This is Not Normal Telecommuting

Flamethrowers are standard issue for telecommuters…

Those of us who are work-from-home-introverts can be found online joking about how we’ve been preparing for this Coronavirus thing for our entire lives. And yes, I suspect the transition to working from home will be easier on introverts, and will be almost no change for existing telecommuters. That said, working from home this past week was not normal. Even for those of us who normally work from home.

Some things you might be feeling are normal when starting to work from home:

  • Feeling like you’re not really working because you’re sitting at the same table where you just ate Lucky Charms with your kids
  • Worried that your coworkers think you’re slacking off
  • Mortified at the thought of your kids and/or animals interrupting a meeting
  • Being distracted by being home
  • Feeling alone, so alone, so lonely
  • Having a profound fear that you’re actually a senile old person who is being humored by caregivers into thinking you’re actually doing a job when you’re really just sitting at a table in an old folks home typing on an Etch-a-Sketch and video conferencing at an old photograph of a team building event you attended back in 1982
  • Ok, that last one was just me. Sorry if I’ve introduced that into your own psychosis

Some things, however, are NOT part of the normal transition into telecommuting:

Difficulty Focusing

Don’t get me wrong, it’s easy to get distracted when you work from home. The distractions can be anything from falling into a YouTube hole, to overthinking your interaction with a coworker that seemed like maybe it was tense but you can’t tell because you’re not there to read their body language. Working from home during the Coronavirus is different though.

  • You probably don’t have an established location to work. When you telecommute regularly, you have a work space, even if it is something you set up and tear down every day. After a couple days, you’ll get better at “being at work”.
  • Your kids are probably home with you. This is HUGE. Normally when you work from home, you don’t have your kids with you. During this time of social separation, your kids and possibly spouse are just THERE all the time. That’s not normal, and it’s affecting my productivity as well. And I have a separate office in a remote part of the house.
  • Your company is not prepared to have their entire workforce work from home. As someone who is particularly vulnerable to this virus, I’m grateful and quite honestly proud of companies who are allowing people to work from home. But it’s a sudden adjustment with no time to prep. It will NOT be smooth. It WILL affect productivity. At first, productivity will go down. (That said, I think telecommuting in general is underutilized, and it can help productivity — but this is a special circumstance)
  • YOU ARE THINKING ABOUT COVID-19 ALL THE TIME. And of course you are. So am I. It’s changing the way we live our daily lives. You’re reading this from your kitchen table for Pete’s sake. Our world has been turned bonker-town nutsy-whack. When you’re thinking about if your kid’s cough means he infected Grandma last week, or if you have enough food and toilet paper to stay indoors for a few weeks — it’s going to affect your productivity. Even if you were still in the office. In fact, if you were in the office, and not safe at home, your productivity would probably be even LOWER than it is now.

So basically, welcome to the world of telecommuting. Also, this is not the world of telecommuting. You’re getting a crappy, dystopian version of working from home. When this current emergency is behind us, there might be some changes to how we think about work. There may be opportunities for more employees to transition to telecommuting. Know that while it is a strange adjustment, the weird version you’re experiencing now is not normal. But that’s OK. We’re all in this together, even though we have to be apart. Thank goodness for technology. Hit me up on Twitter or Facebook if you want some social interaction. I’ll even be livestreaming a lot more, just to have a place to spend time together.

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