I’m now approaching the end of 3 weeks of working from home. It took a little while to get it all figured out, but things are running pretty smoothly. There’s still learning/tweaking to do, but in general I’m feeling positive and productive about work.
At some point, we’ll all be able to go back to the office . . . but I’m wondering which I prefer. Assuming this is successful for the company, if there will be some opening up of the possibility for more regular working from home.
If you’re new to working from home, are you enjoying it? Would you keep working from home if given the option?
I think if this was truly a plan in the long term (as in years), I’d want a bigger house. We’re under 1000sq ft, and both my wife and I are working. We hear each other’s conference calls, and having “offices” for both of us, even multi-use rooms, uses 50% of the non-bathroom rooms in the house. But, other than that, I think I really do prefer it.
My computer at the office is much nicer than my home computer (e.g., several large monitors vs one moderate-sized monitor). Also, it’s more convenient being able to talk to my co-workers face-to-face. So I would prefer not to work from home.
I’ve been working part of the time at home for several years. I found for me, about two days at home per week was ideal: two-three days in the office to talk to coworkers face to face , deal with paper, enjoy a dedicated desk and do any downtown errands, and two days at home with less commute, chance to do tiny home projects on my breaks, comfortable clothes and fewer interruptions (of course that was when the rest of the family wasn’t home all day too…).
That 2-3 days would still be my goal post-Covid.
I teach math at the local community college. Some of the teachers have had a rough time with the transition to teaching remotely. Not me. I’ve always maintained a website where all of my class materials are posted (syllabi, lecture notes, worked examples, homework assignments, etc). So I was ready to go with little prep. Instead of going to campus and pulling up my website to go over materials, now I open a Zoom meeting and do the exact same thing.
In the classroom, I lecture for the first hour or so, and leave the remaining 90 minutes for the students to work on their stuff while I’m there to help. Now, when my lecture is over, I open my personal Zoom Room for a couple of hours, so that students can pop in and out if they need my help with something. If students want to work in groups, they can Zoom with each other.
My biggest hurdle was “writing on the whiteboard.” I have a drawing pad I bought like a year ago, but never took out of the box until this started. Writing on that, and have it appear legible on the screen, is taking some getting used to. I have to go very slowly, but I’m getting better.
I’m realizing that I need a second monitor. But my desk setup does not have room. So I guess I need a new desk as well.
Overall, so far, I think this is great, and would love to continue.
It’s weird. I don’t consider myself much of a ‘people person’ and I don’t socialize with my coworkers outside of work, but I find myself really missing going into the office.
In fact, I’m at work right now all by myself.
There’s a number of things that play into that:
My commute is a very pleasant bike ride along the river and I really enjoy that
My work requires quite a bit of group work, so trying to effectively do that remotely is quite challenging
My work environment is really nice. I have a window with a great view, I work with highly interesting, highly intelligent people and I have a great deal of autonomy.
I’m not a highly motivated person and so having a regular schedule, with regular touchpoints with folks who need things from me is very helpful for me
So, I miss going to work and am looking forward to going back to how things were.
I’m retired, but I wouldn’t have wanted to work from home, even tho pretty much everything I did was on the computer. There were times I needed to ask multiple questions of coworkers, and it would be a pain to have to do that remotely, especially when I needed them to look over my shoulder at the specific issue I was having.
Frankly, I don’t know that I have the self-discipline to work from home, especially on days like today when it’s so lovely outside! I’m about to start some yard work.
I work from home (NYC) mostly anyway, and go into the office (outer suburbs NJ) maybe a few times a month. I do like my trips to the office if just for the variety and their swell cafeteria, but I like my health more, so I don’t want to go back until the way is free and clear, which I doubt it will be by the time my contact runs out at the end of June.
I worked from home full time for many years, then worked in the office for many years. For me, and considering my horrible commute, I hope that after the lockdown I can be in the office 3 days a week and home 2. In on Monday, Tuesday and Thursday, home on Wednesday and Friday would be the ideal.
This sounds about right, except that this is the first time I’ve ever worked from home so it did take some getting used to. I’d need to set up a proper work station and for sure get a chair. I currently stand almost all day because there’s nowhere to put my laptop and extra monitor anywhere but on the little bar area in my living room. Too high for a normal chair and the bar stools are uncomfortable as hell. That makes it not a totally unattractive thought to return to the office.
Three days in the office , two days at home would be great.
I have been working from home since November because that is how the project was designed. I really don’t like it. I find that when I am home I tend to want to do home things, and then I get tense and feel guilty that I am shirking. Being physically at work helps me focus on work things.
Also, I really like being around people. I find that shooting the sh*t for a few minutes around the coffee machine in the morning, and going out to lunch with an office pal, are good for my sanity. I don’t have that and it does not make me happy.
My office work is considered essential, so I’ve been working from here all along. Six of the other seven people in my office are working from home. I’ve been grateful every single day that I get to come to work - I love my commute, I love a tight schedule, and my job would be impossible to do from home. Basically, if some entity decides that nobody at all can leave the house, I’ll just be on vacation. If anything, I’m dreading the rest of them coming back after the COVID crisis - I love having my own printer/kitchen/bathroom/heat settings/music selection.
Yeah, as much as I like to ‘socially distance’ even without a global pandemic on the rise, teleconferences and having to track down people via phone because they aren’t responding to email or IM is a real time-suck. Also, I’m losing track of “work time” and “leisure time” because even though I’ve set office hours for myself and sort-of adhere to them, I’m now getting calls from 0600 to 2200 from people working their own peculiar schedule, and if I don’t answer I start getting a string of texts with “NEED ANSWER NOW!!!” about a project that is sitting still because nobody can move anything anywhere and all of our customer facilities are on some version of lockdown.
On the other hand, I can have a beer with lunch and not violate any company regulations. It does make the afternoon go a little smoother. On second thought, I’m never going back to the office again.
I live in a one-bedroom apartment so working from home is basically staring at the same four walls 24 hours a day. The work isn’t too bad (book pagination) and my iMac at home is better and newer than my work machine; and I can access the server with no problems as my broadband is fast.
When things get back to normal, I’d rather be at work, I think. I will miss the extra hour sleep I now get due to not having to commute, but I’d rather be at work.
I wouldn’t mind maybe three days a week at work and the other two at home. But I don’t know if the employer will go for it.
I have mixed feelings about going back to the office. I don’t miss my commute, would could take 40 minutes each way. It’s amazing how much more free time I have after work now that I don’t have that time back.
They let me take my docking station and monitor home, so I have a fairly decent work setup at home now. But the downside is that it’s on my kitchen table, so I can no longer use it for meals. I mean, there’s probably enough space if I moved the keyboard out of the way, but I feel like I’m “at work” when I sit here now, so I don’t want to eat meals at the table just for that reason.
But I do really prefer being able to talk to my coworkers face to face when I need to ask them a question. With engineering type work, sometimes it’s a lot easier to explain things if you can draw on a whiteboard while you’re talking. That’s much more difficult to do over the phone.
I’ve gotten in a much better work groove here at home than I would have anticipated, given my experiences with teleworking 1-2 days a week. I think that when we can go back, I’d like to switch to working from home 3-4 days a week, and going in to work 1-2 days a week so I can have face-to-face conversations with co-workers.
But only if I got to keep my desk at work as solely mine. But that wouldn’t be likely: where I work, if you telework more than half the time, guess what? You get put into ‘desk-sharing’ so you have to keep your desk clean because someone else is using it on the days you’re not there. And I’m not good at that at all.
So I really don’t know what I’ll do when push comes to shove. We’ll see.
