I’ve worked at home full time since 2005, and the longer this situation goes on the more I’ve had to compensate for my social isolation with technology. I rely on IM to provide the kinds of idle conversations and impromptu meetings with colleagues that I once had face-to-face in the office. The beauty part of the whole arrangement is that IM allows me to avoid the meetings I once dreaded during my days as an in-office worker. I don’t have to sit through long “all hands” meetings (where I often passed the time on IM anyway).

More importantly, I can avoid unwanted chatter that interrupts my workflow. I do this by deploying a form of IM etiquette that I call “always away.” IM clients allow you to specify a status that gets displayed to other people using IM, and the defaults are things like “available” or “away.” I always set my status to “away,” sometimes adding a phrase like “working” or “fighting aliens.” Most of my colleagues do the same thing (except for the fighting aliens part). This allows me to have plausible deniability when I need to ignore a purely social message that interrupts my workflow. After all, I might really be gone. But I can respond when a colleague messages me about something important.

Every new form of social interaction breeds its own etiquette. Read more about this.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 16th, 2007 at 9:27 am.
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