What exactly are you doing at home?

I keep getting asked what I do now that I work at home. OK, most of those are from my employers asking for status reports. Still, some wonder how the working from home works.

I'm supposed to be working from 7:00 until 3:30 with a half hour for lunch in there somewhere. I set my alarm for 6:30 and sit down in front of my computer around 9:00.

Realizing I've started late I set my quitting time at 5:30.

I start by checking my e-mail and pondering what I should blog about. I don't always do that blog thing right away. You may have noticed.

I grab a DVD from the library and stick it in a computer. I reduce the display so it's about 1/16 of the screen and let it play as background noise.

What comes next depends on what needs doing.

I've turned out eight chapters for a book we're nicknaming "Dustoff". That's not the actual title since someone else already wrote that book. Our book is about the history of aeromedical evacuation. I'll let you know when you can get the PDF from our site.

I adapted the cover for the Pediatric Medicine book for use by the printers. They have to turn the documents I sent into metal stamps and color selections for stamping and painting the covers of our textbooks.

There's also a lot of unpacking to do. I've drug home several boxes of floppies, Zip disks, slides and glossies to process. I've cleared about 200 floppies and a few dozen Zip disks. On the disks I have to determine the value of the files, recover useful files, and toss them into a heap for disposal. I could use ideas for what to do with the disks. Eventually I'll hook up the slide scanner and scan them in. I may need to grab something from my computer museum to create a replica of the Graphic Database I developed at work. This way I can add the pictures here, export them, and import them to the DB at work.
I also had to sort through my paperwork and try to file it somewhere accessible but invisible.
This is mostly for when I run out of other stuff to do.

Lots of little things, too. Send files to this guy, ask questions of that guy. So far no tech support.

The biggest problem? Without all the usual office crap going on I'm more productive. I'm working my 8 hours instead of being in the office for my 8 hours. I run out of things to do way too fast.