I’ve been staying up late, working into the wee hours, and all day on weekend days, crunching to get a project done. It’s got me thinking about working at home versus working at an office — and how the lines are blurring more and more. My own “work life” is tightly integrated into my “home life” so much so that our household is pretty unusual. But we are also illustrative of what may be a trend. A few years ago I wrote a column for The Christian Science Monitor about this:

As I rise in the early morning, I often imagine a farmhouse in a small, agricultural community, perhaps in Maine 80 years ago. This imaginary farm provides the means for the family’s getting by. The chickens give up eggs; the cows, milk; and the soil, vegetables. Well-tended, the farm generates income at market as well as sustenance at home. It is the economic engine of the family. All hands work at making it run.

Our own house is like that farm, updated for the early 21st century. Instead of milking the cows, I fire up my screen and scan the night’s e-mail. Instead of harvesting the turnips, my wife drafts a new report for a client. Instead of feeding the chickens, the kids could collate a mailing (admittedly a rare occurrence). All of this puts food on the table. And it all happens at home.

I know most people go off to work. But, ours is not some oddball approach to life. The way we live shares similarities with many of the people I see every day. On Sunday, I got a call from my dentist’s office asking to reschedule a Monday appointment. Where does one find help willing to make such a call on a Sunday? It’s the dentist’s spouse — they work together. My local barbershop is run by a husband and wife team who have a back room where their preteen kids spend lots of time. They wander back and forth between “work” and “home” all day long. I know more neighbors whose entire work life is focused at home than I do neighbors who go off on a daily commute. This is too small and idiosyncratic a sample to say there is a trend. But it’s clear that there are many households where “work” has taken on a different meaning, where the lines are blurred and the house itself seems to be the economic engine for the family.

As we hurtle into an uncertain future, it can feel as if we’re going back in time.

Xenophon, “history’s first professional writer” according to one classics professor, was born in Athens around 430 BC. His Oeconomicus is influential. It is a housekeeping manual, a discussion between the immortal Socrates and another man, concerning the best way to keep an estate. In this work, the two agree that it is “the business of the good economist to manage his own house or estate well.” It is from this household care manual that we get the word “economics.” It’s about the inflows and outflows that go into keeping a home. Seen this way, “home economics” is redundant: Economy is about the home to begin with.

The nature of work is changing, business pundits now tell us. Institutions shrink, businesses squeeze ever more cost out of operations, commutes get so long that it becomes a chump’s game. Increasingly people in the “economy” are trading the workaday world for the workaday-at-home world. As the new century began there were more than 18 million such entrepreneurs, according to the US Census.

Since I wrote that, it’s only gotten more that way. Even my friends who have “office” jobs are working at home half the time, and not because they are being driven by Scrooge but because that’s just their work style. Still other friends are starting up home-based entrepreneurial ventures. Another friend who is getting an online news venture off the ground spends what seems like most of her time working at a cafe.

As the economy sheds jobs at a rate of half a million per month, what will a “job” mean? Is this “home economics” just the province of so-called “knowledge workers?” Just think of all those people — ordinary folks, the Wal*Mart world — who have started businesses on eBay.

I wonder if it will see odd, eventually to go off and work at a place instead of work at home. That only the jobs that need a physical presence will be handled that way.

Or, will the pendulum swing back? I’ll confess: throughout my thriving home economics world, I regularly consider shifting and working at an office.