We decided to take advantage of all that space by cantilevering a 6th meeting room over the cafe. What you’re seeing here is the framework for the Sky Room. It’s small — it will only seat 5, but like all the other meeting rooms it will have a large flat-screen monitor, conference phone, iPod dock, and a fridge full of water.

We’re experimenting with materials for the walls — we’ve got some wild ideas floating around. I’ll let you know when we’ve made a final decision on that. For now, you can actually climb the staircase and walk around up there.

That wavy wall will be covered in cork, as will the two posts holding the room up. This is where you’ll be able to post your flyers for your band, your piano lessons, or your lost cockatoo.

Pretty cool, eh?

I was challenged by one guy in the audience who suggested that telecommuters are less productive than their office-bound coworkers. I was pretty sure I had read reports showing the opposite, but I had no facts at my fingertips to offer. He then sent me a follow up email, reasserting his stance, which he backed up with a link to a comment on a post about Sun Microsystems. The comment, from a former Sun employee, suggests that telecommuter is a euphemism for slacker.

The Computer Technology Industry Association (CompTIA) recently released findings of a web based survey among 212 respondents in order “to determine the top benefits and challenges of telecommuting in a wide range of industries, including but not limited to IT, government, education, insurance, and telecommunications.”

Among the findings: “Top benefits of telecommuting to organizations include improved productivity (67%), cost savings (59%), access to more qualified staff (39%), employee retention (37%), and improved employee health (25%).”

An article titled Productivity Measurements and Telecommuting by Sam Miller suggests: “Another myth about productivity measurement and telecommuting is that an employer has no hold on how much an employee works on a set number of days. This is contradicted by the fact that employers enforce deadlines that a telecommuting employee must adhere to.”

Hell, even Donald Trump — while admitting he does like to keep his employees in his sight (no surprise there) — has this to say about telecommuters in a blog post called Management Tips: Trusting Telecommuters: “In the end, it should be easy to tell if telecommuting employees are getting the job done. Their work output should speak for itself. But it’s still difficult for a hands-on manager to loosen the reins, especially when it’s someone who is used to walking into cubicles and stopping by desks for meetings all day long. So there’s a huge trust issue. But if you don’t trust your employees, you shouldn’t have hired them in the first place.”

Which isn’t to say I’m relying on The Donald for management tips — I’ve got my own management style, thank you very much. But I don’t think you can argue that point about trust. As another InnoTech attendee pointed, out, if you’re standing behind your workers monitoring their every move, you’re not a very good manager. Trust coupled with communication is really what inspires dedicated, productive employees.

Plus, let’s be real. Sure there will be some telecommuters who slack, and who don’t meet expectations, quotas or deadlines. But guess what? You can find the same type of deadbeat right there in the office, surfing the day away and taking a tips from Matt Groening’s Work Is Hell book featuring such cartoon gems as How to Kill 8 Hours a Day Without Losing Your Job.

Some people are suited to telecommuting, some aren’t. Some managers are way too uptight to even think about allowing telecommuting without wincing and grinding their teeth. I say too bad for them because the way things are going, working fulltime in an office is rapidly becoming just one way to work, not the end all be all work scenario.

This is a lovely place to be, since there have been times in the past when I didn’t love my work, but couldn’t not work because I had to support my kid and I was still struggling to get my writing on the map. Now I’m in this delightful position where I get paid well to do what I love. And if I wanted to, I could take time off.

This morning, I did the same thing I do when I’m home and not on vacation. I read the New York Times. Reading the Times is a great metaphor for how my work life and leisure time intersect very regularly these days. I read the paper first and foremost because I am a news junkie/journalist. But it also happens that reading the paper yields great ideas for the work I do.

For example, today I found a piece about a woman named Alison Link, who is — no kidding — an expert on leisure. More interesting still, she works with incarcerated and formerly incarcerated folks. Sounds a little odd unless you think about it for a minute — imagine getting out of the big house and suddenly having lots of time on your hands and plenty of freedom but no work. Idle hands do the devil’s work and all that. The article reports, “Though Ms. Link works primarily with at-risk populations, she says that we can all improve our quality of life by paying more attention to leisure habits.”

Link offered up the story of a busy executive who found that if she could just work in a few minutes here and there of leisure time even during her busiest days, her overall happiness was going to improve. We’re talking really little things like walk to work, or call a friend who makes her laugh, or just go to a coffee shop for fifteen minutes here and there.

I flipped this scenario on its head for my own purposes. For me, the majority of vacations I’ve taken have either involved visiting family (which can be hard work) or being on a working vacation. The latter is nothing I’ll complain about — National Geographic Traveler has sent me on some pretty wild adventures. But in the end, I do have to pay really close attention, take notes, and report back.

So now, here I sit, on a vacation vacation, and what am I doing? Work. But just a little. I squeeze in an hour or two a day to think about coworking, or redraft an essay I wrote months ago in hopes of sending it to an editor to consider. I make some notes for a novel I want to start writing this fall. And I come up with to do lists for when I get back.

Does this make me an uptight workaholic incapable of ever truly relaxing? Maybe I’m in denial, but I don’t think so. Doing a little work keeps me grounded and connected. (And also gives my boyfriend, with whom I am spending eight days in 24/7 close contact with, a nice break.) Doing work settles me, so that I can fully enjoy myself when I am doing leisure activities (today I sat on the beach, my legs buried in black lava sand, and played with rocks for hours on end).

I think this relates, at least in part, to being an independent worker. Those of us who make it working on our own might appear to have slack schedules and limited discipline. That, I promise you, is smoke and mirrors. Yes, you might see me out walking in the middle of the day when other people are heading into their fifth meeting at the office. And it’s true I can go to the grocery store while a lot of others are sitting in rush hour traffic. But really, I have to figure out not only how to get all my work done, but to balance it with the leisure stuff, too.

When I first started writing for LaunchPad Coworking six months ago, a lot of things made me very, very happy about the gig. One is that Julie, like me, doesn’t spend much time differentiating between work and play. As with my newspaper reading, there can be a healthy overlap — maybe one of us meets someone at a party who would make a good interview or maybe one of us, as I did recently, came across an item while I was out on a personal errand that we might be able to use in the café.

I remember, when I started, how Julie and I were discussing that book, The 4-Hour work Week, which was selling like hotcakes, apparently being snapped up by overworked corporate types fantasizing about cutting back. We ascertained that this was just it — a fantasy — and that a lot of those folks interested in the book probably didn’t really want to cut back, or at least not to four hours a week. They’d be lost without their work. And even the book’s author apparently works an awful lot, but he refers to preparing for lectures and other work related activities as non-work.

So while real work and real leisure probably can be separated out by some people, and while surely both are important, I hold that a lot of how we perceive what we do lies in the framing. Technically, it’s work for me to sit here and write this post. Only really, it’s not. I’m taking a breather from hiking into canyons to see waterfalls and drinking fresh juice from a coconut with a hole poked in it. But I’m also having fun with it so it doesn’t sully my vacation.

Maybe I can start coworking with Alison Link — she can keep helping out folks who want to use their leisure time right. And I can help the folks who need to rethink when and where to work, and even how they define that word.

At the request of Governor Ted Strickland, Hugh Quill, the state’s director of the Department of Administrative Services, is putting a plan into place that would better be described as inflexible time. Allegedly, the root of this is to “maximize efficiency.”

The report noted a US Department of Labor statistic the: “one quarter of full-time employees in both the state and private sectors, nationally, are on flexible work schedules.”

Okay, this is just my opinion, but sounds to me like Strickland and Quill are authority-a-holics, with a need to exert control over those in lesser positions. So what is this going to net them — forcing workers to keep schedules they clearly don’t like and that interfere with, say, taking care of their families? I’m going to guess a bunch of disgruntled state workers who, while they may be putting in the facetime required to keep their jobs, will quite possibly work slower, daydream more, and revolt in quiet ways that certainly will not improve efficiency.

When are employers going to learn that when you trust people to do their jobs, when you don’t breathe down their throats, that good employees are going to get that job done, and get it done as swiftly and efficiently as possible, allowing them to move on to the next project?

I hold myself up as an example. I write at an extraordinarily fast pace. In one of my jobs — copywriter — part of the big sell is just how efficient I am. Not only do I beat most deadlines, I have less billable hours. Do the people who hire me really want me to dedicate forty hours to work that only takes me fifteen? Would they prefer to trap me in an office, where I work far less efficiently? Or let me work independently (or, of course, cowork)?

Beyond my opinion, there’s plenty of research to back up the idea that a flextime worker can be a highly efficient worker. Here’s just one study about the Seattle Housing Authority’s (SHA) great success with their program. And it doesn’t just help the workers, it helps the clients, too. To cite just one point made in the study, having workers coming in at non-traditional hours allows “SHA to be more agile in responding to emergencies related to its residents and housing units, because it has staff to call on for more hours of the day.”

So Ohio? Good luck. But I’m guessing it won’t be long before you realize the error of your ways.

“I work in loud music — hard-rock stuff like AC/DC, Guns ‘n Roses, and Metallica have always been particular favorites.” – Stephen King

Stephen King isn’t alone in preferring high volume accompaniment to his writing. Pulitzer Prize winning novelist Michael Chabon also is rumored to crank it up while cranking it out.

“Noise” and “quiet” are, of course, all about perspective. You might hear a leaf blower and wish an anvil to fall, cartoon-like, upon it because until it’s silenced you know you’ll never get any work done. Someone else might easily tune it out. Someone particularly talented could perhaps even reframe the sound of the leaf blower to be some soothing crashing ocean waves.

Google the term work in silence” and you’ll get over 25,000 hits. Not as many as if you searched for Britney Spears or gummi worms, but still, nothing to sneeze at. A lot of people have strong opinions about what’s acceptable and what’s not when it comes to background noise while working.

How is it that some people can work, or even need to work, with the TV blaring, or the radio droning, or Modest Mouse cranked up to ten? And why is it that others need dead silence to produce?

Most importantly, what’s your definition of the right amount of background noise when it comes time to settle down and get stuff done? What do you like to hear? How loud do you like to hear it? Do your sound level needs vary based on the actual task at hand?

Time management is especially tricky for the self-employed—it’s so easy to get distracted—it’s not hard to see why Ferriss is generating a lot of buzz. But as the article suggests, it could be that the book isn’t leading to any real life changes. In fact, the 4 hour workweek could just be another escape fantasy for those who buy (and maybe even find the time to read) the book. Just as we buy cookbooks with complicated recipes we never get around to trying and diet books that promise hard bodies in a matter of weeks, Ferriss fans seeking Easy Street might be visiting Delusion Road.

Not that Ferriss doesn’t make some valid points about time consumption. He talks about what a time eater email can be — I have no argument there. Last week I sent out 170 emails. If each one took “only” an average of three minutes, that’s 8.5 hours. That’s a work day. That’s time I could’ve spent taking a class, visiting with friends, getting some damn exercise, or just sitting on my butt not doing email.

Ferriss uses his time saved to trot the globe, learn obscure skills like horseback archery, and hang out in restaurants. Bear in mind, though, the guy makes enough money from a company he pays other people to run that he can outsource his non-work related work, too— everything from answering emails to procuring online dates. So you might need to be pre-rich to afford a 4- hour workweek. Plus he counts speaking gigs (and the time spent preparing for them, I assume), going on a book tour, and being interviewed by the NYT for this recent article “evangelism,” not “work,” which opens up that whole What Is Work vs What Is Play can of worms I’ll address another time.

Perhaps Ferriss’s true key to relaxing—and apparently the key to earning admirers who think they wish they had more time—is that he’s actually willing to make time to play. If you think about it, some of the folks seeking Ferriss out as a guru could probably afford to up and quit their jobs and have a zero-hour workweek, and live off the interest of money already in the bank.

Therein lies the rub. You can say you wish you had more time. But maybe the thrill is in the work. All play and no work can, in my experience, make for a boring existence pretty quickly. We all need a little friction, some exciting challenge to tackle. Which is why I’m leaving the fantasy of the 4 hour workweek to others.