My employer would get a lot more use out of me if they let me work from home and come in late. On average, I meet with about 16 students a day. 12 of those students come in between 2:30 and 5. Eliminating the 2 hours I spend with the other 4 students and the hour I take for lunch, that leaves me with about 2 hours a day where I’m supposed to be working on projects, sending emails, reaching out to students, and updating the webpage.

What do I do with that 2 hours? Honestly, not much. I play a lot of Zuma and Words with Friends, read a lot of news stories, dick around on Spotify, and tweet more than I probably should. I don’t do this because I’m lazy (OK, maybe I am), I do it because:

a) I’m uncomfortable. I hate wearing khakis and dress shoes. When I’m not comfortable, I don’t work. When I don’t work, I dick around to not go crazy. My desk chair isn’t the greatest either.

b) I know I can do the work in less time at home when I’m comfortable and able to focus. I’ve timed it - work that takes me an hour at the office, I can do in 15 minutes at home. Partly because I’m in PJs on the couch, but mostly because I’m not being interrupted with meetings, phone calls, or emails. I’m not important enough to be contacted every 20 minutes, but still, everyone feels the need to cc: me on everything. GMail’s “Archive” button is my best friend.

c) I’m not being challenged. If the tasks I did on a daily basis were more stimulating, I could ignore Problem A (Lord knows I’ve done it before) and Problem B wouldn’t even be an issue. Sure, I could always take on more tasks and responsibilities, but being honest - there’s not a lot of upward mobility in my position. As such, there’s no monetary incentive to do more. I know it. Some of my coworkers pretend to not know it. My managers know it. I’m no fool. I don’t work for free.

Mind you, I like my job, even if I just threw out 3 bullet points that make it sound like I don’t. I work in a cool place with great people. I have fun for 7.5 hours a day and I go home. I don’t have to carry any baggage around before or after work. I’m brushing up on skills I haven’t used in a while and learning new ones. And after spending many months on #TeamUnemployment, I’m VERY happy and VERY grateful to have a job. I’m just saying that everyone would be better off if I could work from home every now and then. Just half days. Or at least wear jeans occasionally. That extra 10% of productivity that I could bring to the table would be amazing…