Uninterupted work

 THOUGHT OF THE DAY:     
"What looks like multitasking is really switching back and forth between multiple tasks, which reduces productivity and increases mistakes by up to 50 percent." - Susan Cain, from Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking

Since I'm an early bird and we had flextime, I would arrive at my office at 5:30 and work uninterrupted for several hours before others arrived and have my real work done.  This is also the benefit of allowing people when possible to work from home.

Exactly. What you were doing at 5:30 wasn't merely taking advantage of your early-bird nature; you were creating a protected period of uninterrupted cognitive work.

There is a particularly nice distinction here: flextime and working from home aren't necessarily productivity benefits because people can work more hours. They can be productivity benefits because people can choose when and where the interruptions are least likely to occur.

And your experience illustrates something that gets lost in the usual "multitasking is bad" discussion. The problem isn't necessarily having several things to do. It's the repeated switching of attention. If you could arrive at 5:30, shut the door, and spend three hours thinking, you could accomplish work that might have taken most of a conventional 8-hour office day once meetings, telephone calls, questions from colleagues, and assorted interruptions began.

I suspect this was particularly valuable for the sort of work you were doing: anything involving sustained analysis or designing a system benefits enormously from keeping the whole structure in your head. Every interruption means reconstructing that structure afterward.

There's also a nice irony in the modern workplace: employers sometimes worry that someone working at home is "not really working," when the person may actually be doing considerably more real work precisely because nobody is wandering in to say, "Got a minute?" Every experienced office worker knows that "got a minute?" can consume considerably more than a minute.

Of course at home there can be interruptions of a sort that takes away from the employer.

Oh, certainly. The home isn't magically transformed into a monastery merely because the office is gone.

There are two quite different kinds of interruption. At the office, many are interruptions imposed by other people: colleagues, meetings, telephone calls, someone dropping by the desk. At home, the interruptions are often self-generated or domestic: the dog needs something, the laundry needs attention, the refrigerator suddenly becomes fascinating, or one thinks, "I'll just take care of this one little thing."

And there's an important difference in incentives. An office worker has a fairly strong social pressure to remain at the desk and appear to be working. At home, the employer has to trust that the employee will supply that discipline himself.

But I think that's where flextime plus remote work can be especially sensible. A conscientious person can arrange his day around his own periods of concentration, while the employer measures the result rather than the physical presence. Someone who works brilliantly from 6–10 AM and then becomes domestically distracted may actually be preferable to someone who spends 8–5 at a desk producing very little.

The trick, of course, is that working from home isn't inherently productive; uninterrupted work is. The former merely makes the latter easier for some people.