From the day I started my professional career on January 7th, 2019 I spent 50 to 70 hours of my week in an office. Weeks have 168 hours total which means I spent 30-41% of my life sitting in a Herman Miller chair - a really nice chair, but that’s besides the point - staring at a pair of computer monitors and playing my “professional work Trevor” life role. If you take out the hours I spent sleeping that’s another 49 hours and 29% of my life that weren’t mine to spend. Add in the human necessities like eating, exercising, and having my daily cry session into my pillow and I was left with 10%, maybe 15%, of my life leftover to live how I wanted. And my girlfriend would always wonder why it took me weeks to drop discarded Amazon packages off at UPS.
And then a global pandemic killed off 99.99% of my routines and expectations like a wave of hand sanitizer.
I wont belabor the story of me attempting to maintain a fast-paced sales role from the comfort of my bedroom - it didn’t go well. I’ve already told that story here.
The pandemic brought us a lot of negatives, many of which are still prevalent in life nearly three years later. Yet, if you’re an occasional optimist like I am, you can see a lot of positives that came from the circumstances as well. Primarily, it forced a paradigm shift in how work happens. It strong-armed companies into making the decision between allowing their workers to engage remotely and not being able to work at all. That’s an obvious decision as an employer.
And what happened? All of the ready-made reasons employers never previously allowed remote work (decrease in productivity, reduced oversight, deterioration of company culture, etc, etc) turned out to be unfounded. Many companies experienced record levels of growth throughout the pandemic, including my own. And what’s more? Workers started experiencing higher levels of life satisfaction. They got to spend more time with their kids, their friends, their dogs. People had the opportunity to take on more projects. We could handle more of the To-Do items in our lives during the day since weren’t physically stuck in an office.
Remote work may not be suitable for every job out there, but for the jobs that allow it, its nearly impossible to shift back into the paradigm of five days a week in a physical office.
My current role is the latter. Much of my job is spent working with software programs that are accessible regardless of where I’m geographically located. I spend a lot of time interacting with other team members, but that’s done virtually via Teams. Even when all of us are in the same building nobody is going to spend ten minutes wandering around the floor trying to find the correct conference room. Remote work just works better.
This week my work team is having a “team on-site”. This means we’re all coming into the office every day - even those of us that live out-of-state - for “team building”… or whatever. Don’t get me wrong, my team members are great people. It’s nice getting to spend real time with them and do non-work related activities with them, but ultimately they’re my coworkers. If given a choice between spending time with my coworkers and spending time with the people that I’ve actively sought out and choose to be a part of my life I’m going to choose the latter every time. I think the idea of building relationships with team members is fine, but its a relic from the past paradigm. Since we no longer have to spend 30-41% of our lives in the company of our coworkers they can be just that: coworkers.
It’s Wednesday and this week has already been longer than any remote work week. I haven’t had time to exercise, or eat well, I haven’t read any of my current book, I have Amazon packages that need returning, prescriptions that need picking up, and a dog that needs walks. And the payoff? I’ve been no more productive than I typically would have been.
This one week in the office isn’t going to kill me. I can appreciate the benefits that come from getting to know my direct coworkers on a personal level, and I know that next week I’ll be back to my normal schedule and able to get on track.
That said, if I’m ever pressured to return to the office for more than my current one day a week, at least in my current role, I will be fighting it with every tooth and nail that I have.
We weren’t built to spend a third of our lives in an office building and I wont ever go back to believing otherwise.