Raise your hand if you thought we’d be here, five months after the COVID-19 outbreak in the States necessitated shutdowns and shelter-in-place orders. I sure didn’t.
When my company announced in mid-March that everyone would be working from home, I was convinced it would be for a few weeks. Mayyyybe through the month of April, but even that seemed outlandish.
And now, here we are. It’s been five months of working from home full-time and there’s no end in sight. Actually, everyone at my company has been so successful at working remotely that it’s prompted my company to look into having more flexible remote work opportunities. At this point, whenever things do return to “normal” (or whatever our normal will look like), I believe I can request to continue working from home full-time, which is really exciting for me.
Pre-COVID, I was going into the office four days a week with a work-from-home day once a week. I was very vocal to my supervisors about my desire for a more flexible work-from-home schedule—even one more remote day a week would have been acceptable to me! But what I desired most of all was the chance to experiment with full-time remote work. What would it look like for me? Would I even enjoy it? Would I need the structure of going into an office to work effectively?
I won’t lie: I was excited for the chance to experiment with a full-time remote work life. Of course, it was coming at a time when coffee shops were closed and I had to fully isolate myself from other people and I was freaking out about a global pandemic. These aren’t normal times. I couldn’t just meet up with a friend for lunch or hop over to a coffee shop to work for a change of scenery. I didn’t even have a desk to work at for the first month! I spent all of my time at home, only getting out for walks and my once-a-week trip to the grocery store. It wasn’t a true test of the remote work life. It was an experiment, for sure, but in a completely different scenario than I ever envisioned.
Working in an office is not the most ideal scenario for HSPs (highly sensitive people) and those with social anxiety, and I identify as both. The fluorescent lights are harsh on the senses, the constant conversation and people moving around are distracting, and making small talk with coworkers is anxiety-inducing. I made it work, but it wasn’t easy and caused a lot of internal anxiety.
That’s why working from home is so good for my soul. I can control my environment: the lighting, the smells, the temperature. I can work in complete silence (a necessity for me when I’m writing and editing) and don’t have to worry about the distraction of coworkers and other discussions happening around me. Sometimes I miss the camaraderie of working with other people, but let’s be honest, there were MANY days where I came in, did my job, and left without speaking to anyone.
Five months into this new work-from-home lifestyle and I am loving every second of it. I love the comfort of being at home all day and hanging out with my kitties. I love that I’ve eliminated the morning rush and can wake up 15 minutes before I’m supposed to log into work. I love not wearing makeup or doing my hair or wearing real clothes. I love the solitude and the quiet and the ability to work late into the night if I need to meet a deadline.
One part of my work-from-home lifestyle that I love the most is that I can take a short midday nap if I need to. I used to do this in my car on my lunch breaks (I even had a big pillow in my car that I could lean against the door!) on a regular basis, and now I just do it on my couch. 🙂 I only give myself an hour to nap, but that’s really all I need. While I always wake up groggy, it usually only takes me about 10 minutes to get my bearings. And then I feel energized and ready to tackle the rest of my to-do list. It’s such a luxury! I’m grateful that my supervisors are not micromanagers who check that I’m logged in and working from 8-5. They trust me to get the work done, and sometimes that means working a little later in the evening if I took a nap during the day. And I’m totally fine with that trade-off!
One of the things that’s been most interesting in this transition to full-time remote work has been finding the right work/life balance. I’ve never been someone who struggled with work/life balance. It’s just not in my personality to be laser-focused on work. I can leave work at work. I don’t check my email on the weekends. I never struggled with leaving the office at a normal time each evening. And then… I started working from home and staying at home. It became much easier to just pop online to check email or write a page or two on the weekend. I struggled with shutting down at a decent time and having a firm separation between work life and personal life. It’s so unlike me, but I guess that’s just what happens when your work life is at home. There’s no longer a delineation between your home and your office.
When all this first began, I recognized after the first week that I would need to invest in a desk and office chair. I was working from a bar stool at my kitchen island, which was just bad news bears for my back and my butt and my overall well-being. So for $100, I found a desk and an office chair through Walmart.com. A few months later, I invested in a second monitor, which has been the single best purchase I’ve made this year. It is a critical component of my work life, allowing me to be more productive and efficient and I honestly don’t know how I made it nearly four months without it. I set up a tiny workstation in my bedroom, right next to my bed, and it works for my needs right now but I’m hoping that my new apartment has a corner of the living room that I can use as a pseudo-office. Having my bedroom be the place where I sleep and work isn’t the best option, but it was the best I could do at the time.
All in all, I’m grateful for the ability to experiment with full-time remote work, although I wish it didn’t have to happen because of a global pandemic. Five months later and I’m feeling so happy with my work situation and curious to see how things may have changed (or stayed the same?) over the next five months.
I definitely did not think we would be WFH for so long. But it quickly became apparent that this arrangement would not end anytime soon as my company gave guidance a couple of months ago that our offices would be closed through at least year end. I have a hard time seeing us coming back in the first quarter of next year… maybe by mid-year we will be back? I think this has shown executive management that people CAN be productive WFH. My company was extremely against it before COVID. You could WFM on an as-needed basis, like if you had a dr appt or a sick kid. But you couldn’t WFH on a recurrent basis (like every Friday). But now they have said they have changed their view on things.
I think for me, a hybrid would be the best fit so maybe 2 days at home and 3 in the office? My job requires a lot of collaboration and dialogue with others so it is optimal for me to be in the office with other colleagues. But I don’t need to be there EVERYDAY and cutting out the commute and getting ready really saves me time.
I’ve definitely found myself working more hours at times and taking very few breaks. I always left the office at the same time because I had a bus to catch to get me to daycare in time. Phil does pick-up most of the time these days so I find that I will keep working well past when I would have stopped if I was in the office because there is nothing prompting me to stop working. I’ve also been more busy in the last 5 months than I had been in recent times! So I am trying to be better about making sure I go for a walk 3-4 days/week to break up the day.
I love the WFH lifestyle! It’s been the majority of my working life, and there are so many benefits. Obviously, now that I have a kiddo, it is also REALLY helpful in allowing me the flexibility to get her from school or keep her home with me. I’m glad it’s working out so well for you! Obviously, I wish it had happened under different circumstances, but it sounds like a real blessing for your work style and personality!
I definitely didn’t think we’d be working from home for so long, however, now it’s like I don’t anticipate us going back any time soon… I think I need to share my own post about the wfh life, but in short: I enjoy it (very much), I never thought it would be an option for me, but now that I had the experience, I really hope I can at least keep a hybrid schedule when we finally go back. I hope you’ll be able to continue wfh as well.
I wish I had a dedicated extra room for an office, my desk is set up in the living room (and with J being home all day, it can be a little “cramped”), but overall, we’lre making it work.
I am so glad you got a desk, chair + second monitor. I have two monitors too and they’re livesavers!
I was just thinking this weekend about how I have not been in our office since March! And you have to get special high-level permission to go in, or to go anywhere. I was already on a really liberal WAH schedule – 4 days a week at home, one in the office – but it feels strange not to have seen anyone in person for that long!
I hope your new place has a nook for an office too. It will be great to get your desk out of the bedroom!
I think the sneaky reason companies like WAH is because it blurs the starting and quitting times and they get employees who are “on” more than they were in the office. Have you found more balance with that? Since I have been doing it for so long, I am able to shut down when I get done at 4:00 (I usually work 6:30-4:00) and only check in for special circumstances.
I totally hear you on needing to concentrate! I do drawing reviews sometimes and I cannot do them on in-office days. I would have to reserve a meeting room for a whole day and that defeats the purpose of being in! We used to have the same face day each week, and I hope when we go back it can be more flexible to what works for each person.
It’s so interesting to me to read about how other people are adjusting (or have adjusted, I guess, by now) to working from home because, as you know, I’ve worked from home for over a decade now. This is sort of a weird thing to say, but the pandemic has me wondering whether certain aspects of my personality are indeed fundamentally related to my personality, or whether I’ve just worked from home fore a very long time & adapted accordingly?! My strange sleep schedules, my social anxiety, my perpetual struggle with work/life balance… maybe I’ve just been doing this for so long that they’ve become part of me?! When I watch new work-from-homers face similar challenges for the first time, I can’t help but wonder.