Working From Home

working at home = dud for me. 6 mos. of freelancing for aol and i was ready to comit hara kiri with a letter opener.

Always got stuff done though - often at 9pm on the Sunday night when server traffic was quiet and my conscience was playing up.

working from home: classic
working from home when your flatmate has been made redundant and is mooching around the flat with his annoying boyfriend all day: DUD DUD DUD oh god just go awayyyyyyyyy

I twisted my knee playing football last night (that's why I'd stopped playing!), and couldn't walk properly today as a result, so I emailed in sick to work, and told them I had various things I'd do online and that I'd be available via email and my work mobile. As result I've actually been marked down as "home working" today rather than on sick leave.

This is the first time I've done this (although I do, if off sick or on leave, generally check work emails reasonably regularly - especially when I was off after my hernia operation for instance), and it's been surprisingly productive; I've organised as many if not more things as I would have done had I been in the office, sent a gazillion emails chasing various things, edited a load of copy, drafted some new web pages, AND had a nap and stroked the cats. And all while wearing a pair of shorts and a t-shirt that are full of holes and not fit to be seen in public.

i'm working from home today and it is fucking amazing.

-shouting abuse at co-workers who can't hear you in response to their emails
-singing along to records
-cooking your own lunch
-not bothering to pretend to work if there's a lull or you're done by 1600
-no commute obviously

I have been working from home for almost four years. I can only see advantages. If you're office based and you have Skype, Webex and so forth I really don't see any reason *not* to. The people who still insist on buying or renting huge energy consuming, Earth destroying office space (space which could be used so much more constructively, be it for housing, parkland or given back to nature) are truly behind the curve.

What I'm interested in -- and I'm interested to know if there has been research in these areas:

(a) Has anyone done serious calculations of how much energy we could save (inter)nationally if everyone who *could* work from home did so and secondly,

(b) from a sociological point of view, the focus has been on the negative ("you can't get to know/work properly with people who don't see and physically interract with, ergo groups of home working people are doomed to failure") but shouldn't we also consider the flipside, that home working allows for people to be judged on their true merits, rather than the ad hominem nasty stuff that comes to the fore when people have to share a space?

Heh, my wife just started doing this full-time and has liked it so far.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, a couple people at my office must have asked about the possibility because the partners sent out this really passive-aggressive email at the start of the year about how it will never be a possibility here because, basically, "it is impossible to believe that anyone could work productively out of their home". It was just laughably obnoxious and reductive about any possible benefits. (Of course, several months later one of the partners' favorites moved to Texas with her husband and was suddenly approved to work "remotely")

I don't ever want to do it

with my immunocompromised status and the virus terror, I may have to

BUT

the plantation I contract for, at a pitiful wage, uses a "VPN" that requires use of your

PHONE

which I do not have and do not want

fuck apps, fuck texts

is that app PingID?

no

Full time wfh since Oct 2012. Best thing ever. Makes work not suck. Def still look forward to the weekends but I no longer dread Monday. Limits my "advancement" options but I don't care; if I could maintain current position now thru retirement I'd be thrilled.

makes personal traveling mid-week possible. it's harder now that I changed roles, but when I was working in implementations, all they cared about is that I worked, not where I worked from, so sometimes I'd head out of town mid week and bring my laptop.

did manage to go to Vegas midweek last year because i had no classes that week

I’m starting to wonder whether spending £4500 a year on train tickets so I can commute to London, sit in an office and have web conferences with my colleagues and customers around the world is the most productive use of my time and money. The big problem with working from home ime is that it is much harder to put a cap on the day. I’m more likely to agree to 7pm meetings or answer emails at 10pm than I am if I have physically left my place of work.

Full time WFH since May 2015. It is definitely harder to put a cap on the day, though I don't really have meetings or emails to answer (I'm a web dev)

Its the job content itself as much as the WFH but I've changed around my perspective to not see work in terms of hours or blocks of time like this, but blocks of stuff that I need to have built by the end of the week or month. This means the delineation between own time and work time is more entwined. Mentally I'm kind of always at work but also never at work, I don't know if its better or not but I don't miss my 90 minute each way commute!

I feel a lot of the risk could have been mitigated if more organisations were better at actually allowing people to work staggered or different hours - fewer people on public transport at peak times, less crowding on train/tube platforms (can’t count the number of times I’ve been in a crush of a few hundred people waiting to get on a tube train) and management doesn’t have to pretend it cares about having a coherent wfh policy. My parents have never worked more than ten minutes from where they live and I envy them.

I feel a lot of the risk could have been mitigated if more organisations were better at actually allowing people to work staggered or different hours - fewer people on public transport at peak times, less crowding on train/tube platforms (can’t count the number of times I’ve been in a crush of a few hundred people waiting to get on a tube train) and management doesn’t have to pretend it cares about having a coherent wfh policy. My parents have never worked more than ten minutes from where they live and I envy them.

WFH today. Probably one of many. Technically I am a 'remote worker' anyway, having been made one about a year ago, but I still come into the office as it's about 10 mins cycle away. Frankly I've nowhere to work at home - I have a small desk in my room that's uncomfortable to sit at, and my sofa and kitchen table are no better.

been asked to supply emergency contact info at work in case of

lol

"adverse weather closing the office"

politics is the art of what cannot be said etc

The big problem with working from home ime is that it is much harder to put a cap on the day. I’m more likely to agree to 7pm meetings or answer emails at 10pm than I am if I have physically left my place of work.

We have a pretty flexible working culture with a lot of working from home and honestly it's great, but it only works if you're prepared to treat people like grown-ups. TBH I'd retain the same boundaries as you do in the office. I don't especially mind working a bit later if I'm not going to be commuting home, but if you do have a 7pm meeting what's to stop you taking a longer lunch break or similar. As long as you get the work done when you're supposed to, who cares?

International meetings make things harder, but one way psychologically to put a cap on the day is just to make a clean break by immediately doing something that absolutely says to yourself I Am Not At Work Any More. Cooking, opening a beer, playing a video game, whatever. If you just start tapering off it becomes very easy to get dragged back into it.

I'm a freelancer, about 80% of my work is on-site at various places, just had my first conversation this morning about an office shutdown, guessing that most everywhere else will follow, shit is going to get tight.

no wonder u ppl are on ilx all fucking day

Been WFH since 2017. Love it. Possibly starting a 9-5 office job on Monday, though, and not sure how I feel about that (besides “thanks for the money”)...

The lifeblood of ILX the entire internet is bored office workers, moreso without the office.

its a turning point in history

in a bad way

let's run all the megapolls we've been fantasising about

i hope office buildings empty out like suburban malls and are repurposed into affordable housing.

Does anyone do this with kids in the house? Seems kind of impossible without turning child into tv zombie

Looks like this will be me from next week, or even maybe tomorrow. My plan is to move to the conservatory and stock up on educational software / film downloads for them.

I cannot work with kids disturbing me, this is going to be hard.

turn child into book and board game zombie imo

my carrom board is finally gonna get some use, v excited to get good

i hope office buildings empty out like suburban malls and are repurposed into affordable housing.

― Yerac, Thursday, 12 March 2020 12:56 (ten minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

otm

I wish I could find that faux-pamphlet from a few years back about an office building gradually turning into an overgrown post-apocalyptic ecosystem

I've worked from home for almost 19 years. I expect it to all come crashing down around my ears any day now.

i don't maintain much of a social circle outside of work (mostly just my wife, my parents, and my cat) so I do think I benefit from the social aspects of coming into an office every day and interacting with people. i'm lucky in my position that I typically don't HAVE to do much interacting in any given day if I don't feel like it, but if I do then there are always people around who want to shoot the shit.

Does anyone do this with kids in the house? Seems kind of impossible without turning child into tv zombie

i do but there's always another carer around. she (child not carer) occasionally comes up to spin around on my chair but generally respects the sanctity of the office space.

that sanctity in full:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IKxqy9SJ-0I

Spare a thought for us poor sods who can't work from home, we're dead.

My first day of working at home. Not without its downsides, but I did watch an episode of Kojak during my lunch hour, and so without coronavirus I would possibly never known about this meeting of the titans

https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/images/reviews/190/1346970079_6.jpg

James: I am, Im in Brunswick and yeah we're all on lockdown now. Not that I left the house much to begin with lol.

Anyone not aware: my city has had a sudden large uptick in covid cases (well lol, large for us is "120" rather than "120,000" but you know).

So they have decreed we go back to stage 3 lockdown ie do not leave house at all unless for medical, to get groceries, or school/work where neccesary.

Americans would go mad.

xpost my old boss (who is in another dept) keeps on asking for me by name to train the classes that will be going to his teams, I have a feeling they're gonna try to bully me out of the PTO I have in the fall, but I'm holding firm on that shit. by August, esp if Florida is even more of a COVID cesspool by then, I'm gonna need massive decompression

So they have decreed we go back to stage 3 lockdown ie do not leave house at all unless for medical, to get groceries, or school/work where neccesary.

Americans would go mad.

heh -- in my part of America we were at that stage for 2 months at least ... it is weird to see/hear about all the other parts of the country that have gotten back to normal sooner and/or not been on lockdown at all ... but on topic, i had a skype meeting with a client this morning and I realized that on skype, no one can smell your sweat

drinking a beer while wfh for the first time. amazed it has taken almost 4 months

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/fb/30/4e/fb304edf610c07daaf0f3239722ab671.jpg

already become fully adjusted/used to having 2 extra hours in the day not spent preparing for/commuting to the office

already back to feeling like there aren't enough hours in the day, not getting enough sleep, not getting anything done, despite the 2 extra hours

it's definitely a me problem (depression/whatever) but the thought of going back to the office schedule and losing these 2 hours is a nightmare. i miss seeing coworkers in person and other things but not that much.

obviously there are more important things right now, this whole experience has just made me internalize how shitty the office schedule is and how much of a negative it is in my life

work days should be shorter. unfortunately the "most workers only do 4 hours of actual work in an 8 hour day" thing doesn't apply to what i do.

hard agree

I absolutely agree that for those of us doing this easily theres no logical reason why we should go back to wasting an extra 2 hrs of our day, and money on transport/adding to pollution, leaving house to work.

But yeah also agree I cant do less hours - part of my job includes being available on a fucking rostered phone number between 8.30 and 5.30 ugh

wish studs terkel was alive to opine about this

class of only 9 people, and 6 of them have major audio problems that have lasted over a day (as they always do at this site). 4 of them are outright not participating at all, requiring me to call on them to make sure they're actually here (and sometimes I catch them napping).

and my co-facilitator might as well be named Led Zeppelin because all she does is ramble on - 90 minutes over the allotted time for the *first lesson*, and the class is lost.

at this point i'm just happy for the paycheck, but the perfectionist in me hates this nonsense.

wait.. she talked for.. an HOUR AND A HALF too long??

maybe you could have told her, "it's time for you to go... the autumn moon lights your way"

yes. we were supposed to finish the section at like....4:45 pm Eastern yesterday. we started at 9:30 am this morning - still not done.

I had to basically tell her to remember to watch the clock, because this lesson is one of the easier ones. how long is she going to take on teh longer ones? meh.

glad others gave gotten to a ‘phone it in’ mindset. i’ve been getting really burnt out, overall i prefer WFH to commuting and sitting in an office but its been four months now. i sleep way too much and am still exhausted most days. doesnt hurt that i had a really positive performance review last week. gives me some justification to go easy on myself

By my lights there's no gray area. People have busy lives. You have to stick to the advertised time. If you're not done, it's your fault.

Feeling that post, gt. It's been 4 months. I'm hitting a wall. Pretty much everybody I know is.

I’m working quite literally harder than ever, don’t know what’s wrong with me

usually that would be my response to stressful times. in my old job, I could lose myself for hours in writing customer care reference materials, doing technical configuration, and it would take my mind off of things.

but training people in less than ideal conditions when half of them are just as distracted as I am, oi. This was a dream job for me in quiet times - but right now? I'm frankly amazed I actually worked up the energy to be frustrated with how bad it's going at the moment, that's an improvement I guess.

Yeah I dont understand why Im also so fucking tired all the time, but I assume its complete lack of exercise and possibly the increased drinking (ugh and I'd been doing so well before covid too)

for me it's simply "not being able to sleep". lately though i've done better laying on my back at an incline, but that's when I snore wicked awful so I feel bad for my roomies

Half of the 8 people in my class have malfunctioning headsets (something that's been constantly happening with this partner site for FOUR YEARS), one learner left midday yesterday and told nobody.

Half of them still can't figure out how to mute and unmute their phones (because their site managers barely trained them on how to use it)

Our entire Citrix system went down for 3 hours this morning. Like it does because Citrix is garbage.

A problem we reported last December with server issues in our training environment is still unsolved and the IT team is so depleted there's little chance of it being fixed anytime soon.

I love this job really i do

Tough times don’t last, tough people do <- authorized graffiti on restaurant window in my neighborhood

hang in there bud

thanks - and yr right. I mean I've lasted almost 16 years here, so I'm doin something right.

You probably should figure out what you want to do next. It never hurts to have a plan to move on.

true. problem is, 16 years plus a load of huge merit-based pay raises and jumping from pay grade to pay grade = there are few companies who will pay me what I make here atm. last time I tried the market, I got offers that would be a 50% pay cut to do the same work at a competitor!

but...I also wasn't trying very hard.

I kinda wanna just roadie for a metal band for the rest of my life. but...lol COVID

It might be time to consider bossing

ugh

in a better mood today. we are actually having to pull my co-instructor from class for her performance. That isn't the happy part - I hate having to do that, and in fact, have never had to do it. She was woefully unprepared today and left the training on dead air for 15 minutes, so I asked to pull her, to give her time to re-review her materials, as she has to lead the same class next week, and I"ll finish the class solo. and I'm going to observe her and give performance feedback in her next class, as apparently, her classes have been getting poor feedback and nobody's ever formally observed her before.

took a problem and made it into a solution.

diversity day presentation over zoom. i am new here so i wasn't sure how mandatory this was. i logged in with the intention of just muting it and reading a book. then we got an email saying sorry some people couldn't get in, the presenter limited it to 100 people. i am taking someone else's spot who wanted to be here and i can't leave! i already know race is a social construct. i might leave at noon though.

Supposedly my last day of wfh is a week from Friday, then it's back to the office (unless we get another stay of execution, but I doubt it). What should I do on my last day? Pancakes for breakfast? B33r for lunch?

Wake and bake
Then breakfast of champions: Cheerios and Budweiser

took a problem and made it into a solution.

This sounds like something a boss would do.

yeah. I've never managed people before but I've been a project manager (two years). went from having a prodigious start where I took over a project before my training was completed and saved it from collapse, feeling confident, and loving my job for 2 years....

....to feeling dehumanized by nasty Executives and toxic business partners and having it wreck my mental health. i wasn't the only one - my peers were also miserable...and some left. was 100% the company, so maybe if I did it elsewhere, it'd go better.

"I'm being extremely lazy, my productivity is absolutely in the toilet. I don't give 2 fucks tbh.

Yeah lately I've just been phoning it in. If ever there was a time to do C minus work, this is it."

I genuinely think this is okay and is about looking after yourself.

I took the rest of this afternoon off. the assignment I was supposed to start on isn't ready, I didn't sleep well, and I would rather just nap

"Yeah I dont understand why Im also so fucking tired all the time."

This but ... it's crap working from home. I resent the lack of division between home and work. I resent work filling my brain when I've stopped. I could go for an hour's nap in the middle of the day and would still be actually working harder than any time I'm in the office. I miss the pottering to the work kitchen for a coffee and a natter. I miss going for a lunch break, even though my lunch break was only ever wandering around Wilkos and probably buying nasturtium seeds. I miss my colleagues, even the ones I only quite like. Also, alcohol starts at 1700 instead of 1800, now.

(Disclaimer: really grateful that I'm not being made to work in a risky workplace).

I held a Psych game night on Zoom for 4-5 people last week and one of my friends couldn't get in (issue with the link) and after 5 minutes I almost called it off cos it felt too much like work helping him troubleshoot. but he got in.

"I'm being extremely lazy, my productivity is absolutely in the toilet. I don't give 2 fucks tbh.

Yeah lately I've just been phoning it in. If ever there was a time to do C minus work, this is it."

I genuinely think this is okay and is about looking after yourself.

― djh,

^ this. I was trying extra hard the first couple of months but now I am slowing down a bit.

I'm still working too hard lol, nothing else is interesting to me rn

My org had some incredible things to say as the pandemic was hitting and we were working from home.

The HR chief gave a presentation and there was a slide with the following on it:

Working Remote - COVID 19 Principles
1) You are not "Working From Home," you are "At your home, during a crisis, trying to work."
2) Your personal physical, mental, and emotional health is far more important than anything else right now.
3) You should not try to compensate for lost productivity by working longer hours.
4) You will be kind to yourself and not judge how you are coping based on how you see others coping.
5) You will be kind to others and not judge how they are coping based on how you are coping.
6) Your team's success will not be measured the same way it was when things were normal.

I can't describe to you how much relief this slide gave me, and as a result, I became more productive because I wasn't stressing about how much I was fucking up during the pandemic.

I'm lucky to work where I do, but I hope that maybe some of you will be able to take a couple of these principles and apply them to your situation. Especially point #1, which is a reframing that helped me be a lot kinder to myself.

That's nice! We never got an explicit acknowledgement of this kind but I suspect managers received something to this effect, because they've been patient and hands-off throughout.

Ctrl-F "vodka," no results found. Hmph.

djh, your post - it me

yeah our company/HR have been very good to us around all this - they were ready to send us all home by the middle of March and hit the ground running on that front (new laptops, headsets, chairs, the lot).

We have weekly video quizzes and regular competitions (best pet, bakeoffs, that sorta thing). I havent felt micromanaged, we're all trusted to just Get Shit Done (this can be a bit deadly for me though, I can slide a little when someone isnt whacking me at least occasionally lol)

"Video quizzes" - to be fair, this would make me resign.

(Sounds good, otherwise).

My office is closed until April and there's discussion at the moment, within my team, as to whether we ever go back. Colleagues have taken the opportunity to move to the US and Europe and work closer to their families and there's not much of a pressing reason to make them come back. The interesting discussion is going to be, come April, what happens if half the team wants to work from the office and half doesn't. There's a fear that it could disrupt collaboration and the team dynamic if you have a core group who see each other every day and a bunch of people who don't. I imagine it'll be optional but the idea of forcing everyone to work from home to put them all on an equal footing has been mooted.

Where I work we’ve been told that wfh in another country isn’t on the cards for tax reasons. Some staff have ill parents elsewhere and would really like to be with them medium-term but it ain’t happening.