National Work At Home Week – Profile from 2000.

MSN is celebrated “National Work At Home Week” with some profiles in 2000.

Here’s one I found interesting.

A Portland, Ore., man describes how the MSN network of content and services enables him to work more productively from home and on the road.

A typical day at the office for Chris Hanschka might begin in his bedroom and end in his 1998 Jeep Wrangler.

As a mobile home broker for one of the Pacific Northwest’s largest commercial real-estate management companies, Hanschka, 26, does nearly all of his work either from home or on the road. He purchases repossessed homes within the company’s 90-plus mobile home parks, arranges for the properties to be refurbished, and then locates new buyers for them.

“Most of my day is spent talking on the phone or sending email or going out to see people, so I decided I could be just as effective working out of my house as I would be in a cubicle at the company headquarters,” says Hanschka, who started the job in August and spent the first two weeks driving to work before persuading his boss to let him stay home. “I’m actually more productive now, because I don’t have to drive half an hour to get to my office or spend an hour going out to lunch every day.”

National Work at Home Week, which lasts through October 8, pays tribute to a rapidly growing group of U.S. workers such as Hanschka, who no longer punch the clock at a traditional place of business. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that 3.6 million workers were based at home in 1997, the last year for which figures are available, compared with 1.9 million in 1991. Another 21 million people performed at least some work for their primary job at home, and six out of every 10 at-home workers used a computer in their daily tasks.

The lifelines of Hanschka’s business are his personal computer, fax machine and Web-enabled cellular phone. He also relies on the MSN services from Microsoft to help him keep in touch with clients, colleagues and information throughout the day, regardless of whether he is sitting at his desk or driving along Interstate 5 to meet with a prospective home buyer 100 miles away. An MSN subscriber since 1996, Hanschka uses MSN to manage his email, track the performance of his stock portfolio, send instant messages to co-workers and generally streamline his active lifestyle.

“I work almost entirely outside of my office, so having access to all these services from MSN on my cell phone is a huge time savings for me,” Hanschka says. “I don’t have to wait at my desk for someone to call me or send me an important piece of mail, because MSN gives me multiple options for getting that information wherever and whenever I need it.”

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