Let me work from home forever, please

I am a person who craves solitude, who needs it in order to function, both in that fill up / replenish energy way and to actually do my work.

So I have not been sad about the forced working from home the past year+. Before, I’d feel a pinch of guilt, wondering how far I could push my boss before they subtly hinted that they “missed” me in the office and would I be in for that Friday meeting?

I hope this past year means I won’t ever have to go back into an office again, except maaaaaybe on occasion. This might not be possible; office leadership has started talking about “when we’re all together again” and re-opening offices in September. They haven’t used the word “family” but that’s the vibe I get. Is everyone desperate to go back to an office, to work among many other people, but me? 

I get missing colleagues, I do miss IRL facetime with mine, and the impromptu coffee breaks and chatter about what you watched last night, or plans for the weekend. For me, the benefits of working from home far outweigh missing that facetime. Not seeing my friends and actual family, the sameness of these walls, that is what is making my nuts, is making me sad.  Not working from home.

I get that some professions are better suited for in-person (teaching, arts, jobs at labs, travel industry jobs and so on) but a design and ad agency? To some, the answer is “yes.” My office prides itself on being collaborative, of different disciplines (the visual designer, the product designer, a creative director, a content strategist, etc) shut into a glass-walled conference room and attacking a whiteboard with sharp lines and loose squiggles. As a researcher, I am sometimes in on these “working sessions,” and I love them. I love feeling part of the process, of making my own squiggle lines, of batting ideas back and forth. It is a needed break from the solo hours I need in order to plan research studies and analyze data. 

But I also see that we can collaborate just fine remotely. Maybe it does work better to be in person. I don’t know, it all depends on you, your team. It still feels strange to me to hear someone in leadership talk in such glowing terms about “being together.” We are colleagues, not a family. And I’m fine in my quiet office at home, and so grateful I have this space. And yet, I felt the energy of being together. I too, am tired of Zoom. 

Where to go from here? Wherever it is, I hope there is flexibility. I hope this year has shown us, especially our bosses, that we need more understanding about our colleagues’ lives. We’ve seen the cats clomping over the keyboard, the babies sitting in laps, kids peeking over their caregiver’s shoulder, heard the dogs howling at the front door. Feeling supported is what we need, not an arbitrary demand on where we do our work. 

I wonder about control, and how much of the general push to go back to in-person work is about bosses wanting more control over their employees’ schedules and work lives. Productivity software already exists for this (and thankfully not something I’ve used). And it’s a ridiculous idea, right? Why do we have such a hard time trusting our colleagues? Trust that we’re all trying, trust that we’ll meet our deadlines. Shouldn’t that be the starting point, an assumed thing? The energy of monitoring could be so much better spent cultivating a supportive work environment, and seeing employees as people with messy lives. Not productivity machines.

Anyways, there are good reasons to work from home and work in-person and crappy ones for both. What I want is for that to be acknowledged and to be able to choose where I work best. That’s what most of us want, to be trusted to make the decisions that work best for us. 

This post was inspired by Anne Helen Petersen’s newsletter Culture Study. Her newsletter is one of my faves for the interviews with fascinating people you didn’t know you wanted to meet and thoughtful takes on cultural topics as wide ranging as work, gender, and the Baylor influencer twins.

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Getting used to a new normal

My coworkers decided to make Friday “Formal Friday.” Because of COVID-19, we’re under a shelter-in-place order in Chicago, and are all bunked in our homes wearing PJs or sweats (on the bottoms at least - can’t see that part on video calls) every other day. Why not get dolled up for the biweekly breakfast meeting?

Me, I’m like “no thanks.” This is probably very revealing of my core character: a lazy non-joiner. I’ve been just fine in my leggings and grubby sweaters, with no make-up and somewhat clean hair.

But really this is a nice thing my coworkers are doing. In the two weeks since my company switched to a work-from-home policy, the whole office (< 50 people) has been creative in finding ways to connect while we’re all remote. We do shout outs with drinks at the end of the day Friday, kids and pets welcome; in honor of National Puppy Day, we posted a stream of cute pooches to Slack all day long; and there’s weekly trivia just for fun.

These kinds of things have definitely made the transition to working from home easier, though my daily rhythm hasn’t shifted too dramatically. As a child-free introvert, I feel like I’ve been training for quarantine my entire life. The challenge so far has been being home with the dog all day, who has a propensity to explode into a shrill bark if he hears even a whisper in the hallway.

But obviously something has shifted. Even that I have a job that I can do remotely feels like a great privilege as the unemployment rate is spiking. Even those of us who are still working face uncertainty about our jobs and paying our bills.

My emotions oscillate wildly, between relief that I’m safe and healthy, worry for friends and family who still must leave their homes for work, annoyance that I don’t have as much new free time as I hoped under quarantine, general anxiety about the pandemic (no doubt egged on by all the links in the Covid-Convo Slack channel at work) and guilt for feeling stressed because I’m at home all day with a gallon of bleach, toilet paper, and enough canned beans to last for days. 

A few months ago, I had made a year plan with quarterly goals and everything. That’s been obliterated into insignificance. My partner and I were planning a vacation to Joshua Tree at the end of March which we’ve obviously had to postpone. I was excited to attend a tech and design conference that isn’t happening. My planner is loaded with white-out. And I don’t even care that much. Those plans seem irrelevant now that I don’t know when it’ll be safe to hug my friends or see coworkers IRL. My brain is incapable of thinking beyond next week. It’s occupied by stuff like:

• Should I still try to find hand sanitizer or Clorox wipes if 95% of the time I’m only touching surfaces in my own home (the other 5% is accidentally touching my face).

• Talking myself off the ledge that it’s The Virus(!) if I happen to cough.

• Should I finally pluck my eyebrows?

• I hope my moisturizer doesn’t run out soon.

• How can I avoid going to the grocery store as long as possible?

• I didn’t buy enough coffee, did I? 

Despite all this, I’m feeling a general burst of optimism now, in this moment. What I really want to hope is that amidst all this uncertainty and emotional twirling, there will be some silver lining. That this blow-up to our routines will show us something, will illuminate something we couldn’t have seen otherwise, even a small thing.

I know this optimism is fueled in part because I’m financially OK now and healthy and not surrounded by tiny humans who need my attention. But I’m seeing how my coworkers are looking for ways to connect even though we’re all remote, how friends too are checking in with each other and finding ways to do things we would normally do together even when we’re apart, how we’re stepping in to support local businesses and others in need. That counts for something.