As the company has grown, I have had to spend more time at the office.  I used to work 4 days at the office and then 1 day at home every week.  In fact, sometimes I'd work 3 days at the office and 2 days at home if there were particularly important things going on.

Working from home isn't for most people.  For many people, working from home results in a loss of productivity because of communication issues, lack of resources, etc.  But in my particular case, working from home results in vastly greater output.

My case is a bit unique because I'm what you'd call an executive with a focus on execution.  That is, a significant % of the company's raw work product output comes from me in one form or other.  My relative percent has decreased over the years as we've brought on more people but my overall output has continued to grow and the value of that output has grown with it since I have tried to stay on things that are more crucial to the company.

At home, I don't have the distractions I get at work. I can just sit in my chair with my various computers (I have 3 computers at home on my desktop that I connect to with Multiplicity Pro). Plus, I have lots of handy snacks near by which are particularly important to the way I work.

So at home, I can go through web pages in peace and optimize them. I can write up articles which tend to be crucial to our traffic. I can help put together email, magazines, etc.  I can play around with our various beta programs in peace for long periods of time without being interupted and put together detailed reports and specifications. And of course, I can write code.

But working from home has a price as well. There's a small morale penalty at the office when I'm not there.  That is, I am concerned that people will feel I'm not working hard enough or that I'm just at home relaxing. What they don't know is that the key stuff that I do gets done at home. I basically am at the office to help follow-up with people to make sure projects are staying on track, help play communications traffic cop between departments, and just talk to people to give feedback/kudos/suggestions on what they're doing.  These are important things by all means. But the time I'm not spending working on the "key" stuff costs us money.

Now, one might argue that I could keep hiring people to do all the little things I do. But that's not a practical matter. My skillset has been developed, over a period of a decade, specifically for Stardock.  So my ability to quickly edit web pages, write up specs, debug code, QA software, create mailers, etc. would require a lot of different people.  Moreover, there's just so many little things that would go unnoticed (And do go unnoticed) that it would be incredibly inefficent to have other people do them.

For instance, I'll find a page that hasn't been updated to mention that the program works on Windows Vista.  Or I'll find a typo on a product or an unclear description (buying WindowBlinds on CD, for instance, was a convoluted process that was only fixed this morning when I noticed it).

So today and tomorrow I'm working from home.  And then all of next week. With any luck, I'll be able to get a lot of work done -- at home.