WFH?! WTF!
So here’s the rub: as the world retreats to their homes, our homes become businesses, cafés, dance studios, gyms, places of worship, schools, social spaces, sports arenas and, well… homes.
The confluence of multiple spaces collapsing into one has been happening to me for some time now. It started last January when I took a job for NoTosh, a globally distributed consultancy that has no centralised office and where employees all work from home. From the outside looking in this sounded great: getting paid full time to work like a freelancer! While businesses were grappling with whether or not to allow their staff to work flexibly — or if they did, how it would all work — we at NoTosh were ahead of the curve. We knew how to meet online, distribute work online, collaborate online and, well, do just about anything online you can do in an ‘office’. Even have a scandalous ‘office’ romance.
Despite the obvious freedoms and benefits this way of working afforded us employees, like anything new, it does take some time to adjust to. Within the first month it became apparent that having an office in Europe, an office in North America and an office in Australia meant that literally someone, somewhere, somehow was awake, online and seeking information or conversation at all hours of the day and night. As the newbie I felt compelled to prove myself to be the best employee I could be, so I was dutifully answering, responding and making myself available all the time. This lead to the pinnacle of stretching myself too thin; conducting Zoom a call in bed at 11pm while my wife was trying to sleep next to me (fortunately she had no idea about the office romance 😉).
Working from home or living in the office?
What happened as a result of this was that, rather than having an office at home, my home became the office. In the early days I had no idea how to make this working from home work, and that 11pm Zooms from bed are not really what flexible working is for.
Fortunately, after a few months of mistreating the flexibility, I started to look at my situation differently. I no longer felt the need to answer every question asked, or respond to every comment — in fact, when there was no backlash it made me realise that the expectation was only ever self imposed. The new found assertiveness also enabled me to comfortably decline the Zoom meetings scheduled at 11pm — except when their sole purpose was to advance the office romance 😜.
The Game Changer: Stop Beating Yourself Up
By far the biggest revelation, and the thing that enabled me to think of the whole working from home situation differently, was that in my previous job, as a corporate drone, I would only do about four-hours of productive and work a day — and even that felt like a lot! When I reflected on an average day working in high-end corporate job it consisted of getting into the office at 8:30am to log on, so those in the organisation tasked with surveillance wouldn’t put a red flag against my name, and then finding a buddy to join me in getting a coffee from the local cafe. This was a round trip that took between 30–45 minutes at least. Back at my desk at 9:15am, I started going through my emails, another 30 minute exercise — longer if there was something that needed a considered reply. However, most of the emails were what I called “ass covering”, workers telling managers about the work they’d asked others to do and Cc-ing all the people that might be remotely interested, just so they could cover their ass in case anyone brought them to account. After getting up to speed with all the minutia of everyone else’s job it was nearly 10am and time for the first pointless meeting of the day, this one happened to be about the new policy the company was rolling out in relation to working from home — how ironic. 11am now and time for another coffee. And, as you can imagine, the rest of the day was just as productive…
When I thought about it, so much work in an office is busy work — work for work’s sake — rarely productive and never meaningful. And some people are experts at looking busy without doing anything… we’ve all encountered those sorts of people along our journey, and generally they’re the ones in senior management positions. Having this revelation meant that I would stop beating myself up about not working my allotted 7.6 hours a day (as per my contract), knowing that when I’m with clients — which is often interstate or overseas — I’d be working at least 10 hour days, running workshops and managing client relations. I figured that in the end the ledger would balance itself out.
Benefits: Timeshifting and Flexibility
A secondary revelation was that working from home meant I didn’t have to be locked into working from 9am–5pm just because that was the expectation set up decades ago. It meant that I could take the liberty of time-shifting to suit my own needs, rather than being locked in to set hours. So, what I aimed to do was to get four-hours of meaningful and productive work done every day. With that mindset, I found was that once I was engrossed in the work — being in flow if you will — meant I’d actually get more done than anticipated. And to be fair (and honest) there were some days that getting into flow was really challenging, but I stopped beating myself up about it knowing that I was doing a good job and adding value where possible. It also meant I could get into a rhythm that suited me. I’d get some work done in the wee hours of the morning, while everyone else was still asleep, head out and work from a cafe after school drop off, find a buddy to play some tennis with in the afternoon (healthy body = healthy mind) and then get though some more work in the early evening.
These dual revelations, coupled with finding different spaces other than my home to work in, such as my local cafe or a nearby co-working space, also meant that working from home took on a whole new meaning. I realised the work didn’t literally have to be done in the home! And sometimes, it seemed, working, didn’t literally have to mean working…
Work in the Time of Covid (sorry Gabriel Garcia Márquez)
Fast forward to a fortnight ago, early March 2020 BC (Before Corona), and I was feeling fortunate that I had the benefit of sorting out some of these issues before my combined home/office/workspace also became a school. But now that I’m trying to run a household, manage a business and also conduct a school, the rules have changed again! Just as I got comfortable with my new circumstances, everything flipped and the situation has gone to a whole new level. Now it’s a bit of peace and quiet and isolation I crave, set hours between 9am and 5pm to get work done and longing for someone to demand me work for 7.6 hours a day, just to avoid all the homework, manage the online learning accounts and feeding the children constantly during what feels like a 16-hour non-stop cafe shift.
Finally, I can comfortably put up the closed sign on the cafe! A directive that has come from the highest office in this land and the Prime Minister himself! Now all I need him to do is bring this awful school term to a close and let my home finally return to just being a home …that is until the new term starts again in a few weeks.
