It took me six months and three grueling rounds of interviews with eleven people to land a nearly perfect job at one of America's most admired companies. Having worked so hard to get the job, which included dental, I swore to myself I'd never leave it.

So no one was more surprised than I when, six years later, I found myself wanting to do just that as I listened to Someone Important talk about how we were on track to sell 80,000 units of the company's newest product. The thought I don't care drifted into my consciousness so lazily that it took me a minute to notice it. I suspected that not caring probably wasn't good for me, and it definitely wasn't good for the company.

In all fairness, it wasn't really that I didn't care. It was that there was something I cared about more. Since I'd started at the company, I'd had two children. Even though I had switched to part time and had an enviable childcare situation--a sitter came into our home on days I worked--I couldn't shake the feeling that while my kids were fine, I was missing out.

I had a dream shortly thereafter. In it, I was wandering around a tony clothing store, unable to find exactly what I was looking for. After awhile, an executive from my company ushered me to a part of the store that housed large bolts of silk, linen, and fine wool. I interpreted the dream to mean that a nearly perfect job situation wasn't close enough; I'd need to take the raw materials and create a perfect one for myself.

Six months later, I quit and took my raw materials--my writing skills--with me. My idea of the perfect situation was this: Part-time work, and variable part time at that, from a home office.

An expert on telecommuting, Gil Gordon warns, "People greatly misjudge what's involved in working from home. They see only the glories of no commuting and of working in their p.j.s." My commute was already short and I've never been one to lounge about in pajamas. Rather, the "glories" that wooed me were "control of my time" and (the biggie) "more time." I would work, see my children, and have spare time, which I'd use to get control of the hurlin' closet, organize six boxes of family photos dating back 20 years, and bake batch after batch of cookies for my children. I had it all planned out.

Making peace with flexibility
You're probably expecting me to say I was wrong. But I wasn't, at least not about the big things. After six years of working from home, I do have more control over my time.

At first, it didn't seem that way. I had envisioned "daily flexibility," e.g., taking the kids to the beach during the day and working in the evening. In theory, I could write brochure copy for a client at night. In practice, however, when night arrives and I sit down at my desk, I'm driven to distraction by the thought of everyone else relaxing, winding down for the day. Sternly telling myself You've had your fun doesn't help. In addition, my best times of the day for working coincide with daylight hours. By my calculations, I am 97.3 percent less effective at work-related tasks during the evening than I am during the day. So, in spite of all that flexibility, I do what most office workers do: I work 8:00 to 5:00.

This frustrated me for the first several years. What was the use of working from home if I wasn't going to take advantage of the best benefit it offered? But over time, I saw a different, unexpected pattern emerging: seasonal flexibility. Now the kids and I go to the beach during the day a lot, but mostly during July and August. To make up for it, I work extra hard during the months they are in school.

Since I began this work arrangement, I also have more time. I work efficiently at home, where I find it much easier to get into the creative flow that's so elusive in a traditional office. But the hurlin' closet still isn't cleaned out and the photographs still aren't organized, even though I have the time now. And I hardly ever bake cookies.

What I realized (and it was a relief, in some ways) is that I don't much value clean closets or organized photos, at least not as much as I value reconnecting with nature by walking places I used to drive, reading to my kids for long stretches of time, even though they no longer need me to, and pushing myself to try new things, creatively.

Efficiency experts would probably call this "frittering time," but I think we've lost something if productivity is the only way we measure our lives. There's something to be said for how we do things, not just that we do them. The most efficient way for me to get a meal on the table is to prepare it by myself. But then my kids miss out on learning how to cook. More importantly, I miss out on hearing my daughter talk about how she found fur, vole bones, and insect exoskeletons in the owl pellet she dissected at school.

I don't get more done now, but I enjoy the things I do get done more, and at a pace that allows me to think great thoughts and wander down a few side streets, metaphorically speaking.

It's always something
Still, like my previous job situation, this one isn't perfect. Bringing work into the home is convenient because work is always there, but also a little dangerous. We all assume that the more parents are around, the better it is for the kids, but sometimes I wonder. If you work in an office at a company, you say "I'm not available" once a day to your kids, and that's when you leave for work in the morning. Working at home, however, means you say it multiple times--many more times than you say, "Yes, I can help you."

I worry my kids will someday end up in counseling, feeling that all they ever saw of me was the back of my head as I sat at the computer. In a Time magazine piece on the multi-tasking generation (March 27, 2006), Elinor Ochs, director of UCLA's Center on Everyday Lives of Families, says their research shows kids are so absorbed in their technology that they greet parents returning home from work only a third of the time. "We have so many videotapes of parents actually backing away, retreating from kids who are absorbed by whatever they are doing," Ochs says. It's a good reminder to myself, because what's true of kids who use electronics for pleasure might be equally true of adults who use them for work.

One night when I was tucking my son, then nine, into bed, I asked if he thought I was doing a good job of balancing work and life. "Not really," he said nonchalantly. My heart sank for a moment, but then he added, "I think you maybe spend too much time on us and not enough on work."

The freelance life hasn't played out exactly the way I thought it would. Because of who I am, I don't take full advantage of the flexibility, and I don't use the time I've found to clean up and clean out. But I can finally see that while less gets done, more gets accomplished. I can live with that.

Jill Johnson tries to remember that the best gift you can give anyone is your full attention.