I've been remote for years now and this has been an "eternal September" (or, rather, March) kind of thing where all of a sudden hundreds of people in my immediate professional circle were forced to have new work habits while the couple of dozen of us who were used to "regular" remote work watched a variety of small scale train wrecks as people realized they had to do meetings differently, be more flexible about scheduling, etc.
Good points:
* It's more inclusive, for sure. Everyone has to use Slack/Teams/whatever to interact, so you don't feel like everyone in the room is ignoring the remote guy inside the little box on the table.
* If you have a home office, it is _way_ more comfortable than anything else you might usually have at a "regular" office. For instance, you get a door you can close instead of open space insanity.
* If your kids are still in school (and not sent home because of COVID) you get to pick them up (that's my daily outdoor exercise).
* You are no longer taking hours (sometimes days) travelling to the office, customers and whatnot.
Bad points:
* More, shorter meetings that completely destroy focus time. I've taken to block out 2h a day at least where I will simply not take calls or even reply to chats in order to get stuff done.
* Longer working hours (which I also completely blame on the pandemic--it's become much worse this year).
* Your life feels more "crammed in". Part of it is due to the insane work schedules, but confinement means shopping and chores (like doing the dishes, cooking or laundry) have to be done _somewhen_, often into the night time.
* You may be physically around your kids, but most often so busy or exhausted that it takes extra effort to devote the required level of focus and attention you absolutely _have_ to give them in these trying times.
On the whole, though, I still don't want to go back to an office.
Yes, it's harder to create new relationships, to learn a new org, etc. But even when things get back to "normal" (if ever), I don't think I'd be able to deal with going to an office more than once a week, because the benefits will then far outweigh the downsides (at least for me).
I recently wrote about that at some length, in fact: https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2020/10/29/2200
I've been remote for years now and this has been an "eternal September" (or, rather, March) kind of thing where all of a sudden hundreds of people in my immediate professional circle were forced to have new work habits while the couple of dozen of us who were used to "regular" remote work watched a variety of small scale train wrecks as people realized they had to do meetings differently, be more flexible about scheduling, etc.
Good points:
* It's more inclusive, for sure. Everyone has to use Slack/Teams/whatever to interact, so you don't feel like everyone in the room is ignoring the remote guy inside the little box on the table.
* If you have a home office, it is _way_ more comfortable than anything else you might usually have at a "regular" office. For instance, you get a door you can close instead of open space insanity.
* If your kids are still in school (and not sent home because of COVID) you get to pick them up (that's my daily outdoor exercise).
* You are no longer taking hours (sometimes days) travelling to the office, customers and whatnot.
Bad points:
* More, shorter meetings that completely destroy focus time. I've taken to block out 2h a day at least where I will simply not take calls or even reply to chats in order to get stuff done.
* Longer working hours (which I also completely blame on the pandemic--it's become much worse this year).
* Your life feels more "crammed in". Part of it is due to the insane work schedules, but confinement means shopping and chores (like doing the dishes, cooking or laundry) have to be done _somewhen_, often into the night time.
* You may be physically around your kids, but most often so busy or exhausted that it takes extra effort to devote the required level of focus and attention you absolutely _have_ to give them in these trying times.
On the whole, though, I still don't want to go back to an office.
Yes, it's harder to create new relationships, to learn a new org, etc. But even when things get back to "normal" (if ever), I don't think I'd be able to deal with going to an office more than once a week, because the benefits will then far outweigh the downsides (at least for me).