TRC #224: Working From Home + PZ Myers Interview + TRC Predictions

Season’s greetings!   Elan discusses whether working from home can actually work, then we have a very special interview with PZ Myers and lastly, we review our predictions from last year and make a few for the year to come.

Download direct: mp3 file

If you like the show, please leave us a review on itunes.

Show Notes:

Working From Home

Stanford Study – Does working from home work?

AJPM Study – Commuting Distance, Cardiorespiratory Fitness, and Metabolic Risk

Ambient Noise on Creative Cognition

Lifehacker – Seven Productivity Myths, Debunked by Science (and Common Sense)

Predictions

CERN now 99.999999999% sure it has found the Higgs boson – ExtremeTech

This entry was posted in The Reality Check Episodes and tagged , . Bookmark the permalink.

4 Responses to TRC #224: Working From Home + PZ Myers Interview + TRC Predictions

  1. Jo says:

    About working from home… An element that is important in many jobs is networking… Promotions generally won’t be given to people no one has ever seen. So the time talking to colleagues might not be productive on paper, but it might be what counts the most in the end… As well, if I’m not mistaken, the study was made in China, where they generally have more a community way of seeing things and a bigger sens of duty. I don’t know how much the study could apply here. And if I participate in a study or I’m monitored to know if something new that I want is working, I might try harder or I have more to prove about my personal motivation at home than the status quo of the office.
    Adam, if the most stressful thing in your life is commuting… Lucky you, be grateful!

  2. Evil Eye says:

    In your segment about working from home, you failed to think about people like farmers or caretakers that actually live where they work.

  3. Elan says:

    Thanks for the comments! Jo, I totally agree with you and tried to get across in the segment that this is not conclusive evidence that working from home is better in all cases, but simply an example showing that working from home is not as bad as some people say it is (I think I mentioned in the segment that I found the term “shirking from home” thrown around). Also good point about people acting differently because they are being monitored. I actually covered this (The Hawthorne Affect) back in episode 159 (http://www.trcpodcast.com/the-reality-check-159/).

    Evil Eye, yes those people would definitely suck at their jobs if they worked from an external office away from home. Unless the farmer has awesome surveillance and remote controls for all of their equipment?

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *