Since March 2020 when life took an abrupt change, the modern office and work life did as well.. while some factory and shift work gained much of the semblance of normal after a few strange months, the office world seems to have taken on a new path: Endlessness..
Those who work remotely may know the dreadful feeling.. the morning sun peeks its rays into your bedroom. Chances are you were awake long before your daily alarm since your sleep pattern has been in shambles for a year. As you climb out of your less than comfortable sleeping position, you don’t even bother stretching.. you reach for your phone, move your computer mouse and log back in..
Sure there are a few gaps.. you may need to make lunch for your child or take out the pet. But the rest of the day’s grind begins in earnest.. you ensure that your Skype or Teams emblem is green and ready to go. You pound through emails as quickly as others come in. You, after all, are not alone. Others are working too.. working before a typical day would have ever begun .. and finally, as the closing of the workday happens, you leave your laptop open. You frantically try pretending to have a normal evening while at the same time taking work calls, meeting requests, or sending “just one more email” before exhaustion hits.
And despite that deep exhaustion, and the fact you worked far longer than a typical 8 hour workday, you still can’t sleep. You can try some alcohol.. a stiff drink or a slow glass of wine. Maybe you seek laughter in a comedy show…
Those just lose the “oomph.” Then you trek into the local drug store and see a myriad of pills and gummies that promise a restful and needed sleep..
They work. At first. But those bags just continue to grow under your eyes.. the benefits of working at home is a savings of time. Gas money.. expenses.. and office politics. The burden has become everything else, that inability to turn it off.
It would seem the pandemic has forced us into a strange paradox.. for years theories were espoused that working at home and telecommuting would bring us the luxury of time.. but this past year, we seemed to have almost purposely ditched the benefits and instead opted for the extreme punishments.
We have no time, after all, after a work day. We lose site of when the 9 to 5 really should end. It sometimes seems that instead of racing to live our lives, we are outdoing each other in a battle to see who signs off last. The final victor! The spoils go to the winners.
But in this circumstance, the spoiling of life makes the victor the loser.
The WALL STREET JOURNAL actually had a piece on this new lifestyle shift today. Chip Cutter authored it..
A few points that stood out,
At Slack Technologies Inc., WORK 0.80% the default meeting length on employee calendars is now 25 minutes, down from a half-hour, said Sheela Subramanian, a senior director. She uses her five-minute breaks to check on her children, use the restroom or do jumping jacks. In addition to minibreaks to refocus, Ms. Subramanian said she and many of her peers now employ a corporate version of college office hours. Her team views the core hours between 10 a.m. and 3 p.m. as fair game to meet online and collaborate. They arrange the rest of their workday as needed, she said, whether that means getting heads-down work done or dealing with home and family matters. Though companies are trying to help their people set boundaries, employers also have largely been the beneficiaries of pandemic overwork, research has shown. An analysis of census and survey data published last fall found that Americans spent 60 million fewer hours commuting and spent much of those hours on additional work
The article goes on to detail one case study could quite frankly be more common than we think. It maybe YOU:
Landy Simpson thought she had found the right balance when she embraced working from home. Instead of taking the bus and streetcar to a downtown Toronto office, the 26-year-old software engineer fired up her laptop from her bedroom and worked long hours, and filled her nights and weekends with cooking nutritious meals and taking long walks. After six months, Ms. Simpson said, she felt exhaustion she couldn’t shake. Days blurred together. She became forgetful. She would roll out of bed and into her nearby desk chair, missing meals as she stared at her screen for hours. She said she regularly worked 13-hour days, and slept 12 hours at a time on weekends to combat fatigue. She has been able to dial back some, making precise to-do lists that keep her on track and setting a timer for certain tasks to ensure her productivity doesn’t flag, and said she is beginning to feel better.
Another case study, again.. could be YOU!
Johanna Santana, a 36-year-old corporate-communications professional based near Orlando, Fla., said the pandemic has made her long for office work. Her hour-plus commutes would allow her to listen to music or podcasts and get pumped for the job, and then decompress, putting bookends on her workdays. “It was the only time I had to myself,” she said. For much of the past year, she has juggled calls, meetings and emails while tending to a toddler, changing her son’s diapers and cooking, while her husband worked and her stepdaughter attended virtual high school in the next room. “There were no breaks, there were no separations,” she said. “I couldn’t breathe.”
Mental soundness isn’t going to come from this.
Though productivity did!
At least for a while. It would be interesting to see how much longer this grand experiment of teleworking will elicit higher than normal degrees of work results before it collapses soundly..
….but are people working more because their managers are? Because their bosses are seeing the idea of micromanagement slowly slip through their fingers…?
Hmmm…
x x x
David Gelles wrote a rosy scenario:
Some individuals have had a harder time than others working from home, but many companies say productivity has remained at pre-pandemic levels, or even gone up. Without long commutes, small talk with colleagues and leisurely coffees in the break room, many workers — especially those who don’t have to worry about child care — are getting more done.
But there were also some warning signs. Gelles went on to write,
Business is humming along, but executives said working so hard in isolation could, in the long term, lead to burnout and loneliness and fray corporate culture. Satya Nadella, the chief executive of Microsoft, lamented the loss of in-person interactions, even as he said productivity was ticking up. “How long lasting is that?” he said of the company’s improved efficiency. “What does burnout look like? What does mental health look like?”
But…..
This new world is fascinating. Because if you go back to the old world, perhaps we were equally stuck in and mired in the mud … the hostile commutes that almost killed us time and time again.. the battle for parking.. the long ugly walks to work in snow and rain.. the fake and phony work meetings that should have been 20 minutes but clocked in at an hour.. and those office politics. Those awful office politics.
Maybe a few good lunch locations. But we sometimes hated the company.
Was it that great?
And is the “new” that bad?
No…
It’s what you make of it.
The way out of the trap is to couple the triumphs of getting more productivity in with getting a better life-work balance.
The loss of the “corporate culture” is lamented in both the Wall Street JOURNAL and New York TIMES articles. You mean, the corporate culture that most decried before 2020!!?
As stated earlier, this pandemic’s viscous trick was to give us the “telework” without the benefits … it forced business to act more treat telework more as a punishment. It is not. it certainly shouldn’t be..
Those who have ‘worked from home’ for their careers will tell you the simple solution.. quitting time comes and you just don’t look at your phone anymore. Develop that balance that is necessary for the health and welfare of your own body and your own family.
Sure, easier said than done. But just saying it will not do it. You have to try..
Working from home can be great.. No bumper to bumper commute. No worries about the weather. No one poking their head in and interrupting you. Lunch is just a few steps away. The coffee pot is always clean. There is almost no office gossip and intrigue. No whining from the chronic complainers.
So cheers to the pandemic!
Maybe if we get through this fatigue we can regain the right view of telework. It does work.
And cheers to ZZZQuil! Because … one just ain’t enough.
Regardless of where you work.
BE WELL.
X X X
