Telecommuting and the bursty economy

Filed in archive Lifestyle on May 13, 2007

As a reader of www.techwithoutwires.com you possibly willl be quite familiar with "telecommuting". Either you telecommute a lot, or you are in a group of workers where commuting of any sort is a foreign idea. Often working from home engaged in running a small business the concept of commuting anywhere is not an issue. However, there are others of us that work in larger organizations and continue working regardless of where we are . . . we telecommute sometimes and maybe not others. So here is a Google Notebook I prepared to arouse your thinking about Telecommuting.

What I did find useful is the notion of people working in a "bursty" economy v's working in a "busy" economy

Web Worker Daily: The busyness economy works on face time, incremental improvement, strategic long-term planning, return on investment, and hierarchical control. The burst economy, enabled by the Web, works on innovation, flat knowledge networks, and discontinuous productivity . . .

So a busy economy worker arrives and leaves 9 to 5; the bursty workers works anytime, all hours of the night or day and from anywhere. The measure of work for the busy workers is the hours put in between 9 and 5; the bursty worker is valued by her/his workstream -- what is actually produced.

The point is that a bursty worker can work from anywhere, therefore telecommuting is most applicable, if indeed we need to even raise the idea of telecommuting. Maybe we need to alter our thinking to view work as not a place to go but a thing we do.