Sitting here in my room well past midnight, I am typing in this article. This is the time I have consciously chosen to work because I can think more clearly without the clutter and noise of the day. There are no phone calls dividing my attention and no calls to the table at meal times. The day is done yet my work has officially begun.

However, the only reason I can afford this luxury of choosing my own time of the day to work is because I work from home. I am not bound to a particular office computer where I must sit and work. Nor do I have to worry about waking up at seven in the morning and trudging off to office at eight thirty to be back home not before half past five. And with newspaper offices, the timings tend to get a bit wonky.

With the rise of the Internet and email, modern life has taken a new twist. Conceptual realities have changed and societies have been altered by the shift in practical realities. With this new face of communication, work and study patterns have also been affected. In this complex age, where specialisation is the mantra, there is increased pressure at work and study levels in terms of an individual's performance.

As large family units are dissipating and societies grow more and more individualistic, the number of responsibilities of a person have increased manifold. An individual must now depend upon himself for a great number of things. Bachelors working abroad and living by themselves have to cook and clean for themselves, while they earn a living too. Married couples need to look after their children.

Efficient time-management and multi-tasking have become the need of the hour. A person needs to divide his or her time between home and family, work and friends, personal time and social time as efficiently as possible. This requirement has led to a paradigm shift in social realities. An increased number of people have started working from home.

"As the traffic gets heavier on the roads, working from home has its own benefits. One does not waste time commuting," says Sarfraz Ali who works as a consultant for financial institutions. "You can spend more time with family and still get the same amount of work done if not more." Mr Ali spent most of his life being a banker. After retirement, he had no definite plans until he started consultancy as something he could work at from home.

Different strokes for different folks. Faisal Hussain, a 31 year old bachelor who works as a marketing consultant in Washington DC, holds that working from home has given him the luxury of getting his cooking and cleaning done on a timelier basis. "Getting a chance to work from home has been a blessing for me," he says. "It allows me to multi-task and manages my time more efficiently. I can cook and get up to eat while preparing a presentation. I can drive to the dry cleaner and pick up my clothes whenever I want to. It has really helped in bringing down my stress level. I do not constantly have to battle heavy traffic and I can cut through all the unnecessary office politics and get down straight to work."

One may wonder if working from home actually cuts down stress level. Although it may seem like a wonderful opportunity to be able to work and baby sit your children at the same time but then these professionals often experience what is known as loss of personal time. They have difficulties defining home time and work time. In situations like these, there are two extreme cases; either people end up working almost at all times or they get lazy and start procrastinating.

They also appear to fall out of touch with current trade trends and run a high risk of losing the ability to work together in a team. It's an opportunity cost you pay for running a risk of becoming isolated in terms of developing new contacts or getting acquainted with new technology and learning about the latest tricks of the trade. Again staying at home, one also tends to miss the sense of camaraderie that develops with the colleagues in office and the adult conversation that is part of everyday life at the office. One may talk about games, politics, world affairs, or even discuss work, a privilege which stay-at-home professionals do not have.

Despite these serious drawbacks, why is it that an increasing number of lawyers, architects, illustrators, marketing executives, consultants and even journalists prefer to work from home?

"Well, apart from the fact that I have stopped losing time while commuting to my work-place, or trying to find a parking spot, the good thing about working out of my house is that I have specific tasks assigned to me which I am responsible for. There is no chance of getting entangled in odd jobs at the office that one ends up doing just because someone else conveniently looked over it," says Faisal. "Again I do not have to worry about small things like not going to office if I am sick."

Saleha Alvi is a homemaker living in Chicago with two young daughters, aged 8 and 5. She owns an online store selling Pakistani export items to Western buyers. Her website has picked up in the last few months and she has had to travel to Pakistan on a more frequent basis until she can regulate her shipping system. "In this manner," says Saleha, "neither do I feel like I am ignoring my children, nor do I feel that I need to do something more substantial with my time. This online facility has balanced my life out perfectly."

The role of economics is not to be ignored in bringing out this change in social realities. The buzzword is 'outsourcing'. As the labour in the West gets more expensive, technical work like software developing is being outsourced to Asian markets. Nowadays, it is most common for a programme designer to sit at home on his computer, design a programme, email it across and then confirm receipt of his email using a VOIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) telephone service. Now this is what is called changing lives.

The year 2006 witnessed a mountain load of business conducted via technology based services. Billions of dollars worth of products such as DVDs, portable music players, personal designer accessories were bought through online shopping sites such as Amazon and eBay, with levels reaching a frenzied peak with the Christmas and New Year period. Online gaming has become big business, with competitions attracting gamers from allover with prize money of around $ 50,000. In all this global hype of personal technology based business activity, Pakistan has been slow to catch up. Its been in only the last couple of years that alternative business practices have emerged as a result of the proliferation of consumer technologies such as cell phones, portable computers and access to high-speed internet.

Traditionally, there used to be only a handful of career options for a nascent professional, with ones such as medicine, engineering and business management commanding the most appeal. The transition from an academic to a professional phase in life was usually a mundane and typical process, one that involved a hit or miss approach. The flow of income was entirely through corporate, desk-based jobs that entailed putting in the daily grind. Correspondence with the potential employment offering companies was a slow, long winded process based on snail paced mail. Hopefuls would spend their waking hours waiting by the phone, praying that the next call would enable them to get recruited for their dream job. The introduction of the internet and cellular phone services in Pakistan in the early nineties enabled only limited personal communication due to slow networks and high tariffs. Even as the decade approached an end, the usage of such technologies had progressed little past the e-mail, chatting and the occasional call to and from cellular phones.

It wasn't until the hooking up of Pakistan with the rest of the world via a fiber optic link that network bandwidth was enhanced and broadband internet became a viable option over the conventional dial-up access. With the establishing of the Pakistan Internet Exchange (PIE) the following year and the subsidizing of internet tariffs, web based commerce became a reality. Information Technology (IT) was acknowledged at an official level and a related industry was promoted by the Government of Pakistan (GoP). Software development companies were the first to become operational, many often as start-ups by students graduating with Computer Science degrees. These fresh programmers started offering business-management solutions with their virtual products to clients all over the world at rates much lower than the market average. Individuals without the resources to form such firms have been taking advantage of portals such as Rent-A-Coder to sign on to projects by bidding the lowest for preparing customized software.

Companies based in North America and Europe had started to offshore their customer support services, especially to regions of South Asia due to the low labour costs, even that of skilled in this case. Call centers soon started to mushroom all across Pakistan, with the target workforce mostly consisting of eager teens fluent in English and wanting to make a quick buck. With high speed internet connections in the hands of the domestic user, either cable based or over telephone networks utilizing DSL technology, such customer support could now be delivered in the comfort of one's home. People with physical disabilities, housewives or girls with restrictions on office based employment and those with conveyance problems especially are able to benefit with this alternative form of employment. Aspiring teachers can now avail services of sites such as Tutors Without Limits coupled with voice communication tools such as Skype to coach students anywhere in the world. The option to set one's own available times, subject fields, especially rates has prompted Pakistani based teachers to offer their services for fees three or four times less than those asked for by their international counterparts. Unfortunately, the government of Pakistan has created many hurdles by deeming products such as Skype illegal, especially as by making calls to phones, the state-run PTCL had been losing revenue.

Trading in stocks has always been perceived as a messy business, with scenes of hysterical brokers swapping shares amid a tumult of activity. Investors used to be hesitant in frequent buying and selling as it required long hours spent at the venue of the stock exchange, constantly monitoring the changing rates. The only feasible option was to either hold onto one's shares for an extended period or sell whenever the average price of the share was above the buying one. But this way would one would miss out on the opportunity of selling at peak levels during the day to day trading. However, since the past three or four years, trading in the Karachi Stock Exchange (KSE) has come within the reach of the domestic investor. A leading brokerage house initially launched an online portal providing a complete solution to one's trading concerns. Real-time states regarding one's portfolio and market rates are available to enable the retail investor to make a quick judgment and if needed, an instant execution of a transaction. Furthermore, the investor can now glance at the market rates whenever and wherever the need be on a cell phone based application that exploits the GPRS and EDGE networks. Usman, a student of B.Sc. actively uses his mobile phone and laptop with Wi-Fi (wireless internet access) capability to make and carryout trading decisions on campus. "I simply marvel at the way that I can give attention to my studies while simultaneously making money. What's more exciting is that I am able to apply economics and finance principles learnt in my courses in a real-world environment and get instant results!"

Our society is slowly but surely becoming techno savvy, though there is a lack of really novel uses of technology at the individual level. Scenarios in other countries are turning more and more into like those out of a science fiction novel; what with planes and cars being developed to be operated without human input, the most likely cause of disasters, and instead by satellite based navigation systems. The government cannot keep on shutting out new technologies that empower people, just because certain monopolies are being threatened. It is only by embracing and understanding advances in science that the masses undergo true progress and societal evolution.