Working From Home Works For Some. I'm Honest About That.

I've been working from home a long time. During college as I financed myself outside of playing in a band and working as a teacher's assistant, I wrote programs. I worked from my parent's basement, and I worked at bars while hanging out with my friends. I worked wherever it was convenient and as often as I pleased. Sometimes, I didn't work, because I wasn't effective at the moment.

I understand why offices exist and love personal interaction and meetings; working on a solution with coworkers is critical to making good product. However, sometimes I just need my head down, and I want to work from my home office to put in an extra-long day.

My personal preference to be at the office sometimes and remote for others. It is my preference, really, because offices have continued to give us increasingly intolerable working environments that I have openly insulted for years. We know open offices are cost-saving devices. All of the "collaboration" is actually an environment filled with germs that prevents focus and increasingly removes one's ability to personalize their working space into something comfortable.

Just to drive that one home, I could post the myriad of studies over the last decade showing how terrible open offices are. Instead, let me post one from just before Covid-19 made all of us blessed enough to keep our jobs work from home. Read it here. Ironically, I'm sure the enlightened leaders will hold this opinion afterwards.

It's vindicating, but years of me "not believing in upper management" did its harm on that one still...including a manager who claimed I wasn't working because he couldn't see me! It turns out, when I had to be available at both US and Thailand hours, I preferred to have those meetings in my office rather than living at work. After seeing the team's output, he apologized after realizing myself and others had completed work well beyond what was expected. Regardless, it displayed the stigma.

Anyway, back to working remotely. The take-away I would like everyone to have after this world-wide trial is as follows:

1. Working from Home is OK and should be a normal part of work when possible
2. Some people really can't work or be productive at home due to all kinds of possible causes, and that's OK

It's as simple as that. So while I expect the world to have more obnoxious one-sided debates about "the future of work", keep in mind that like all things, there's a fuzzy middle. I hope the world wakes up to that and we all keep enjoying work and staying safe, whatever that ends up looking like.