This article focuses on 'connected freelancers' as a category of teleworkers and examines the pressures placed on their workhome balance by their relationship with clients. Based on diaries, questionnaires and interviews, it reveals that, while connected freelancers do not generally work excessively long hours, they do work irregular hours. This is because 'work always wins' in a conflict with domestic commitments, a phenomenon the article dubs 'client colonisation'. Client colonisation was a source of anxiety for respondents, who found themselves continually thinking about the current and future projects on which their livelihoods depend. The article illustrates the porous ways in which they interleave work with non-work activities and contrasts traditional 'monochronic' forms of work with emerging 'polychronic' forms, which erode work-home boundaries. It concludes that a new model of work-one in which individual patterns of control over workhome balance are paramount-already coexists alongside traditional models but is still insufficiently socially understood and accepted.

It is accepted that teleworkers generally manage the balance between their home and working lives by establishing temporal and physical boundaries between the two along a continuum of role integration-segmentation. What is less understood is the nature of the relationship between temporal and physical boundaries, and how teleworkers control constituent elements of physical boundaries to secure their preferred location along the continuum. Based on 20 interviews with self-employed teleworkers, this article examines the ways in which successful control of time depends largely on the successful control of space. It investigates in particular how teleworkers attempt to control space by breaking it down into constituent elements involving equipment, activities and ambiance.