I'm far too busy to try working from home

According to a leading management consultant, in a decade's time, millions of workers will be at home, juggling their careers with caring for children and older relatives. In a decade's time? In our household, it's already happening. Turning his back on office life after a long career in magazines, my husband's "office" is now at the bottom of the garden, where he writes books, does brand consultancy, sorts out his ageing parents' bills, offers round-the-clock advice about his brother's errant love life, answers the door to blokes trying to get him to switch to npower and eats too many biscuits.

Did I mention looking after the toddler? No, that's because he doesn't, and how could he? Our nanny does, though if anything in the system fails, he is the one who picks up all the pieces.

Working from home has long been held up as a positive model for the future, and a panacea for any number of ills. But while it might be excellent for reducing your carbon footprint, what it is not always very good for is actually doing any work. High-speed broadband might enable you to ping your work to the office in less time than it takes to boil a kettle, but when it breaks down you are home alone, without the benefit of an IT team to kiss it better. Also, people are always calling "to pick your brains", in a way they wouldn't feel entitled to if you worked in an office with a boss breathing down your neck.

The survey claims the new home working will be less about a "work/life balance" and more about "work/life integration". Life certainly has a habit of integrating with work when you're at home but not in a productive way. The notion that the future is a utopia of home working where computers never break down, kids are never ill and robo-kettles fix you the perfect coffee would seem ridiculous.

To present working from home as any sort of solution to the twin challenges of young children and ageing parents that many families are beset by is naive, to say the least.

I suspect that childcare issues will be a picnic compared to the juggling abilities/financial clout we'll need to harness when our parents, all of whom live miles away, are too old to live prudently on their own. Working from home is not a synonym for working flexibly - and if we are to sail happily into the next 10 years, surely flexibility is what it's all about.