Five Years is a Pretty Long Time (on Working from Home)

Since March 11, 2020, I couldn’t say how many times I've spent an entire workday in an office - but I’m sure it’s a number my three year old could count up to with her fingers. Prior to that pivotal page on my desk calander, I was in the office seven, eight, ten hours a day, five days a week, without fail, for years and years and years. Then it just stopped.

The calendar froze on my last full day in an office. Photograph from July 2020.

I hated most every cubicle-dwelling moment I lived. There were some truly awful offices, and some better than others, but in all cases, I usually felt that what I was doing could have been done from anywhere - especially once I grew out of flirting with coworkers and structuring my social life around office cliques.

Pleading my case for working remotely always hit a wall - especially once I began working in the world of government contracting, and especially especially when that work became somewhat “sensitive.” There was just no way they were letting me bring a laptop home to do my job from my basement; in the eyes of management, I might as well have printed out flyers with my social security number and bank account routing information and handed them out at a coffee shop.

And then, all of a sudden, one day it was okay - it had to be okay - and five years later, to the day, it still is.

Over those years, we've all experienced changes in how we live, how we work, etc. For me, the most meaningful change has been watching one baby daughter grow into a kid that reads books independently and roller-skates and has already (!!) uttered the words, "DAD, you're embarrassing me!" (I thought it would take at least three or four pandemics before I started hearing that) - and seeing another (post-Covid) daughter grow from a puff of nothingness into a three year old tornado of somethingness. And I’ve witnessed these changes, this growth, from a proximity that never ever would have been possible, pre-Covid.

Another very significant change that happened was that a few months into working from home, I found myself looking very closely at how I was spending my time. I'd been interested in habit tracking and journaling all the minutiae of my life prior to those days, but something snapped me into a routine of actually tracking, to the second, every activity that I did - labelling it and quantifying my routine in such a way that at the end of a week I could say "I spent 22 hours and 19 minutes in meetings, but only four hours and seven minutes exercising, what the fuck!"

So for several years - from July 2020, to around August of 2024, I tracked every (week)day, and in so doing, learned a lot about the limits of my attention, the rewards and outcomes of spending my time this way or that. One thing became very clear - the idea of the "40 hour workweek" was complete bullshit. I was able to keep doing my job, well enough to earn myself new assignments, raises, promotions and pats on the back - all while sometimes only spending only fourteen hours a week actually "working."

Now, that doesn’t mean the rest of my week was spent playing Xbox or smoking crack or whatever - the rest of those hours I read books, or watched courses, or wrote, or walked, or did many of the other things that to an observer probably didn't seem connected to the work I was doing, but in what they provided to my soul, to my health and my mental clarity - they were indispensable, essential for doing anything else I was expected to do.

Random snapshot of some hours I spent doing some things

And out of this expiriment in surveilling my daily routine, I realized what was probably the greatest benefit, the best change that had come in how I worked - I stopped worrying about 'looking busy.’ I didn't have to show up at 9 a.m. and stay til 6 just because that's what everyone else was doing, even on days when my work could’ve been finished before noon. I did what needed to be done, and didn't stress about weird looks that I'd get if I were in the office and someone walked by my desk to find me drawing in a sketchbook or taking a nap or trying to fix a toaster oven.

With more control over my time, and less pressure to look like I was doing things I didn't really need to, I was happier - I was living in a way that felt more authentic, more aligned with my values and my passions and my health and my domestic responsibilities. I wasted LESS time. I got MORE done, FASTER. I still do.

I try to stay grounded by recognizing how privileged I am to continue working this way, while others in my industry (after years of productive work) are now being forced to return to offices (on the surface, for reasons of 'synergy' or 'teamwork' or whatever other bullshit buzzwords the bosses can come up with, but realistically, because of the sunk cost of empty office space and the heartburn that gives company financial departments.)

And finally, with the self-reflection that an anniversary inspires, it’s interesting to think about the mechanics of how something that was once deemed impossible suddenly became possible - but what I’m even more curious about now, is how - if what was inconceivable in my work life five years ago turned out to be a complete delusion, it forces the question - what beliefs am I subscribing to now, that make my work and my life more of a pain in the ass than they need to be, that in another five years time could also be obliterated?