Telecommuting is often a benefit - a choice people make that enables them to save money or time, be more accessible for young children, or a host of other reasons. And with the choice of telecommuting comes some challenges – that require new skills to overcome.

However, I’d like to talk a little about a work situation which brings it’s own challenges – where telecommuting provides an answer to that challenge instead of causing the questions.

I work with an incredibly distributed team. I have team members in the US, Asia-Pacific, and Europe. This means that I often have lots of early morning meets to catch my European counterparts as well as evening meetings to talk to the folks in Asia-Pacific.

This work-style can be hard on a person (not to mention his or her spouse, kids, etc). It can certainly make for very long days if you need to be in the office for a 7am meeting and stick around for another meeting that doesn’t end until 6pm or 7pm! Add the commute into that and we’re talking about well over a 12 hour day at the office. And in between your morning and evening meetings, since you’re at work, you’re going to spend all your extra time working.

So what can you do?

Well this is where telecommuting can really be a benefit. If I had to be in the office for a 7am meeting I’d have to get up at 5:30am so I could be showered, dressed, and out the door by 6:30 and into the office by 7am. But instead, I often roll out of bed at 6:45am and take my 7am meetings in my pajamas (thank goodness my company isn’t heavily into web-cams with their teleconferencing systems yet!). I can work throughout the day and when I finally get a break in meetings I hit the shower. If my day isn’t too crazy then once Europe is offline, around lunchtime for me, I can even take a little break and go for a walk or do a workout video. I can take a break here or there in the afternoon to throw laundry in the washing machine. I can prep dinner. Then, towards late afternoon, when my meetings with my Asia-Pacific counterparts start, I haven’t already put in a grueling 10 hours of work with more still to go. I’m fresh enough that my meetings with the Asia-Pacific folks are as productive and effective as those with my European team members. And I don’t feel like I’ve sacrificed too much of my life to get through each day with these brutal meeting schedules.

Sure, there are plenty of times when I do work pretty solidly through the day between my 7am and 6pm meetings – times when there’s just so much work on my plate that it’s the only way to meet my deadlines. And yes, sometimes it feels like this happens more than I would like it to. But those times are by my choice, when my workload is unusually high. I at least have the control over my work/life balance to decide whether I’m going to put in a 12-hour day or just let a particular deliverable take one day longer before I turn it in. Working from home gives me that flexibility in a way that I would never have if I were to take all my meetings from the office.

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