Working from home

There is a lot of discussion today about returning to work and not being able to work from home anymore. In a lot of those cases I feel like Management is not trusting people who work from home to do the right thing or worries that they don’t have the right equipment so they won’t be as efficient or effective as they once were or could be.

To be honest, that’s a fair concern. There’s a lot of people who don’t work with the diligence that they do in the office, and I think that’s a shame, and I also think it’s like one rotten apple spoiling the whole barrel. I think there are many more workers who work perhaps more diligently when they’re at home than they do in the office. I’ve heard of people working two and three full time jobs because they can roll out of bed and sit down at the computer in bathrobes and bunny slippers, and they’ll sit there till 10:00 at night. I’m not sure that’s quite the right balance either but you hear the stories.

For me personally, I’m not an advocate for working remotely in my current role. I have had roles where I’ve worked remotely, my current role just isn’t one of them, but I’m getting away from what I wanted to share in this post.

It is vitally important when you’re working remotely to have a setup that’s going to motivate you and keep you engaged. A place that’s going to work for you ergonomically and functionally and every other way.

I believe the setup that many users try to use when they’re working from home is to their detriment and what makes them unproductive. I saw a social media post from one person who had and old monitor that they had laying around sitting on top of a stack of books that was on a TV tray and they were sitting in a folding metal chair. You don’t have to guess how that worked out.

The photo that leads this blog post is my WFH setup and also where I play, study when I’m taking classes and do work for others if I’m building a website. It’s actually more comfortable than my office at work, and I’m more productive when I work here, but the nature of the work I do from 9:00 to 5:00 doesn’t lend itself especially well to that.