I'm going to strike a very different reaction to most here: I miss my office!
The office is where I work. Home is where I don't work. I have a 30-40 minute subway ride between the two for changing gears. Home-no-work. Office-yes-work. Sudoku and Kindle in between. It's a pattern I hadn't realized I'd so strongly driven into my mind.
The first two weeks of this pandemic? I accomplished nothing. I sat down and tried to work at my desk (I even have a dock and a KVM switch so I could use my dual-monitors, keyboard, and mouse) and I did almost nothing for two weeks. I just could not change gears. It was agony.
I finally was able to get working again by moving from my desk to a chair beside it, with just my laptop. I have no pattern for this place- it's a chair usually covered in stuff I need to put somewhere so I have no really deep patterns for what I do when I sit here (is my own self-psycho-analysis). I'm still not as productive as before, but at least I'm getting some things done.
Even then, I miss running into people in the kitchen that I haven't talked to in a while. I miss grabbing lunch with friends from other departments. I miss that first 15 minutes of the day where we're all waiting for the caffeine to kick in, asking what the weekend plans are. The social aspects keep me sane.
And right now I'm trying to train new guys. One guy, we started him during the lockdown by just mailing him a laptop with instructions for how to get on the VPN. Training people remotely is hard. Even mostly-remote companies often start new people in the office for a week or two, then send them back home. There's video calls and screen sharing- it's not the same. I find it very difficult.
I have many criticisms of modern offices, but I still want mine back.
The office is where I work. Home is where I don't work. I have a 30-40 minute subway ride between the two for changing gears. Home-no-work. Office-yes-work. Sudoku and Kindle in between. It's a pattern I hadn't realized I'd so strongly driven into my mind.
The first two weeks of this pandemic? I accomplished nothing. I sat down and tried to work at my desk (I even have a dock and a KVM switch so I could use my dual-monitors, keyboard, and mouse) and I did almost nothing for two weeks. I just could not change gears. It was agony.
I finally was able to get working again by moving from my desk to a chair beside it, with just my laptop. I have no pattern for this place- it's a chair usually covered in stuff I need to put somewhere so I have no really deep patterns for what I do when I sit here (is my own self-psycho-analysis). I'm still not as productive as before, but at least I'm getting some things done.
Even then, I miss running into people in the kitchen that I haven't talked to in a while. I miss grabbing lunch with friends from other departments. I miss that first 15 minutes of the day where we're all waiting for the caffeine to kick in, asking what the weekend plans are. The social aspects keep me sane.
And right now I'm trying to train new guys. One guy, we started him during the lockdown by just mailing him a laptop with instructions for how to get on the VPN. Training people remotely is hard. Even mostly-remote companies often start new people in the office for a week or two, then send them back home. There's video calls and screen sharing- it's not the same. I find it very difficult.
I have many criticisms of modern offices, but I still want mine back.