Stuck in traffic, choking on exhaust fumes. Watching the guy in the next lane eating a bowl of cornflakes from a bowl perched precariously on the steering wheel and the woman behind applying a thick layer of mascara before the work day begins. All the way, billboards sell you things you probably don’t need, lane closures slow the pace of traffic to that of a tortoise, obnoxious motorists tailgate as soon as the pace picks up a bit.

Or, opting for the more environmentally sensitive and oft-times quicker way where available, you sit on a crowded train, not listening but not being quite able to tune out the louder-than-need-be conversation between a group that evidently work in the same office and ride the train together every day. The person in the seat opposite yours grunts and wipes a fine thread of saliva from his chin, jerked awake by some unknown dream; he looks around sheepishly to see who noticed. Being polite, you avoid his look. The person beside you is reading the newspaper, ignoring train etiquette by encroaching on your personal space with the unfurled broadsheet, turning the page before you’re finished reading the page (the nerve!).

Granted, these are the worst case scenarios, the ones that hit on days when you roll out of bed and, instead of smiling at what the day may have in store, a hollow dread seems to drift in from out of nowhere. If intuition counts for anything, it’s going to be a bad day.
Sure, it’s rhetoric (I’m thinking of pursuing a career in politics) but with this worst case scenario in mind, is it any wonder so many people dream of working from home?

Thanks to the proliferation of broadband Internet access, the advance in online meeting and group collaboration wikis, websites and applications and a mix of personal document centres, smartphones and laptops, being productive during the hours of 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. without sitting at a desk in a traditional corporate office is a reality.

Far from the digital ties that bind us to our jobs after hours (as is sometimes suggested) a Towers Perrin survey from earlier this year claims that the overwhelming majority of workers feel that cell phones, laptops and other gadgets and gear are actually freeing them to create a reasonable work / life balance. Eighty-six per cent of respondents to the Towers Perrin Global Workplace Study released in February of this year agreed that personal tech actually helps them to find a balance between the personal and professional aspects of their lives. The study polled almost 90,000 workers in 18 countries worldwide with about 5,000 respondents in Canada.

A study of 270 Canadian CFOs by Robert Half International discovered that, while salary is still considered the biggest draw — followed by benefits and bonus packages — in attracting candidates for accounting positions with 31 and 20 per cent of respondents agreeing respectively (they are money-minded, after all) 20 per cent said that telecommuting and flexible work schedules were the most important.

In short, people are starting to realize that working nine to five doesn’t have to mean water coolers, copy rooms, half-hour lunches and office politics. A home-based worker can still be a highly effective worker. It’s heartening to think that the line-of-sight style of management — where time spent looking busy can seem more important than actual output — may be going the way of the Dictaphone and typing pool.

In this issue, which we’ve dubbed “Home Sweet Office,” we’ll take a look at the still emerging world of telecommuting with Dorian Nicholson’s examination of the trend toward empowering employees by allowing them to work where they’re most comfortable: at home.

We also look at multi-function printers In the Lab; these sub-$200 inkjets act as an all-in-one documents centre for the home office, allowing you to print, scan, copy and in some cases fax. As home-based business owners know and new telecommuters will quickly discover it’s important that tech products in the home office be small, easy to set up and ideally, fit many useful functions into a small package.

Andrew Carruthers discusses some of the leading options in online office suites. These often free services take your documents and in some cases spreadsheets, presentations, notes, appointments and more and put them in the data cloud, accessible from anywhere you can find an Internet connection be it at home, down the street or on the other side of the world. The cloud computing concept is a major factor in allowing us to untether ourselves from our desks. Anything that loosens the ties that bind can only really be a good thing, in my mind. Granted there are some serious security and privacy concerns to be discussed and dealt with, but for non-sensitive data, cloud computing is a boon for the mobile worker or editor with terminal wanderlust (no names).

In addition, Helen Bradley discusses how to create your own business stationary like business cards, letter head and invoices using the ubiquitous Microsoft Office suite while Issie Rabinovitch talks about OpenOffice.org, a free a full-function office suite that threatens to pry at least a little of Microsoft’s massive Office mind- and PC-share away.

With all this in mind, it begs the question why I’m sitting here in the office on a sunny Friday afternoon as I write this…

We hope you enjoy the issue,
Andrew Moore-Crispin
Editor-in-Chief