People seem to have a great urge to name everything. When I first began to explore ways of getting people out of their cars to go from home to a downtown workplace. I called the process telecommuting simply because it focused attention on stopping or reducing commuting by car. In 1973, when the grant came in from the National Science Foundation to actually set up and study this possibility, we formalized the term and added teleworking as a synonym. The tele- meaning distant in both cases: the work gets done without moving the workers to the workplace; only the information flows back and forth.

As time went on, and the concept kept evolving, we had a need to further specify what this tele-stuff was all about. Different names for it kept cropping up so I felt the need to define each term more explicitly in order to ensure that, in a conversation or other interchange, all parties were talking about the same thing. So, here’s the 2024.7 attempt, an update from my 2022 version, using my 1998 definitions^[1] as the base. [Note: the number of days worked in one of these modes may actually vary from week to  week; the numbers quoted are averages over a year.]

Distance working

ANY form of information working whereby the worker may only occasionally have contact with the principle office, communicating via any available technologies. This includes, but is not limited to, all of the forms listed below. Benjamin Franklin was a distance worker when he was negotiating with the French.

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