The kitchen table
A thing that was impossible until it was compulsory, and a day that has stopped having edges.
The laptop is on the kitchen table. The kitchen table is where I eat, and where the mail goes, and where I was sitting last night at 9 pm, and it is now also the office.
I want to say up front that I’m aware I’ve got this extremely easy. I have a job, I can do it from here, and nothing about my situation is difficult in the way that plenty of people’s are right now. This is a post about a small thing, written from a very fortunate position, at a time when the important things are elsewhere.
But I’ve been turning one bit of it over for two weeks and I’d like to write it down while it’s still strange, because I suspect it stops being strange quite fast.
The thing that was impossible
Three weeks ago, working from home was a thing our industry did not really do. Not at my place, not at most agencies I know. There were policies, technically. There was a form. In practice you could work from home if you were waiting for a boiler engineer, and everyone understood that the real answer was no.
The reasons given were always about the work. Collaboration. Culture. The whiteboard. The value of the conversation you overhear. Client confidence. Somebody, at some point, said the words “we’re a very in-person team” to me with a completely straight face.
And then in about five working days the entire industry moved every single person out of every single office and carried on shipping.
In about five working days the entire industry moved everybody out of every office and carried on shipping, having spent a decade explaining why that was impossible.
I keep thinking about the people who asked for this before. The colleague whose condition makes a commute genuinely expensive in a way it isn’t for me, who was told the role required presence. The one who wanted three days a week at home because of the school run and got a conversation about commitment. People who left jobs over this. People who left the industry over it.
They were right. They were told, professionally, in meetings, with reasons, that they were wrong, and now the thing they were asking for is compulsory and nobody has said anything about it.
I don’t think anyone was lying, exactly. I think it was believed, and it was believed because nobody had tried, and “we’ve never done that” spends decades disguised as “that doesn’t work.” Which is a thing I’d like to remember about myself as well as about my employers, because I’ve said a version of it about plenty of things.
But this isn’t working from home
The counter, and it’s important, and I’d rather make it myself than have it made at me.
What we are all doing right now is not remote working. It’s emergency working, from home, during a pandemic, with schools shut and nowhere open and no ability to leave the house, under a general low hum of dread.
Anyone doing this with children in the house is not working from home, they’re doing two jobs badly in one room and being told they’re lucky. Anyone in a shared house is working from a bedroom. Anyone who lives alone is now alone all day as well as all evening, and I think that one is going to turn out to be heavier than people are currently saying.
So the conclusions people draw from the next few months are going to be dodgy in both directions. It’ll be used to prove that remote work is fine, when what’s been proven is that it’s survivable under duress. And it’ll be used to prove that remote work is miserable, when a lot of what’s miserable is the pandemic.
I’d just like us to notice which one we’re measuring, later, when somebody produces a chart.
The day has no edges
The specific thing I’ve felt, personally, in 15 days.
I don’t miss the commute even slightly, and I’d been told for years that I secretly would. I’ve got an hour and ten minutes a day back and it’s the best thing that’s happened to my working life in five years.
What I’ve lost is the edge. The commute was a bad hour that did a good job: it was a physical transition that told my brain the day had started and, more importantly, that it had stopped. Closing a laptop on a table you’re going to eat dinner at in 40 minutes does not do that. The laptop is still there. It’s there at 9 pm. It’s there on Sunday.
And the ten-second question has inverted. I wrote something a few years ago about how a chat message makes asking cheap and being asked expensive, and how the volume goes up because the cost is paid by somebody else. That’s still true. But the opposite has appeared alongside it: the things that used to be a ten-second question across a desk now need a message, or a call, or a slot in somebody’s calendar. So the small clarifications don’t happen, and people guess instead, and you find out on Thursday that two people have been working from different assumptions since Monday.
What I’d like us to keep
I don’t know how long this goes on and I’m not going to guess.
But whenever it ends, I’d like the following to be a settled question rather than a favor: that a person who does better work from home some or most of the time should be able to, and should not have to justify it with a medical letter or a child or a boiler.
We have now run the experiment across an entire industry simultaneously. Whatever the results are, “it can’t be done” is off the table, and I’d like somebody to write that down before everyone forgets and the form comes back.
Anyway, I hope you’re alright, wherever you’re reading this from, and I hope the people you’re worried about are alright too. I’m going to move the laptop off the table at 6 tonight, which is a very small ambition and is the only one I’ve got 🥲