Time to Switch Off?

I am currently sat in a tiny hotel room near Euston Train station. I’m in London to present at Internet Librarian International Conference. Today I ran blogging workshop with my colleague Ann Chapman and tomorrow I’m giving a presentation on preserving Web resources.

Anyway that’s by the by, I wanted to blog because this is a bit of a landmark occasion being the first time I’ve updated my blog as a remote worker away from my home office desk.

I feel like a real remote worker. A remote remote worker!!

The wifi in this hotel is pretty easy to use and as wifi becomes more mainstream I can see that for some people it becomes hard to draw the line between work and play. I have a colleague (who will remain nameless!) who seems unable to go to a pub unless there’s wireless. Possibly one step to far?

So when do you switch off?

This blog post by Phillipa Hammond on Remote working using Wi-fi explores this.

She comes to the conclusion “I’m still not sure if work/life balance can truly exist when you’re freelance, or whether it’s just that your life and your work become intertwined”. I guess the same applies to anyone who works from home.

Interestingly one of the people commenting says:

“I used to do a lot of remote working, using the combination of my laptop and mobile phone. I’ve worked from mountain campsites and tropical beaches. For the first couple of years, I thought it was great because it allowed me to take more vacations. After a while though, it started to get old, and a family rebellion convinced me to make great efforts to leave all work at home when vacationing. Even though I was spending only 10% or so of my time working, I found that not having any work at all makes for a much more pleasant vacation.”

So what do we do? When do we draw the line? Having small children I doubt if I’d get a chance to do my work while on holiday, and even if I could I don’t think I’d want to.

Maybe that’s just me. What do people think?