Like a growing number of people, Shannon Bryant long dreamed of working from home. Stuck in traffic commuting for more than an hour a day, wishing for more personal time, she hated "feeling like I was in the rat race," says Ms. Bryant, a health-care consultant. But she hadn't a clue how to ask her boss for a change.

She found help in an unexpected place: the Internet. On a friend's advice, she searched Web sites on job flexibility and found a template for a telecommuting proposal to hand to her boss. After some homework and preparation, she presented the proposal and won approval. She's now seven weeks into her new work-at-home setup, and it's going well.

More than half the work force wishes for some kind of change in their hours on the job, according to research by the Families and Work Institute, New York. But from the perspective of many wannabes, as the old saying goes, you can't get there from here. Unless your employer is among a minority that has adopted and truly embraces clear, fair alternative-work policies, surmounting obstacles to changing your work setup can be a mystifying challenge.

It's the most common topic in questions I get from readers. It's also one reason fewer than one-third of full-time U.S. workers are on flexible schedules.

The Internet has the potential to change all that. If you know where to look online, you can find some of the best strategies that have come out of more than a decade of flexibility research and practice. Templates for a detailed written proposal, background on the business reasons for offering flexibility, Q&A;'s by experts and even a screening test to help you figure out whether you're suited to work independently, can all be found on the Web.

There are plenty of other things you'll need that you can't find online. You'll need goodwill with your bosses, earned through hard work, and a good track record on the job to lend your proposal credibility. You'll also need a fundamental understanding of the objectives of your business, to show how your proposed new setup will serve its needs.

You may need lots of patience. One customer-service manager I've corresponded with labored for two years to get her employer's approval for job-sharing, as her boss's bosses dithered over such steps as adjusting health benefits. By practicing perseverance, she eventually got approval.

You also need courage. If you work in a rigid culture, you risk being written off as uncommitted, or consigned to somebody's layoff list, if you ask for an oddball work setup -- no matter how skillfully you ask. Though Ms. Bryant knew she had the work ethic to be a successful telecommuter, she didn't muster the courage to propose it until she and her husband decided to move to another state for his work, forcing her to either quit or work from home.

Those obstacles aside, the Internet can jump-start any flexible-work plan. AJ Marston, a grant writer in Southern California, says, "I started out completely clueless" about how to morph from a full-time office job to the part-time telecommuting lifestyle she wanted. She found www.workingfromanywhere.org, a site run by the International Telework Association & Council, a telecom industry research and advocacy group. By clicking on "Resources-ITAC Resources," she found statistics and workshop presentations in support of telework -- a catch-all term for working from anywhere, including home. Under "Resources-Career," she found links to other useful sites. All were helpful as she proposed and successfully negotiated for the change she wanted. "The Internet is an invaluable tool," Ms. Marston says.

The best all-around Web site is www.workoptions.com, by flexibility coach Pat Katepoo of Kaneohe, Hawaii. Ms. Katepoo covers the bases for employees on four options -- part-time hours, a compressed workweek, job-sharing and telecommuting. The site lays out some excellent homework for wannabes, with checklists of things to do before approaching the boss. This includes boning up on workplace policies and precedents, such as finding out whether others have been granted schedule changes and how they worked out.

While proposal-writing exercises and tips are free on the site, templates for 30- to 40-page written proposals cost $29.95 each; Ms. Bryant purchased the one on telecommuting.

A couple of other Web sites provide ammunition for pressing a change. Work & Family Connection, Minnetonka, Minn., offers news on how flexibility benefits employers; click on "Support for the Business Case" at www.workfamily.com.

If you'd like to know whether you're temperamentally suited for working at home, two sites can help you do a self-test. At AT&T;'s Web site, www.att.com, click on "Telework Guide" in the A-to-Z Index, then on "Getting Started." Another good self-quiz can be found at a site by Joanne Pratt, a Dallas consultant, www.joannepratt.com; here, click on "wannabes."

All this may seem like a lot of homework, but it can pay off. Kristin Scharfen's vice president was against her part-time telecommuting plan when her immediate boss first mentioned it to him. "He was kind of shoving her out the door, saying, 'That's not going to work,' " recalls Ms. Scharfen, a program manager who lives in Missouri. But after her boss handed him her well-documented written proposal, based on a template she found online, "he came back and said it was the most impressive proposal he'd seen, and that given the time I'd put into it, we ought to give it a try," Ms. Scharfen says.