work during the pandemic - where are you at, mentally?

I thought I would hate working from home but it's actually really, really great

I'm personally at....

working at home - I just am too worn down to care right now and am phoning it in

mostly because...

1) I hear my mother working with my father in the house throughout the day and if she's having a difficult time with him and I'm teaching a class/can't break away, I feel bad that I can't help

2) I can't help but read the news throughout the day re: COVID, and even with a lot of it being positive, it keeps pulling my attention

3) teaching classes has become a logistical nightmare since the students all started working from home. our infrastructure was never properly built for this and we constantly have technical problems and people keep quitting.

4) part of my work engagement always required me having some kind of release outside of work hours and most of those are gone.

i'm doing well enough that nobody has noticed but I find myself feeling guilty that I'm not pulling weight.

unemployed, spend every day all day doing stuff that is basically work anyway, well apart from about 2 hours procrastinating on the internet.

lots of distractions but I probably get more done overall. it is really nice to be able to plug through and just listen to records all day. would love to go to a 50/50 split of home/office once this is all over.

working at home - I'm often distracted but doing my best

^^^

Somehow I was lucky enough to get a job during these times—it's an adjunct teaching gig that I probably couldn't have gotten in normal times, I'm teaching remotely at a university 80 miles away and the remoteness makes it possible. It's also my first solo teaching experience post-grad school, and not being in contact with students directly, unless they come to my Zoom office hours, is frankly awful. I'm frequently distracted by any number of other things around the house and as such end up working at least a little bit every day instead of getting my stuff done and moving on to other tasks like I would with in person instruction. I also feel incredibly lucky just to be in this position, with a partner who has been working from home for almost a year now and is mostly thriving in that arrangement.

I thought I would hate working from home but it's actually really, really great

I admit I never thought I'd hate it...and I don't, good lord I don't. It seriously has helped me rethink how I'll see out my plan-as-such for the remaining years of my work in general, good fortune willing.

I thought I would hate working from home but it's actually really, really great

― Hello Nice FBI Lady (DJP), Wednesday, February 17, 2021 10:51 AM bookmarkflaglink

I did too (I first started working from home in 2012).

with all things being normal, I realized I got more work done that way, but also things like doctor's appointments/etc are things you can do again since all you have to do is just make up the time later in the same day. emergencies easier to react to etc.

honestly this pandemic has added like 2 hours to our day which is huge when you have two small children. I get more sleep, I'm more productive, I have more time to myself, I'm not stressed all the time because every part of my day is micromanaged within 5 minutes. if not for everyone getting sick and dying I'd say this has been pretty nice!!

working at home, as productive as ever, very lucky that my kids are old enough that they don't need constant supervision/hassling to be present in online school, also I've sort of given up on resisting that they're gonna play minecraft or among us when they're not in school and I've just decided to be cool with that since they're playing with their friends and not internet strangers. We all have lunch together, it's nice. I would also agree with "I'm often distracted but doing my best" but that's equally true when I'm in the office so I think "as productive as ever" is my best answer!

You've missed out not working at home, or in an office or around other people - but still employed and getting paid.

like before this my wife got up at 6 because she's got an hour commute, I'd wake up at 6:45, get my son on the bus, drive my daughter to day care, go to work, work a few hours, eat a 15 minute lunch so I could catch my son getting dropped off at my house (they can't drop him off anywhere else), take HIM to day care, drive back to work, pick them up at 5:30, quickly prepare dinner before my wife gets back, eat, then spend exactly one (1) hour with my kids before starting the bedtime routine...

(xp) .. for doing nothing work-related, basically.

... much to the consternation of our bosses.

the removal of the commute in both directions is the best part.

i should also note my feelings have little to do with working from home, which I've done since 2012. but our business partners are WFH for the first time.

xxxxxxposts

You've missed out not working at home, or in an office or around other people - but still employed and getting paid.

― I'm Going to Bring a Watermelon to Mark Grout Tonight (Tom D.), Wednesday, February 17, 2021 4:08 PM (two minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

this is me. furloughed since april last year, except for 1 week back at work the beginning of november. think i'm basically unfit for work now i think, don't miss the 20% of my salary i'm no longer getting and it's been like early retirement on a good pension which is something my actual retirement is never gonna be.

I mostly work from home anyway but not being able to mix it up at all has taken a toll on my productivity. Then again, 95% of my job runs on self-motivation and induces a sense of irreversible alienation even without the added burden of a pandemic so this hasn’t been easy tbh but as a segue from grim stoicism into an even grimmer stoicism it’s worked wonders.

(xp) I'm guessing this isn't happening in the US, which is why it's not in option in the poll.

You've missed out not working at home, or in an office or around other people - but still employed and getting paid.

― I'm Going to Bring a Watermelon to Mark Grout Tonight (Tom D.), Wednesday, February 17, 2021 4:08 PM (two minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

this is me. furloughed since april last year, except for 1 week back at work the beginning of november. think i'm basically unfit for work now i think, don't miss the 20% of my salary i'm no longer getting and it's been like early retirement on a good pension which is something my actual retirement is never gonna be.

― oscar bravo, Wednesday, 17 February 2021 16:14 (one minute ago) bookmarkflaglink

This

I've been back and forth, having to go into work and then it gets locked down, then re-opened, then locked down etc. At the moment we're locked down, of course.

Yeah same, had a couple of months back in leading up to xmas. I'm really going to struggle when we reopen properly

The nice thing about working from home is that nobody can see you cry at your desk.

Generally it’s fine, just a lot atm.

<3

It's going to be weird going back to work. so many people I haven't seen, or spoken to in a year. It's pretty insane really.

I keep thinking it's like sailors in the olden days, going away for a year to sail round Cape Horn or something.

working at home - I'm often distracted but doing my best
working at home - I just am too worn down to care right now and am phoning it in

somewhere between these two

fuck work btw

I feel like I cycle through many of these. I worked from home already, but it's been harder than normal with lockdowns and cold weather shutting everyone in, and the greater uncertainty around everything. I'm getting some stuff done, though, reaching out when I feel like I'm floundering, and trying not to beat myself up when I have an off day. Have to remind myself that it's just work.

modest productivity gains balanced out with loneliness and despair

i love it, i'm more productive and my mental health is much improved. if i could go out and do things in the evenings it'd be even better, but i'll take it

I can't vote: supply teacher presently in limbo. When I am working, I was nervous at first, got to where I never thought about it after a couple of months, and now, when I return from just-lifted school closures, I expect to be nervous again because of these new variants.

ive been wfh for the last 5-6 years - my partner has been wfh for the pandemic and tbh i'm going to really miss it when shes back in the office, i dont miss the office or my coworkers a single iota, but its been extremely nice being able to see each other throughout the workday.

had a major & kind of insane change in my job duties that would have happened regardless of the pandemic but has been a major life stressor - without going into too much detail its involved going from completely solitary number crunching (to which im well-suited) to crunching numbers and occasionally connecting people in mental health crisis with with crisis teams (which i am, uh, not particularly experienced with, but learning how to swim.) so in that case its been very, very valuable for my own emotional health to have my partner close at hand for support.

xp to dan m: do you have enough leeway in your planning to replace class with one-on-one or small-group conferences every so often? I adjuncted for several years and experienced the same thing when I had to run a completely asynchronous online class one semester. I ended up holding a bunch of phone conferences that weren't in the original class plan, and it really helped with rapport and comprehension.

Both my courses were determined to be asynchronous before I was hired to teach them, so I've got no say in that aspect. I do get some students dropping in for face-to-face (via screen) time, which has been good, and I do have a series small group meetings baked into the schedule for later in the semester so I'm hopeful about that too.

Yeah, it was the same with mine, I couldn't actually change the schedule, so I'm not totally sure at this distance how I made time for the phone conferences, but I was really glad I did. I didn't think of it until late in the semester, though, and I ended up wishing I'd done it earlier.

Part of my problem is the students' collective motivation to do that sort of thing seems really low. I polled them during the first week about putting together in person meetings and the only ones who responded are the exact same ones coming to online office hours. The others don't seem to be bothered. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

working at home - I'm often distracted but doing my best

It's been an easier transition than I would've expected, as I assumed I'd be completely distracted (all my fun non-work stuff is right here! all the time!) and incapable of staying on task. I've been able to maintain the general quality of my work, though. It's definitely nice to not have to travel two hours every day, although I don't get even a fraction as much reading and writing done as I did on my commute.

I'm in a meeting right now. It's a nice change of pace to not have to even pretend that I'm paying attention to this dumb shit that doesn't pertain to my own job in the slightest.

Mentally speaking, I'm honestly a little worried about the eventual return to my workplace. Liiiiike, I don't want to have to go back to there. It's been very nice to not have to go to there.

media production industry means I'm on set and around people but we are all tested EXTREMELY often (good).

I have a job in production (this is extremely good and very lucky).

I have been given opportunities to use more of my unique skill sets and have 'made my own work' (I can do a lot of different tasks wrt tv production - usually you get pidgeonholed into specialization and I have managed not to, for the most part. This is the hustle part).

Crews have been skeleton-ized and we're still trying to do the same level/speed of production with 1/4 as many people/support units and all our vendors are doing the same. (not great and tiring)

At my usual peak I have something like twenty (20) clients and if ten (10) of them call me once a month I'm in great shape. Now I have one (1) client because all the others are either too small to promise modest safety measures (renting cleaned/wiped studio spaces or providing N95s, for example) or are extremely celebrity foreward (famous people are absolutely NOT travelling rn). (extremely bad and worrisome to project into the future)

Also I have a lot of teacher friends and I am SORRY for all you folks have been thru

super worn down, but not because of working from home or the pandemic, well not entirely ... just the fact that so many people are not working and have been unemployed for almost a year ... and I haven't had more than 4 days off in a row in ... 6 years.

mentally I am in a fucking pit tbh

I fucking hate my job and I hate everyone I work with

<3 Colonel Poo. know the feeling.

another thing that wore me down is from March of last year until.....January of this year, we were a level of busy we had never been in this role because people kept getting hired and quitting so we had to run like three classes to retain the people we'd normally get from two.

so when things slowed do, naturally.....the last thing my brain wants to do is accelerate back to that again.

I occasionally feel guilt of not being productive enough, then I remember the way the company milked me to death between 2014-2017 and caused me to lose my sanity to where I had to go see a therapist to help get rid of the panic attacks that had resurfaced regularly during that timeframe.

actually ... that's really insightful! Like, maybe that's part of why I feel like garbage? At the beginning of the pandemic (and for months on) I was in crisis-response mode having to learn a bunch of stuff and help clients navigate these new things, and then things slowed down a bit for the holidays, and now ... I don't want to accelerate back to that again, as you said?

More productive than ever, for two main reasons

i. I work better in a twice a day burst pattern of 11am-3ish and 6ish-7:30ish, which i can now do

ii. As you may be able to tell from the above hectic schedule, "as productive as ever" was never actually a breakneck pace

I'm as productive as ever, perhaps even more so
but p worn down with it

i was very much a burst pattern guy when I worked in implementation requirements.

there's only so long you can do that work each day without needing a break. but during those bursts, man would I get shit done.

do miss that job as it was closer to what I like doing, but the toxicity in that department is something I can never go back to.

and every time I've tried looking outside my company, they've offered me like....half or less of what i make now so lol

Now lets be clear those are ranges during which i am more able to knuckle down/concentrate, not my daily schedule

This may be a personal thing but solo concentration on text/work for longer than like an hour isn't in my wheelhouse anymore (tho i can spend all day in group/discussion activities and only feel more energised at the end of the day)

Great to hear nv

awesome, NV.

Ive been in and out of the mostly-deserted office in the past three weeks due to work that couldnt be done at home.

Like alfred, ive really enjoyed it, whether that be the change of routine, the movement itself or the environment

Might look to keep it up, i had thought that the guff about a mixed of wfh/office routine was nonsense but im finding otherwise

Thanks everybody

I'll probably be given the opportunity to work from home at some point but I live 20 minutes walk away and the walk and the routine of getting up and leaving the house is also really good for me so I'm happy coming in as long as I can

Yes, one of the things I miss most about not working is the walk there and back, which is the only exercise I had last year.

'Grats NV, that's excellent news!

I am very happy for you, NV! <3

was phoning it in a bit for the first few months of WFH but back to normal productivity now

i miss getting lunch at the office more than i do working at the office

Heh yep the coffee break stroll with me mate is badly missed, i am still going in on a friday for an hour at lunch to perform a socially distant version

This would have been a much more productive week had my internet not been down since Tuesday. This shit is fuuuuucked.

i've been smoking more than i was before the first lockdown anyway but again the meeting people in the smoking shelter vibe is a great part of being at work

i am definitely smoking fewer cigarettes, but that's a combination of not taking smoke breaks with colleagues and getting hit up for cigarettes by members of the general public

there was a point before the pandemic when we were having financial problems, and me and my fave work colleague thought of the fundraising strategy of basically standing outside smoking all day and selling cigarettes at 100% markup to passersby as there is heavy foot traffic where we work.

i think we had even come up with the idea of periodic trips across the Nevada border and buying a bunch of cartons at a time to take advantage of the way lower taxes on cigarettes there, so our profit margins could be even higher.

i have had bad thoughts about the social power of smoking that i'm too sober to iterate yet but also

the smoking shelter at work is definitely the place to tap into a lot of truth and gossip about what's going on

today i was fake smoking my pen a lot and thinking about taking up having a pipe but it's no good if you can't smoke one at your desk

I MEAN A TOBACCO PIPE

i remember when i was about to get fired from a job, and part of how I sensed it was coming was that my boss didn't want to take regular smoke breaks w/me the way we used to when I was in her good graces.

yeah smoke shelter is too intimate :/

too intimate for a Judas kiss i mean

in this case, i quit before they could fire me ... and it was a very very very good decision. i still care about the org, and my former boss, but i am much better off not working there.

too intimate for a Judas kiss i mean

― The Scampo Fell to Earth (Noodle Vague), Friday, February 19, 2021 12:19 PM (forty-two seconds ago)

oh indeed!

Sometimes I miss being a smoker but then I remember that it made me feel like utter shit and that I couldn't deal with the constant shortness of breath and the residual cough that would linger forever. I still light one up with a drink on occasion but the next day I immediately recall why it's a habit that I simply cannot sustain – even beyond the abstract and hence ineffective long-term threat of premature death. As a crutch to socialize with fellow self-destructees, it's totally classic tho.

smoking has all those ups and downs and yeah, i smoke skinny roll-ups and not many most days and don't get the worst of it mostly but i'm still on them for the love of the camaraderie as much as the addiction

Skinny roll-ups with a filter is about all I can stand these days, when the temptation arises. I've come to prefer the taste anyway tbh.

oh i don't like straights at all now, but even tho i can tell myself every cig has minimal impact, well, when you're sober you can't kid yourself right?

oh i don't like straights at all now

also "out of context" thread i'm good with this YR WELCOME

Doesn't count if that bit was posted for that very purpose imo.

it were an accident i swear

I was working from home for a couple of years pre pandemic so it wasn’t so much a change of routine. Same blend of productivity and procrastination. The differences have been moving from contract to permanent, which has changed things little and how I interact with other people, which has changed a lot.

The whole company went to home working last year and that has forced people to communicate better. I was previously the only person in my city so I’d miss out on a lot of what was going on in the Sydney and Brisbane offices. Now going on happens on slack. even though we still have offices people aren’t really using them as a place to go and work on a daily basis, they are using them as a place to do specific collaborations with others. We also hired a lot over the last year and neither of our offices are big enough to hold everyone on those cities simultaneously. We’re trying to work out what to do but it almost certainly be a place where everyone has their own desk. Most people are happy to keep working from home most of the week.

The exception has been some of the younger staff who have smaller apartments, roomates etc. They have also suffered the most from the lack of casual interaction, hearing the general buzz of what going on and the opportunities for learning that goes on in an office. I’ve been making sure that I spend more time with them on zoom, bring them into more meetings, drawing attention to stuff on slack etc.

As for me the bit that’s been getting me down is I haven’t seen any of my colleagues in person for a year. Typically we’d meet once a quarter as a team to plan out the next quarter and then individuals more adhoc so I’d probably see someone on average once a month. I really miss this and we’re the poorer for it.

We still have snap lockdowns, sporadic border closures and quarantine orders so travelling interstate is a bit of a minefield. I also have no real desire to visit an airport right now, but as quarantine workers get vaccinated, the outbreaks will hopefully diminish.

I've not done an honest day's work since 2011 but have started smoking again recently. I just have one cigarette every evening but I can feel the creeping nicotine addiction coming back again, it will only be a matter of time when I'm back to 10-20 a day if I don't nip in it in the bud while it is not too difficult. A friend has suggested I should take up vaping but it seems quite ridiculous.

My wife switched to vaping a few years ago and she's never looked back. It hasn't helped her quit, at least not yet, but it's the next best thing.

I'm almost tempted to try it, lol you can never have enough portable electronic devices to mess about with!

i've been working in an office around others for the entire duration of this pandemic and i've been numb to any anxiety or emotions in general for months now, feeling great

We never closed so I’ve been working onsite virtually the entire time & it’s stayed super busy (ito workload I mean, number of ppl around has gone up & down)

I’m used to it at this point, I’m sure workplace safety could be better but I don’t feel horribly unsafe (it was another story in the summer when we had a load of temps milling about). My immediate team has 3 other people in it, we are spread across several large labs tho and we wear masks when we have to work closely (a policy that was adopted very gradually lol). In the break room there might be 10 ppl unmasked (because eating) but spaced out. I get the bus in the morning & there are 2 other ppl onboard, and I walk the 4 miles back which takes me a little over an hour

Mentally idk, absolutely worn down like most ppl - it’s not the job really, which honestly just feels normal, but the fact that there’s nothing else *except* work (and being alone in my flat and sometimes going to the supermarket). I think this exacerbates what’s shit about work in general, being overworked and underpaid and how much of your life it takes up. I get in from work and am just shattered, eat dinner do a bit of reading and crash and then suddenly the alarm is going off again. I’m used to this being the case from harvest time to around March but at least in a normal year I occasionally go to the pub as well lol

So... other? I guess my productivity is about the same tbf

I'm at "working at home - I just am too worn down to care right now and am phoning it in" but that's mainly because I am really sick of my own job, if I liked it more I would be more engaged regardless of whether I'm in the office or not. I've spent most of the past two months applying for new jobs and interviewing, which has been tiresome and draining as well (seven hours of zoom interviews at this last place and they passed on me, almost completely killing my self confidence and esteem; but I have another interview somewhere else tomorrow). Financially the pandemic has been insanely good to us so I'm not complaining about that; spending less money, unemployment funds for my wife have allowed us to have a savings for the first time in a while.

The only thing I like about working from home is it makes it easier to hold down even a part-time job with chronic migraines. On days when I couldn't possibly go in to actual work I can still roll out of bed and power through the length of a class.

This is more or less where I'm at, except I haven't yet started applying to new jobs, for reasons

xp

that level of interview is just insane to me akm, sympathies on that for an ordeal

Yeah, that sounds brutal akm, I'm sorry. Good luck with your interview.

I've got to start applying for jobs very soon as well, because the subject I'm teaching is being phased out at the school I'm at. It was insanely hard last year because they canceled the job fairs, but now at least I have a toehold in the district I want to be in, so I'm hoping it will be slightly easier.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

what if you were at 4) before the pandemic

what if you were at 4) before the pandemic

I'm taking this as a purely hypothetical question. my take would be there's nowhere to go but 'up' or 'out' and both options have the potential to be a positive outcome.

nb: 4) = "I do zero work and it's a matter of time before I'm discovered"

11) trying to ignore the ledge

I took this week off and my gooood it felt good

"working in office/around other people - I do zero work and somehow nobody has noticed," but my impostor syndrome has been telling me this since I was 14.

i have found myself looking forward to weekends / bank holidays more than i used to, even if i do nothing with them.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

11) trying to ignore the ledge

Rude.

It's been hell year and a half working in the bowels of the information technology industry. Other than a few days here and there, I have been still on-site. It's always weird to see people who have not seen the office come in for the first time, they still have that "just out of the bubble" vision that I lost probably second week of April last year.

In general, my feelings on the past year is that the human race is mostly a bunch of a$$holes and I have wished many days for the sun to go supernova and blot this grease spot of a planet out of the heavens. I would rather spend a year detassaling corn in an endless July than re-live my last work year. At least when I had that gig the people I worked for seemed to have some regard that I was a human being and cared that I did not overheat and die in the fields.