. . . when I walk out of the workshop door at night the phone goes off and the work stops.
And that's how it should be, whether working for oneself or in an office for someone else.
I mentioned something I call "the artificial need for speed" and heaven knows that's been cultivated, writ large, in IT. There are critical things, and those need immediate attention, but they are very few and far between. Almost everything can (and in my case, will) wait until tomorrow once business hours are over for the day. I'll occasionally send a text saying something like, "Let's get into the details tomorrow," but that's about it, when the issue is not, in my estimation, critical.
And I have trained clients that they had better be making critical versus non-critical assessments about a problem themselves. It's made my life, and theirs, too, much easier.
But, back to the original question, I do think we are going to see a marked shift in the numbers of people working from home, and professionals in particular. Many have been pushing for years to have telecommuting and been rebuffed, but it's going to be very difficult to say, "we can't do that," now since, by the time this is over, organizations will have been "doing that" for months.
I keep waiting for lower level IT folks to unionize, too, as heaven knows the attitude that "your life belongs to me, and if I need 80 hours per week from you because of my incompetence or artificial deadline setting, I'm going to get it!," has been old for decades now.
