Last April I wrote an overview of the design principles for hybrid teleworking (or WFH, if you insist). Here’s a more detailed set of how-to’s for designing hybrid teleworking, for both telemanagers and teleworkers. They are adapted from my 1998 book, Managing Telework and my years of training teleworkers and telemanagers.

Step 1. Rethinking work.

Think about your job; the collection of tasks you need to complete in order to meet the objectives of your work. Concentrate on the little tasks, rather than the SAVE The WORLD — by FRIDAY ones, the tasks that take only a portion of the day. These are scattered almost randomly throughout the week, right? In fact, to check this, try keeping a log of the tasks you perform over a period of a week or two. Make a list of them.

Now, examine each task and decide whether you can complete it by your self, possibly with some technological aids, or need to communicate with someone in order to fulfill the requirements. Do this for each of the tasks in your log. Also note how long each task takes to complete. Divide your task list into two parts: those you can do by yourself and those where you need to communicate with other people, or distant resources in specific locations. Add the task completion times for each of the two lists: solo and others.

You now have the basis for the work from home (or somewhere nearby) decision. Note that I haven’t mentioned timing yet. The big question is: can you lump all the solo tasks together so that they can be grouped into one or more 8-hour blocks (assuming a 40-hour work week)?

Now to that solo task list add all the ones from the communicate-with-others list IF the needed communication can be successful over the internet of other medium, leaving the only tasks where you need to have an in-person meeting. Now you have three lists: solo, internet and face-to-face. The first two of these lists define your potential work-from-home (WFH) time; the third list is likely your need-to-be-in-the-office. Group those into two: the WFH and the in-office tasks.

Step 2. Scheduling the hybrid

Now it’s time to see how much your lists can adapt to reality. How well does your design for hybrid teleworking work in practice? Since you generally need to work with others at some point, you jointly need to work out a schedule (or two or more) for your face-to-face meetings in the office. Depending on how big your working group is this may take some time. This is where the point of separating your work into tasks pays off. Tasks you normally would do on, say, Wednesdays can now be freed to some other time, depending on where they best fit in with all the rest of your tasks. You may even consider swapping tasks with your team members to maximize WFH time. This also increases the versatility of your work group.

For many people, the enforced WFH time offered plenty of occasions for testing various scheduling options. In case it didn’t, now is the time to try experimenting. As I said earlier (even years earlier), keep the nominal schedule as a model but understand that shifting external circumstances may require alterations from week to week. My experience over many organizations informs me that the optimal WFH schedule is about 3 days per week at home or office. Some, such as actuaries, may readily work from home full-time with no problems, Others, such as senior executives, may need to spend almost full time in an office somewhere. As information technology improves, the ability to work from anywhere, anytime increases.

If in doubt, go over the steps for rethinking work again.