Member-only story
What an entire year of working from home has taught me
How lockdown in the UK has helped me to become more positive
Tuesday 17 March 2020. During a team meeting our CEO announces that there has been a number of reported COVID cases in their London Office. Although I’m based in our Nottingham office, the past 6–8 weeks have seen a number of COVID cases rising rapidly throughout the country and as such, for safety measures, we’re all told we can work from home.
At first, my feelings were positive. I work for a company that is flexible and trustworthy towards their staff. I’m fortunate that we’re able to work from home or work from a non-office space when required, assuming we get the work done. When I take work from home days I’m always productive. Working from home offers fewer distractions and therefore less context switching. Episodes of focused working are longer and often I find myself working past 5pm as I’m in a state of flow.
So once I learned we were able to work from home on a potentially long-term basis, I was confident that my weekly output would be plentiful.
However, after the first month, I discovered that working from home on a permanent basis was hard. I underestimated many of the standard office behaviours and the advantages that they brought to each working day.
