Hard at work

Professor Tim Wall and I quite often write together. Usually, I’ll go to his house - a good hour’s journey on two buses, plus waiting and walking. All up, 3 hours commuting, interspersed with cups of coffee, long and interesting chats about lofty-minded things, and short bursts of typing.

Working that way, we tend to get at best about 4 hours of actual writing done in a day, what with a break for lunch and everything.

We’re working on something together at the moment, so this time I suggested that rather than sit in the same room together, we use Skype video, document sharing and various other bits of online trickery, and see if we can’t get some work done that way.

Apart from some wireless router glitching I’m experiencing, it worked absolutely brilliantly. We were able to work together just as well, I got to have a bit of a lie-in, we could see each other while we worked (normally, facing our respective computers means we are in the same room together, but not face to face) and in some respects, it was a better experience all round.

My plan is to roll this out more generally so that I never have to go to work.