Since I was being massively unproductive anyway, I started thinking about the times when I was unproductive while at the office.  Was there a pattern?  Was I just tired?  Bored?  Thinking about golfing?  I decided to take a few minutes and identify my “other” days on a calendar – could I correlate those days to specific events (like being up all night helping a customer)?

Sadly, no.  There was no obvious pattern.  However, the exercise of looking for a pattern helped me to discover my real problem: Sometimes when I am “at work”, I just don’t feel like working!  I know there are tasks to do, I have my prioritized list (with real tasks and alternate, “fun” tasks for when I can’t handle the real ones), but I’m just not in the mood to do any of them.  Instead, I end up puttering around the web, or organizing my email folders, or water-cooler chatting with people, or some other nonsense that has little to do with what they pay me for.

Then, in my sleep-deprived delirium, I had an epiphany: It is more valuable to have an employee at work when they are going to be productive than have them take up space when they are unproductive.  An unfocused, unproductive employee is a distraction to the people around them.  They should go do something else, and come back when they are ready to focus on their real, work-related tasks.  I, for one, want to be “actually working when I work”.

Obviously you can’t let people just come and go as they please – there has to be some “reasonableness” test applied.  It would be easy for an unscrupulous person to take advantage of such a policy.  But in an organization of like-minded staffers, is it possible to say “we have some core work hours – you should be available during them. Otherwise, please get your tasks done by the deadlines, working when you can focus on those tasks”?  Or is this just too Utopian a concept for a typical corporate environment?  Let’s discuss it in the forums!