north side to my little suburb I would forget about the job I disliked and my thoughts would turn to home. I would plan home projects, activities with my kids, dates with my wife. I almost never brought my laptop home with me, and even when I did it almost never left it’s bag.

Now, however, work is everywhere. I feel guilty if I’m in front of a computer and I’m not working. I can hear IRC chirping away down the hall at night, and it’s hard for me to resist getting up to see what’s going on. Sometimes, I will spend nearly every waking hour of the day working.

I knew I had to make some changes when my nine year old complained that she saw me less now that I worked from home than when I had a “normal job”.

Here are five things I’ve figured out about making working from home work for me and my family.

Establish a routine that includes your family
An 8 to 5 job creates a predictable routine for your spouse and children. “Daddy’s home” used to be a clarion call in my house. Family members are comforted by predictable routine’s – the knowledge that a parent or spouse will be available at regular times each day is valuable in establishing closeness and communication.
I try to make lunch for my son every day when he gets home from school if I can. I think he looks forward to this interaction with me as we share a box of mac and cheese.
On Fridays, I pick my daughter up from school in my old beetle and take her out for an ice cream cone. Every day, I take breaks with Shannon. Together we play Dr. Mario on the Wii, talk about the kids, or plan family stuff like meals, vacations, etc.

Create boundaries between work and play
You’ve got to leave work behind for at least three things in your life:
1) Meals and bedtime. Don’t miss opportunities to sit down with your family and share a meal or talk with your children as you put them to bed. Meals and bedtime are critical social events for your spouse and your children.
2) Dates with your spouse are off-limits for work. Leave the blackberry behind. Better yet, pro-actively plan them. Don’t make your spouse beg for your attention.
3) Exercise. Life in a cubicle is already too sedentary. Move the cubicle to your house and you will lose even more physical activity as walking across the parking lot, climbing the stairs, and wandering from meeting to meeting disappear from your daily routine. Block off time to exercise and don’t let work intrude.
Take advantage of your schedule’s flexibility to lighten the burden for your spouse
Remember those breaks around the water cooler? The trips down to the coffee shop with your co-workers? Replace them with a load of laundry, meeting your kids at the bus stop, changing a dirty diaper (the stinkier the better), or making a random bed. Be helpful.
Being helpful around the house has at least three benefits:
1) Your home will be cleaner. Cleanliness (not sterility) is conducive to productivity for many people.
2) Your spouse will like you more and have more free time. Plus, she’ll notice how cute you look with a duster.
3) Manual labor has a way of clarifying problems and evoking solutions from the subconscious. Folding clothes is a thoughtless activity that allows your body to function with little input from your mind. As a result, it wanders through the problems of your life in an unstructured way that often results in valuable insight.
Be cheerful and nice
For me, the commute home was always a purging event for me. I used to pick a landmark like a bridge or a mall at which I was committed to not thinking about work anymore. It was the boundary – work ended at the red bridge halfway between home and the office.
There are no bridges between my office and the living room, no checkpoints where I can dump my work baggage and transition to the father/spouse/friend mindset. I have to switch between those mindsets more rapidly and more frequently now. Even if I’m banging my head against my desk trying to understand a monster sql statement, that’s no excuse to be short with Shannon or to ignore my son’s pleas for help with his shoelaces.
For me, it has really helped to simply adopt a more cheerful mindset. Everything’s going to work out. When work is frustrating me, I take a break and flirt with my wife or play with my kids. I try to take a moment to bring happiness to them, and then I find my brain is more capable of re-engaging the difficult task in a more positive way.
Have an office door and use it wisely
I have a few meetings each week. I use skype for most of these, taking advantage of the excellent built-in microphone on my iMac. This also means that it picks up other noise, like my 5 year-old son shouting “Dad, can you look and tell me if my bottom is clean?” from the downstairs bathroom. I shut the door when I’m on the phone, but it’s just not to prevent embarrassment for myself. It’s also to reduce the stress for my family – if I shut my door they don’t have to modify their routine to keep an atmosphere that’s conducive to productivity for me. Shannon has enough to worry about without trying to keep the kids quiet so Daddy can work.

Working from home can have its complications, and it often requires a period of adjustment from you and your family. Some of those adjustments can be difficult, but if you are determined to be cheerful and helpful throughout you will find ways to balance your commitment to your employer and your family in effective and productive ways.

For the average IT worker, getting laid off in this recession is going to be a serious problem. Many of you have invested heavily in a skillset that is very specific to the business you work for and may not transfer easily to another company. Often, IT employees are experts at technology that doesn’t have much appeal outside of the world of large, corporate IT departments. Even Java, which only a decade ago was the new hot thing, is almost never talked about as a platform for startups, software companies, or high-tech industries. Java, Cobol, DB2, CICS, etc, these are the skills that are going to flood the marketplace with excessive supply when the layoffs hit your town. Add on to that the non-technical IT peeps: PMPs, front-line and middle-managers, project management “office” robots. When crowds of these people hit the streets it becomes hard to differentiate yourself.

Here are a few of my thoughts about recessions and layoffs that I think are useful. Please note they are specific to corporate IT and may not cross over to other industries, just in case you googled your way here:

I’m a little biased. In the decade I spent working in corporate IT, half of it was spent wishing I could get out. Now that I’m finally out, it’s my hammer to every nail. If you’re happy in IT, my advice may not apply to you. But… if you’re not so happy, if you feel like your talents are being wasted, or troubled that your skills are being eroded, or frustrated that market forces don’t reach down into your little corner of the IT world then this advice might be helpful to you.

The best advice I have for corporate IT peeps in this recession is… be a SLACKER
What? A slacker? Seriously?

Yup. Be lazy. Take your time. Don’t stress about work. Don’t bring your laptop home. Don’t “rise to the occasion” and “suck it up” to make your project successful. Nope. Do none of those things, except for brief stints where it is absolutely necessary.

Instead, do the following:

Why do this stuff? Because it differentiates you. It shows that you are motivated, talented, and ingenious. It increases your attractiveness to hiring managers in and out of corporate IT. There is also potential that one of these activities will work out into something that will support you and might even make you rich. You don’t have to build an empire on the scale of Bill, Steve, or Sergei to have a happy and fruitful existence. A web site that generates $200,000 in revenue each year with a cost of about $50,000 is a pretty sweet addition to the life of three buddies who built it in their spare time.

Now, a story.

When I was in college I aced ONE class in my major (mechanical engineering). Oddly enough, it was software related: computer aided design. During the semester, I learned two things: that top students were going to be asked to interview for a high-paying summer job with a local manufacturing company, and that teaching assistants didn’t work very hard and made a relatively large amount of money. I wanted both of those jobs.

I spent a few hours each week in the CAD lab on a project that I was only interested in as a way of getting these jobs: designing a monocoque recumbent bicycle. One of my friends was into bikes, even if I wasn’t, and it seemed like an interesting design challenge, so I started. I finished it right before the interviews for the summer job, printed out an exploded assembly drawing on 4 foot wide plotter paper, rolled it up and took it to the interview with me.

We all interviewed on the same day, which meant we got to wait together. The moment I walked in with that rolled up drawing in my hand everyone knew that I had already won the first spot. It immediately became a competition for second place. Later on, another kid told me he didn’t even bother showing up for the interview because he knew I was applying and had seen what I was working on in the lab.

The average person will only do average things. It doesn’t take a lot of effort to do more than average. But what you do needs to be chosen well. It needs to have value outside of corporate IT if it is going to benefit you. Going above and beyond inside a world that is on the verge of laying you off is NOT an effective means of differentiating yourself. Think outside the cubicle. Slack your way through the recession, at least until you get an opportunity you actually want.

Alcohol
I almost titled this alcoholism, but I’m not sure what the exact definition is. I’m pretty sure that using alcohol as a coping mechanism for an unstoppable problem that grows worse every day makes it an ism, but hey, I’m no doctor.

Alcohol helps people cope with the negative effects of being soulless, faceless, and generally unimportant because, for a brief period of time, none of that matters. It has some other benefits, if you are lucky enough to be either a fun drunk or a quiet drunk, such as:

Like most things, coping with alcohol isn’t a viable option for everyone, and is probably not a good option for anyone. Here are some of the downsides of boozing it up as a way of dealing with the hate you feel for your job.

Adopt Intense anger and Bitterness as a Personality Trait
Don’t bottle those feelings of frustration over years lost toiling away in an unfulfilling career that piles misery upon misery and disappointment on top of that. Let it all out, in the form of unpredictable hostility towards lesser mortals that dare to challenge your ideas. Be bitter!

Somehow, bitterness, from the mild to the extreme, is one way people cope with hating their jobs. I’m not really sure how it works, but there is apparently something therapeutic about wallowing in the misery of working on efforts that are often doomed to fail from the very start.

Note that to pull off the whole bitterness gig, you have to be REALLY good at something if you don’t want to get canned. If you are, then that whole aspect of you becomes a personality trait that people will identify with you and will, oddly enough, come to like and respect. When they hear something they think is a bad idea, they’ll bring it to you to reinforce that assessment, because darn it, Gloomy Greg will tell them the truth. People will want you on your project, because they’ll value the “sanity check” you provide.

One problem with the doom-and-gloom coping mechanism is you have to be one of those people who can pull it off without ACTUALLY becoming clinically depressed. It has to be part of your schtick, not a true descent into total despair. You have to hold on to some tiny shred of hope that keeps you going. If it goes too far, you can take comfort in the fact that psychiatric help is probably covered by your insurance, but you should also remember that anti-depressants are probably not going to help your job performance.

If you’re not good at something, you’ll just get fired. It might take a while if there aren’t any layoffs, but in this economy… you’ll be at the top of the list.

Drink the Kool-Aid
Remember that speech your CIO made at the beginning of the year about faster, better, cheaper? About how process improvement was going to make everything better? That plan to save all the projects by only hiring PMPs? Buy into it. Believe it. Soak it in. Be glad you have a PMO. Defend the status reports as being crucial communications tools. Champion your management me chain as corporate IT uber-geniuses.

This will definitely help your career. Leaders will appreciate your support, your optimism, your can-do attitude. The downside? Like sinners in Dante’s inferno who were condemn to chase a banner blowing on the wind while being pursued by hornets for eternity, you will have no professional compass to guide you, no philosophy or founding principals for building and shipping software to the corporate world. You will become a parrot, mindless repeating back the CIO trend of the year without any appreciation for the goodness or badness of what you’re about. You’ll have become a complete and total suck-up.

Honeymoon!
The first year of every job I’ve had has been the best. Everyone’s nice, you’re still excited about all the things that made you want the job in the first place, and you haven’t really felt the pain of the particular shortcomings of your new gig yet.

So just change jobs every year or so. Hop! You can stay in the “Honeymoon” period forever!

It takes a lot of energy to do this, and it can have a high cost on your personal relationships if it involves relocation. It’s also really only acceptable in the first decade of your career unless you are exceptionally skilled at what you do, at networking, and building consulting relationships. Once your 30 or so, you got to start sticking for at least 2-3 years.

Punch the Clock/Abuse the System
8 to 5 baby. With long lunches, personal errands, and plenty of time cruising the internet. “It’s just a job,” you tell bitter Bob when he complains about the design readiness stage gate form. “Geez.”

This approach works. You can do this your whole career and be a relatively happy human being. You can even climb to middle management this way. But… that’s where the fun ends. If you want to go further, you’re going to have to work.

You can be happy this way, and you can have a nice life, so long as it doesn’t bother you to spend half your adult waking life at “just a job.”

Embrace the Dark Side of the Force
This was my approach – I accepted the dark side for what it was, and then tried to use its dark powers against itself. I trusted in the ineffectiveness of bureaucracy to protect me from being disciplined when I broke the rules, and it worked. I learned to spend just enough time on status reports, stage gate documents, requirements, and other unnecessary artifacts to avoid scrutiny but not absorb all my energy. I focused on what I knew really mattered (relationships) and as a result was almost always able to skirt the “official” process and get things done.

If you take this approach, you will be effective. There might even be times when you will enjoy your job. But you will also value your work product, and when others don’t value it, you will feel stung. It will hurt when your projects are canceled, your products are retired, or your design rejected. Go back and read that section on bitterness.

Ultimately, trying to use the dark powers of corporate IT against itself ends the same way it does for every dark jedi who thought he could use the powers of evil to make a difference. You become swallowed by the evil you thought you could control, and it controls you. You become the dark side.

Get Out
Why put up with all this crap? Just get out. If you’ve got the skills to write software, you don’t have to do it in corporate IT. Pay the price to leave, and get a job somewhere where your work product is sold on the open market. That’s what I recommend.

I soon discovered that becoming a project manager made it easier for me to find other jobs within the Corporate IT world – I was called almost weekly by head hunters for the next four years. I looked at quite a few opportunities, but I always walked away. Eventually I understood that the reason none of the opportunities appealed to me was because they were the same problems in different packaging. Corporate IT stinks everywhere, not just in my little world.

I tried to get the attention of real software companies, but they hardly noticed me. I realized there were two problems with my experience: I had left the technical world and I worked in corporate IT. Both of these were a strike against me when pursuing a position with a real software company.

At one point I asked an acquaintance who worked at a hosting company what he thought the prospects of a corporate IT wonk getting a job outside of corporate IT were. He confirmed what I had grown to suspect: it’s hard.

Leaving corporate IT for a job in the software development industry is not just a job change. It’s a career change! You’ll be better equipped to make that move if you understand this. The secret of a career change, as bloggers like Penelope Trunk and Pamela Slim have pointed out before, is to find ways of demonstrating your cross-over capabilities in smaller ways that are possible to do while you do a reasonably good job in your full-time position.

There are three things I did to demonstrate my cross-over potential from project manager to Rails developer/tester that were critical to getting a job working for Collaborative Software Initiative on the TriSano project. There’s nothing unique about what I did – everyone should be doing each of these things, especially if you want out of corporate IT. Of course, if you’re content where you are, you might consider doing these things anyway given the economic uncertainty we all face.

#1. Blog and Twitter
Corporate IT is generally suspicious of employees that blog and apprehensive about the potential risks bloggers pose to the company. As a rule of thumb, the software development industry doesn’t share that suspicion, although they still expect their employees’ blogs to paint them in a positive light. In fact, most companies in this industry view blogs as an asset. But blogging isn’t important for impressing a potential employer so much as it is important for finding that potential employer.

You see, blogging is a natural way of extending your social and professional network. By blogging, you expose yourself to others with with similar points of view and relationships with organizations that value whatever it is you blog about. In a sense, your blog becomes your resume.

Make sure to blog about something that intrigues you. You don’t have to be an expert to blog about your subject – some of the best blogs are those that portray a learning experience. These blogs are often incredibly helpful to others attempting the same thing.

Twittering is helpful in the same way, but twittering doesn’t replace blogging. It complements it and makes it better by adding another facet to your networking prowess.

#2. Contribute to an Open-Source Project
Corporate IT is often years, sometimes decades, behind the software development industry in terms of technology. Employers you would enjoy working for are going to wonder if your behind-the-times tech experience will be a hindrance to joining their team, particularly if it is a startup that is obsessed with being on the “edge” all the time.

Contributing to an open-source project is a way to demonstrate that you are hep. You can still code with the new kids, no matter what you work on eight hours a day. It also demonstrates that you are special – that your passion for your profession goes beyond a bi-weekly paycheck.

Here’s another reason to work on an open-source project: they might hire you. Is there an open source project you think is cool? Would you like to be paid to work on it? Then start working on it. As Mike Herrick likes to say, do good things and good things will happen. I worked on TriSano part-time for nine months before they hired me.

#3. Find a Bunch of Second Jobs
Corporate IT is stressful, tiring, and soul-consuming, but it’s often relatively easy to get by on about forty hours a week. And, even if your job requires more, it often takes a very long time and a whole lot of paperwork to get rid of a slacker. If this is your situation, you might consider whether you can work part-time in the area you’d like to transition to.

This is easiest to pull off if you have been blogging for a year or so. After about a year of blogging, opportunities should start to emerge. For me, it started with magazine articles, then conference talks, consulting gigs, and finally training opportunities. If you’re not blogging – go back a few paragraphs and start there. Finding short-term part-time opportunities without the blog network is difficult, but not impossible.

Protect your soul (or the soul of an IT geek you care about) by being safely rebellious. Wearing socks that won’t get you in trouble but will raise eyebrows – socks that don’t match. No, don’t wear one black sock and one blue sock. That will just make you look like a nerd. Assert your geekdom by wearing socks that match without matching.

This concept is hard to explain, so check out some of the socks below.

Socks that don’t match, but do, make great stocking stuffers for the geek in your life, and they just might save a soul. So check out LittleMissMatched.com (the pictures I’ve shown are all guys socks, but they have lots of socks and other cool stuff that doesn’t match for everybody).

Note: As much as this post sounds like ad copy, it’s not a paid advertisement. I just really like the socks.

So here are two pieces of advice that I think are pretty useful in nearly all contexts within IT.

1) Don’t schedule a presentation to senior management on the same day you get braces glued to your teeth, unless you want the director of application development to whisper “I tawt I taw a puddy tat” whenever you leave the room. I wish that hadn’t just happened to me YESTERDAY.

2) Don’t use waterfall for software development projects. Unless you want to spend huge amounts of money, deliver nothing, and go down with the ship insisting you would have been successful if only the business hadn’t kept changing requirements. Flippin’ baby.

Here’s how it starts:

A few days ago I was sitting in a cafe in Palo Alto and a group of programmers came in on some kind of scavenger hunt. It was obviously one of those corporate “team-building” exercises.

They looked familiar. I spend nearly all my time working with programmers in their twenties and early thirties. But something seemed wrong about these. There was something missing.

And yet the company they worked for is considered a good one, and from what I overheard of their conversation, they seemed smart enough. In fact, they seemed to be from one of the more prestigious groups within the company.

So why did it seem there was something odd about them?

It doesn’t take a lot of thought or an expert on usability to realize that the interface is silly, but I don’t think the developer cared. It’s not like fewer people bought Yahtzee for their cell phone because of the excessive clicks required. Otherwise the designer would have thought it through, if it had been important. Just because every software application in 1989 made you confirm before you exited doesn’t mean Yahtzee has to.

I see a lot of brain disengagement in the Corporate IT industry. People sometimes just stop thinking for themselves, they turn their brains over to a process, or a standard, or a pattern and they don’t think anymore, don’t question anything. Sometimes people turn their brains over to their bosses, or to a loyalty. I don’t understand this. Is it really that hard to think?

Don’t check out. Don’t build apps like the stupid Yahtzee game I’m addicted to.

I would not suggest trying to “cheat” your way to competence by parroting these behaviors without the skills to back them up. Faking it won’t work. I would suggest you take an honest look at yourself and evaluate whether you have mastered these aspects of the skills in which you are allegedly “competent.”

No matter how lacking you may be in other areas, you can always engage (#4). Engaging has the nice effect of rapidly building your abilities in the other four areas, plus it puts your learning curve on display for others to appreciate. If it is steep, they will see you as an asset even though you have not developed full competence in that particular area.

Dave