14 ms·

What changes when you work outside an office?

47 points by koide 6y ago

digitalsushi 6y ago
My employer, a fortune 100, has had a 100% work from home since late February or early March, and it has been a diverse experience for the thousands of us reporting in each day, week, and month. I consider myself very lucky that my wife, also in IT at another large company, had the same work from home requirement and so although we have been a social island, we haven't been isolated because of each other's company. We share a spare bedroom, already equipped with comfortable tanker desks and large monitors, and as such had already superior workstations than those back at our corporate offices. We do have timing collisions for stand up, retros, et cetera but in general it's less than 5% of the time so we just try to be quiet when the other is doing a demo. For work-home balance, I would say the balance is largely lost, but that as an overall, the experience is still improved. I find it is much easier to work earlier, and later, hours, but to take larger spans of downtime during what was previously our core hours. So I might find myself writing code at 10pm, but because that tends to happen only when it is a good fit, it's still an improvement. But 9 or 10 months is not enough time to really know that it's going to last long-term. If I allow the work-home imbalance to solidify, what longer term effects will I come to regret?
- ghaff 6y ago
  For work-home balance, I would say the balance is largely lost, but that as an overall, the experience is still improved. I find it is much easier to work earlier, and later, hours, but to take larger spans of downtime during what was previously our core hours. Yeah, you need some degree of discipline and that discipline may be to establish fairly fixed working hours. I do up to a point. On the other hand, I don't have any trouble running out to do errands for an hour on the one hand. And checking email or something else relatively quick in the evening on the other.
  - maccard 6y ago
    I know it sounds silly, but I've started setting timers for 2 hour blocks in the day, and I try to just hit 4-ish of them per day. If I hit 3, that's ok. if I hit 3 3 or 4 days in a row, I need to look into it!
    - ghaff 6y ago
      Whatever works for you! Some people absolutely benefit by having more structure. Others are fine without it.
  - nucleardog 6y ago
    > For work-home balance, I would say the balance is largely lost, but that as an overall, the experience is still improved You say the balance is lost, but then go on to describe what I'd consider a great work-life balance. There's never going to be complete equilibrium, but when work and life can both push and pull, then I'd describe that as balance. Moving away from "this chunk of hours is for work" and "this chunk of hours is for not-work" to "hit a general target of X hours of work over the course of a week" but allowing that time to ebb and flow as work and life demand it seems much more balanced to me.
    - ghaff 6y ago
      Separation would probably be a better term in my case. "Balance" as I used it doesn't really make sense :-)
- alisonkisk 6y ago
  2 well-paying jobs with no kids and no commute, you are living the dream of personal comfort.
- at-fates-hands 6y ago
  >> My employer, a fortune 100, has had a 100% work from home since late February or early March The experience with my current employer (fortune 500) has been all over the map: First it was: "Stay home if you don't feel safe, otherwise, you should be at the office." Then it was: "Yeah, we're going full WFH for a few months." Then it was: "We going to start transitioning back to the office - we're going to have 2 week shifts. 2 weeks in the office, then 2 weeks out." nobody showed up anyways, which apparently raised the ire of the executive teams since they were doing badge reports and they reports were really bad Then it was: "Yeah, you know that 2 two week shift idea? Forget it, we need everybody back in the office, effective immediately." This came down from the CEO. The middle management and executive teams were not cool with that idea, so they told their team members only come in if you want to, otherwise, stay at home - regardless of what the CEO says. Right now, with this new surge, there hasn't been any new mandate(s) coming down. People are out of the office full time and nobody I've spoken to has any desire to go back into the office to work or wear a mask the entire time they're working. The company recently sold two of their buildings to an out of state real estate company. I'm assuming it was a cost cutting decision since the company has about a dozen buildings they own in the city. I would think a lot of companies would start doing this as well. Having a huge overhead for real estate you're not using isn't good for the bottom line.
- gwbas1c 6y ago
  > But 9 or 10 months is not enough time to really know that it's going to last long-term. If I allow the work-home imbalance to solidify, what longer term effects will I come to regret? Look at what happened to Yahoo and Intel. After allowing very liberal work for home policies for decades, some people caught on and figured out how to slack off and milk the nice paycheck and benefits. Then Intel and Yahoo cracked down.
  - fartcannon 6y ago
    And now they're better than ever, right? ... Wait.
    - gwbas1c 6y ago
      HA! I should have mentioned that in my post where someone was asking why Intel was going downhill. Worth reading the full thread at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25187136 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25187136 > I worked for Intel for a few years, 2005-2007. It's hard to put into words what happened to Intel...
ogre_codes 6y ago
Misread this as being about working outside which is completely different (and IMO more interesting). I suspect by now most of us have a pretty good understanding of what happens when we are working remote.
irrational 6y ago
I get a lot more done working from home. No need to get up and get dressed and drive to/from work. I roll out of bed, turn on the computer and start working. Frankly the company is getting a lot more work out of me. Sometimes I'm stuck on a problem and I just need to get up and walk around and do something to clear my head. But, when I worked in the office I felt like I needed to always be seen either in a meeting or butt in chair. So I would often get stuck and just spin my wheels all day. Then I'd often figure out the solution in my head while walking to my car or driving home or sleeping on it. Now, working from home, I feel free to get up and walk around the block or go unload the dishwasher or whatever while my mind thinks about it. Again, the company gets much more useful work from me than they ever did when I worked in the office.
- Spearchucker 6y ago
  "...I felt like I needed to always be seen either in a meeting or butt in chair..." Yeah, norms. Like the expectation that employees remain signed into instant messaging apps. And the associated values where for example being signed in is construed as a sign of productivity. I worked as a financial services company like that once where I maxed out my annual bonus and got the highest raises because I was on top of messaging. From messaging in the bathroom, from bars, and for two days a hospital bed.
__jf__ 6y ago
Decibels. 35 at home, 55-60 at the (open) office.
- lawn 6y ago
  Before I started working remotely I worked in the same small room as my boss. He, as the only one in the office, had large speakers and liked to blast music all days. And when we had a meeting he turned up the volume. I tried to counteract this with noise cancelling headphones and music of my own, but sometimes you just have to have quiet to hear your own thoughts. The difference with having a completely quiet work environment is incredible.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
umvi 6y ago
I get both more and less done. More because the line between home and work is blurred and sometimes I find myself checking work email or responding to people on Teams at 8 pm. Less because the temptation to quickly check Facebook/HN/YouTube/News/etc. in between tasks is much higher now that there are zero physical coworkers around that might see my screen.
PragmaticPulp 6y ago
This article touches on some of the tradeoffs with remote work, which aren't one-size-fits-all. In my (pre-COVID) remote team management experience, the bigger problem was that new remote workers didn't really understand what working style suited them best. What people thought they wanted and what actually made them happy were two often two different things. For example, infinitely flexible work hours and asynchronous communication sounds like a dream come true to many people, especially introverted engineers. What could be better than doing whatever you want all day, then pulling some tickets out of the queue to work on in your spare time, at your leisure? Unfortunately, reality is often quite different. Most engineering work doesn't operate like an assembly line with Jira tickets coming out of the Project Management conveyor belt and into the Engineering Department to be quietly transformed into features. This quickly becomes obvious after cumulative months of delays from ping ponging e-mails back and forth over the course of a week for something that could have been settled with a 1-hour video call. So now the work becomes a mix of flexible work hours punctuated by exhausting synchronous calls where everyone tries to compensate for working in different directions for the past few days. Younger engineers often also struggle with time management. When we had infinitely flexible hours, it was common for younger engineers to trickle in work for the the first part of the week and then scramble to pull late nights into Thursday and Friday to make up for procrastinating all week. I jokingly called it the "college schedule" because we've all been there before. One of the unspoken benefits of fixed, core work hours is that it's more likely to help people avoid procrastination cycles. Obviously not a miracle cure, but it's a step above free-form schedules. It can be hard to believe, but switching teams in this situation back to pre-determined core working hours can end up making everyone more happy. Few people will tell you that they want fixed working hours up front, but in my experience most people prefer it after trying it both ways. Teams can still be flexible for running errands, picking up kids from school, going to the gym, and so on. But having some core coordination hours will ease key communication issues. The difficult part as a manager is that you're not going to be able to convince people that they'll actually be better off with 4-6 fixed, overlapping core hours for the team up front. It's one of those things you need to experience both ways before you truly understand it.
Kiro 6y ago
My WFH routine is basically to just sit in the sofa all day watching movies or play videogames, lie about my progress in stand-ups and then pull an all-nighter before deadline to produce the expected results. Not that I was very productive in the office. About the same output but much less time-efficient since I had to sit there for 8 hours.
- maedla 6y ago
  hell yeah
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- PragmaticPulp 6y ago
  You joke, but this was more or less the default behavior we expected from average new hires on remote teams before COVID. I referred to it as the "college schedule" because a lot of new grads just continued their college procrastination habits right into remote work. People treated it like a group project where they know someone else will care enough about their grade to make sure the project succeeds. It doesn't take long before the high performers on those teams get sick of picking up the slack. The high performers move on to companies that care, while the team's output continues to decline as everyone pushes the boundaries of how little work they can get away with. Eventually management wonders why certain teams have so many people but so little output, "restructuring" occurs to trim the slackers, and the hiring cycle starts again to build the teams back up. Performance management is more important than ever when leading remote teams.
  - eng2prog 6y ago
    Wow this really explains why it seemed like people who were at a company for ~7 years seemed like such trash. The 30 year seniors were pretty good despite their ignorance of the world outside their company. The newbies have something to prove. And it takes about 10 years to have a recession... To cut the fat. Is there any disadvantage to being a "forever newbie" at companies? I learn sooo much when I change jobs. I can't imagine 7 years in 1 position is good for your career outside a chance at management.
WWLink 6y ago
I'm a little more open to taking a break from work to deal with household chores. On the other hand, I'm also a little more open to randomly taking a call outside of when I'd normally be in the office. Right now working from home is a bit different. For example, almost everyone I work with could also be working from home, so all of our meetings are online. That's a bit of a benefit. On the other hand, it's not possible to do most forms of in-real-life recreation right now (gyms/food/movies/social gatherings) because it's not safe. So stuff gets more stressful and boring than it would normally be.
kilbuz 6y ago
I've heard this sentiment from several friends: It's not working from home, it's living at work.
- eecks 6y ago
  Agreed, living at work during a pandemic. In my country I can't even go 5km from my home still. I am not loving WFH right now but with freedoms and the ability to see friends, family and get out at the weekend, I think I could.
- hinkley 6y ago
  Over the summer I suddenly found time to work on some exterior projects around the house. It ended up standing in place of the evening commute as providing a physical and psychological barrier between close of business and my personal evening time. Lock my work computer, go outside for a while, come back in. One of the things that has happened is I've hardly played a computer game in months, because I'd do that at the same desk I work at, and it's easier to lock the computer than to unplug it to plug my personal equipment back in. As fall progressed I started filling in some gaps in my outerwear and kept going. Now that the sun is down before I finish working, I'm anticipating some trouble.
heavyset_go 6y ago
I'm no longer putting myself at risk of dying or being injured in a statistically-likely automobile accident by commuting regularly.
engineer_22 6y ago
Sometimes the landscapers ask you to move.
asdff 6y ago
One thing I noticed is increased disengagement with work as this pandemic goes on. I really do have trouble focusing or caring really about this shapeless virtual world I make my money in click clacking on my laptop on my couch knowing there is a pile of dirty dishes sitting there in the next room.
tristor 6y ago
I've been working remotely for about 7 years, through 3 different employers. Here's what I've discovered: 1. I can focus better at home vs at the office. 2. Remote work gives me an opportunity to change my scenery (travel or just go to the park) while working to help inspire me. 3. My day-to-day activities are more flexible as long as I'm delivering, which means I can cook healthy meals at home, take a mid-day run, or go walk my dog. 4. No commute, means I can sleep longer and greatly reduces my daily stress level. Those are the upsides, but there's also downsides: 1. Much harder to build a rapport with people I work with, and I haven't developed any new adult friendships through work the way I did while I was in the office. There's no after-work crew who goes to dinner together or has game nights, like I did when I was in office. 2. Office politics is more difficult and more pointed, without the watercooler / hallway conversations, everything is a lot more pointed and direct and consequently also more difficult. You can't be as soft or subtle when you're remote, because everything necessitates a calendar invite and a video call. 3. I crave socialization outside of work more, while the opportunities to do so consequently dwindle. Traveling while working was a huge help, but COVID-19 killed that. Working actually from home means I'm starved for social interaction with other adults. Then there's the things that are just a reality of the situation, but could be good or bad depending on the person: 1. I'm responsible for ensuring I get things done and how I spend my time during the day. 2. I'm responsible for making sure my equipment is up to snuff and capable of meeting the rigors of my work cycle. 3. I'm responsible for ensuring that I communicate my progress, needs, and achievements to my boss, peers, and others within the company proactively, because they have less visibility into those things directly otherwise. 4. I have to be a better self-advocate. I've done some of my best work while remote, but it's all a matter of finding a way to "get into the groove", wherever I'm working. As long as you can stay motivated and focused, that's the environment you need to be working in whether it's at home, in an office, or in a coworking space.
- whichdan 6y ago
  "softness" is a word I've been using a lot, too. I absolutely miss the little bit of light-hearted conversation that happened when walking between meetings.

47 points by koide 6y ago

My employer, a fortune 100, has had a 100% work from home since late February or early March, and it has been a diverse experience for the thousands of us reporting in each day, week, and month. I consider myself very lucky that my wife, also in IT at another large company, had the same work from home requirement and so although we have been a social island, we haven't been isolated because of each other's company. We share a spare bedroom, already equipped with comfortable tanker desks and large monitors, and as such had already superior workstations than those back at our corporate offices. We do have timing collisions for stand up, retros, et cetera but in general it's less than 5% of the time so we just try to be quiet when the other is doing a demo. For work-home balance, I would say the balance is largely lost, but that as an overall, the experience is still improved. I find it is much easier to work earlier, and later, hours, but to take larger spans of downtime during what was previously our core hours. So I might find myself writing code at 10pm, but because that tends to happen only when it is a good fit, it's still an improvement. But 9 or 10 months is not enough time to really know that it's going to last long-term. If I allow the work-home imbalance to solidify, what longer term effects will I come to regret?

ghaff 6y ago
For work-home balance, I would say the balance is largely lost, but that as an overall, the experience is still improved. I find it is much easier to work earlier, and later, hours, but to take larger spans of downtime during what was previously our core hours. Yeah, you need some degree of discipline and that discipline may be to establish fairly fixed working hours. I do up to a point. On the other hand, I don't have any trouble running out to do errands for an hour on the one hand. And checking email or something else relatively quick in the evening on the other.
- maccard 6y ago
  I know it sounds silly, but I've started setting timers for 2 hour blocks in the day, and I try to just hit 4-ish of them per day. If I hit 3, that's ok. if I hit 3 3 or 4 days in a row, I need to look into it!
  - ghaff 6y ago
    Whatever works for you! Some people absolutely benefit by having more structure. Others are fine without it.
- nucleardog 6y ago
  > For work-home balance, I would say the balance is largely lost, but that as an overall, the experience is still improved You say the balance is lost, but then go on to describe what I'd consider a great work-life balance. There's never going to be complete equilibrium, but when work and life can both push and pull, then I'd describe that as balance. Moving away from "this chunk of hours is for work" and "this chunk of hours is for not-work" to "hit a general target of X hours of work over the course of a week" but allowing that time to ebb and flow as work and life demand it seems much more balanced to me.
  - ghaff 6y ago
    Separation would probably be a better term in my case. "Balance" as I used it doesn't really make sense :-)
alisonkisk 6y ago
2 well-paying jobs with no kids and no commute, you are living the dream of personal comfort.
at-fates-hands 6y ago
>> My employer, a fortune 100, has had a 100% work from home since late February or early March The experience with my current employer (fortune 500) has been all over the map: First it was: "Stay home if you don't feel safe, otherwise, you should be at the office." Then it was: "Yeah, we're going full WFH for a few months." Then it was: "We going to start transitioning back to the office - we're going to have 2 week shifts. 2 weeks in the office, then 2 weeks out." nobody showed up anyways, which apparently raised the ire of the executive teams since they were doing badge reports and they reports were really bad Then it was: "Yeah, you know that 2 two week shift idea? Forget it, we need everybody back in the office, effective immediately." This came down from the CEO. The middle management and executive teams were not cool with that idea, so they told their team members only come in if you want to, otherwise, stay at home - regardless of what the CEO says. Right now, with this new surge, there hasn't been any new mandate(s) coming down. People are out of the office full time and nobody I've spoken to has any desire to go back into the office to work or wear a mask the entire time they're working. The company recently sold two of their buildings to an out of state real estate company. I'm assuming it was a cost cutting decision since the company has about a dozen buildings they own in the city. I would think a lot of companies would start doing this as well. Having a huge overhead for real estate you're not using isn't good for the bottom line.
gwbas1c 6y ago
> But 9 or 10 months is not enough time to really know that it's going to last long-term. If I allow the work-home imbalance to solidify, what longer term effects will I come to regret? Look at what happened to Yahoo and Intel. After allowing very liberal work for home policies for decades, some people caught on and figured out how to slack off and milk the nice paycheck and benefits. Then Intel and Yahoo cracked down.
- fartcannon 6y ago
  And now they're better than ever, right? ... Wait.
  - gwbas1c 6y ago
    HA! I should have mentioned that in my post where someone was asking why Intel was going downhill. Worth reading the full thread at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25187136 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25187136 > I worked for Intel for a few years, 2005-2007. It's hard to put into words what happened to Intel...

ogre_codes 6y ago

Misread this as being about working outside which is completely different (and IMO more interesting). I suspect by now most of us have a pretty good understanding of what happens when we are working remote.

irrational 6y ago

I get a lot more done working from home. No need to get up and get dressed and drive to/from work. I roll out of bed, turn on the computer and start working. Frankly the company is getting a lot more work out of me. Sometimes I'm stuck on a problem and I just need to get up and walk around and do something to clear my head. But, when I worked in the office I felt like I needed to always be seen either in a meeting or butt in chair. So I would often get stuck and just spin my wheels all day. Then I'd often figure out the solution in my head while walking to my car or driving home or sleeping on it. Now, working from home, I feel free to get up and walk around the block or go unload the dishwasher or whatever while my mind thinks about it. Again, the company gets much more useful work from me than they ever did when I worked in the office.

Spearchucker 6y ago
"...I felt like I needed to always be seen either in a meeting or butt in chair..." Yeah, norms. Like the expectation that employees remain signed into instant messaging apps. And the associated values where for example being signed in is construed as a sign of productivity. I worked as a financial services company like that once where I maxed out my annual bonus and got the highest raises because I was on top of messaging. From messaging in the bathroom, from bars, and for two days a hospital bed.

__jf__ 6y ago

Decibels. 35 at home, 55-60 at the (open) office.

lawn 6y ago
Before I started working remotely I worked in the same small room as my boss. He, as the only one in the office, had large speakers and liked to blast music all days. And when we had a meeting he turned up the volume. I tried to counteract this with noise cancelling headphones and music of my own, but sometimes you just have to have quiet to hear your own thoughts. The difference with having a completely quiet work environment is incredible.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

umvi 6y ago

I get both more and less done. More because the line between home and work is blurred and sometimes I find myself checking work email or responding to people on Teams at 8 pm. Less because the temptation to quickly check Facebook/HN/YouTube/News/etc. in between tasks is much higher now that there are zero physical coworkers around that might see my screen.

PragmaticPulp 6y ago

This article touches on some of the tradeoffs with remote work, which aren't one-size-fits-all. In my (pre-COVID) remote team management experience, the bigger problem was that new remote workers didn't really understand what working style suited them best. What people thought they wanted and what actually made them happy were two often two different things. For example, infinitely flexible work hours and asynchronous communication sounds like a dream come true to many people, especially introverted engineers. What could be better than doing whatever you want all day, then pulling some tickets out of the queue to work on in your spare time, at your leisure? Unfortunately, reality is often quite different. Most engineering work doesn't operate like an assembly line with Jira tickets coming out of the Project Management conveyor belt and into the Engineering Department to be quietly transformed into features. This quickly becomes obvious after cumulative months of delays from ping ponging e-mails back and forth over the course of a week for something that could have been settled with a 1-hour video call. So now the work becomes a mix of flexible work hours punctuated by exhausting synchronous calls where everyone tries to compensate for working in different directions for the past few days. Younger engineers often also struggle with time management. When we had infinitely flexible hours, it was common for younger engineers to trickle in work for the the first part of the week and then scramble to pull late nights into Thursday and Friday to make up for procrastinating all week. I jokingly called it the "college schedule" because we've all been there before. One of the unspoken benefits of fixed, core work hours is that it's more likely to help people avoid procrastination cycles. Obviously not a miracle cure, but it's a step above free-form schedules. It can be hard to believe, but switching teams in this situation back to pre-determined core working hours can end up making everyone more happy. Few people will tell you that they want fixed working hours up front, but in my experience most people prefer it after trying it both ways. Teams can still be flexible for running errands, picking up kids from school, going to the gym, and so on. But having some core coordination hours will ease key communication issues. The difficult part as a manager is that you're not going to be able to convince people that they'll actually be better off with 4-6 fixed, overlapping core hours for the team up front. It's one of those things you need to experience both ways before you truly understand it.

Kiro 6y ago

My WFH routine is basically to just sit in the sofa all day watching movies or play videogames, lie about my progress in stand-ups and then pull an all-nighter before deadline to produce the expected results. Not that I was very productive in the office. About the same output but much less time-efficient since I had to sit there for 8 hours.

maedla 6y ago
hell yeah
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
PragmaticPulp 6y ago
You joke, but this was more or less the default behavior we expected from average new hires on remote teams before COVID. I referred to it as the "college schedule" because a lot of new grads just continued their college procrastination habits right into remote work. People treated it like a group project where they know someone else will care enough about their grade to make sure the project succeeds. It doesn't take long before the high performers on those teams get sick of picking up the slack. The high performers move on to companies that care, while the team's output continues to decline as everyone pushes the boundaries of how little work they can get away with. Eventually management wonders why certain teams have so many people but so little output, "restructuring" occurs to trim the slackers, and the hiring cycle starts again to build the teams back up. Performance management is more important than ever when leading remote teams.
- eng2prog 6y ago
  Wow this really explains why it seemed like people who were at a company for ~7 years seemed like such trash. The 30 year seniors were pretty good despite their ignorance of the world outside their company. The newbies have something to prove. And it takes about 10 years to have a recession... To cut the fat. Is there any disadvantage to being a "forever newbie" at companies? I learn sooo much when I change jobs. I can't imagine 7 years in 1 position is good for your career outside a chance at management.

WWLink 6y ago

I'm a little more open to taking a break from work to deal with household chores. On the other hand, I'm also a little more open to randomly taking a call outside of when I'd normally be in the office. Right now working from home is a bit different. For example, almost everyone I work with could also be working from home, so all of our meetings are online. That's a bit of a benefit. On the other hand, it's not possible to do most forms of in-real-life recreation right now (gyms/food/movies/social gatherings) because it's not safe. So stuff gets more stressful and boring than it would normally be.

kilbuz 6y ago

I've heard this sentiment from several friends: It's not working from home, it's living at work.

eecks 6y ago
Agreed, living at work during a pandemic. In my country I can't even go 5km from my home still. I am not loving WFH right now but with freedoms and the ability to see friends, family and get out at the weekend, I think I could.
hinkley 6y ago
Over the summer I suddenly found time to work on some exterior projects around the house. It ended up standing in place of the evening commute as providing a physical and psychological barrier between close of business and my personal evening time. Lock my work computer, go outside for a while, come back in. One of the things that has happened is I've hardly played a computer game in months, because I'd do that at the same desk I work at, and it's easier to lock the computer than to unplug it to plug my personal equipment back in. As fall progressed I started filling in some gaps in my outerwear and kept going. Now that the sun is down before I finish working, I'm anticipating some trouble.

heavyset_go 6y ago

I'm no longer putting myself at risk of dying or being injured in a statistically-likely automobile accident by commuting regularly.

engineer_22 6y ago

Sometimes the landscapers ask you to move.

asdff 6y ago

One thing I noticed is increased disengagement with work as this pandemic goes on. I really do have trouble focusing or caring really about this shapeless virtual world I make my money in click clacking on my laptop on my couch knowing there is a pile of dirty dishes sitting there in the next room.

tristor 6y ago

I've been working remotely for about 7 years, through 3 different employers. Here's what I've discovered: 1. I can focus better at home vs at the office. 2. Remote work gives me an opportunity to change my scenery (travel or just go to the park) while working to help inspire me. 3. My day-to-day activities are more flexible as long as I'm delivering, which means I can cook healthy meals at home, take a mid-day run, or go walk my dog. 4. No commute, means I can sleep longer and greatly reduces my daily stress level. Those are the upsides, but there's also downsides: 1. Much harder to build a rapport with people I work with, and I haven't developed any new adult friendships through work the way I did while I was in the office. There's no after-work crew who goes to dinner together or has game nights, like I did when I was in office. 2. Office politics is more difficult and more pointed, without the watercooler / hallway conversations, everything is a lot more pointed and direct and consequently also more difficult. You can't be as soft or subtle when you're remote, because everything necessitates a calendar invite and a video call. 3. I crave socialization outside of work more, while the opportunities to do so consequently dwindle. Traveling while working was a huge help, but COVID-19 killed that. Working actually from home means I'm starved for social interaction with other adults. Then there's the things that are just a reality of the situation, but could be good or bad depending on the person: 1. I'm responsible for ensuring I get things done and how I spend my time during the day. 2. I'm responsible for making sure my equipment is up to snuff and capable of meeting the rigors of my work cycle. 3. I'm responsible for ensuring that I communicate my progress, needs, and achievements to my boss, peers, and others within the company proactively, because they have less visibility into those things directly otherwise. 4. I have to be a better self-advocate. I've done some of my best work while remote, but it's all a matter of finding a way to "get into the groove", wherever I'm working. As long as you can stay motivated and focused, that's the environment you need to be working in whether it's at home, in an office, or in a coworking space.

whichdan 6y ago
"softness" is a word I've been using a lot, too. I absolutely miss the little bit of light-hearted conversation that happened when walking between meetings.