WFH
During lockdown I had to work from home. It took some adjustment, but I think I coped well. Our daily stand up meetings and regular chat messages between team members kept me reasonably sane.
One thing I did struggle with was the feeling that if I weren't at my keyboard for the whole 7 hours of my working day I was lollygagging and malingering and I would get Told Off by work.
I would put the washing machine on and then rush back to my desk to check I hadn't been emailed or messaged. Hanging the washing out was a panicked, rushed affair that ended with a swift return to my keyboard and mouse.
I would feel guilty that I wasn't working when I was Working From Home.
Then lockdown ended and I went back to the office full time.
It was odd how the handful of months spent apart from an office environment gave me a new perspective on working in an office.
Years ago I'd noted how the whole IT department would decamp to the kitchen for three 20 minute tea breaks a day (meaning work losing them for a whole hour a day). Now I was noticing the sales guy who would turn up first thing, drop his coat and bag at his desk and then immediately launch into a lengthy diatribe at his colleague about politics, home life, or The Match Last Night. I once timed one of his rants as he stood in the middle of the office pontificating about the vagiaries of his work - it was 70 minutes long.
Then there were the colleagues who'd discuss at their desk today's Wordle or other online quizzes they were all doing. The people in the kitchen making a coffee who wanted to hold forth for 15 minutes on whatever.
Not working whilst in the office seemed to be ok. To be honest, I was just as bad. I would check websites between jobs, or entertain myself doing stupid Photoshops instead of whatever job I was meant to be doing. I was no different to anyone else in the office. Any excuse to not work was Ok In The Office. Yet doing those very same things at home felt very wrong.
My first day back in the office after lockdown, the boss came over to chat and made a point of saying that during lockdown, when the whole company was working from home, there was a 10% drop in productivity. It didn't cross my mind at the time that the drop could be down to home internet speeds and connectivity issues, not to mention people working in non-work optimised situations like perched on the end of their bed in their bedroom, or in an unheated garage in the winter.
With that in mind, I've been way more productive at home than in the office, just to prove that I am, in fact, Actually Working thank you very much. In the office I can spark up Photoshop or Illustrator and mess about and call it "training" if someone sees me superimposing Boris Johnson's face on Jabba The Hut's body. Can't do that at home, oh no, that's skiving.
But now I've come to the conclusion that it's all the same. Standing in the office swapping quotes from The Simpsons for 15 minutes is no different to spending the same amount of time on the washing up or sorting the laundry out.
The only difference is that you're spending that time doing something for you instead of not doing something for the sake of not working. I've written this whilst at work. I'm ok with that.