A Man's Home Is His Office
Thoughts on working from home three years in
As you may know, this newsletter, along with freelance writing and a couple of other gigs, is effectively my job. And this newsletter is one year old. However, I’ve been working from home for three years, ever since spring of 2019, when I was still a full-time magazine editor. From our home in Reston, Virginia, it took over an hour to get to my office in downtown Washington, D.C., where I would simply log into all my applications and work on a computer all day.
“Let me work from home so I can wake up at 7 and start work,” I basically asked, and my manager agreed. Ironically, the week before the first wave of COVID lockdowns hit in March 2020, everyone was asked to start coming in more often. I did for a week, and then COVID had everybody fully remote almost up until I left that job in early 2021.
I think remote work is great, and I think it should be an option for workers whose jobs make it feasible. The conflation you often see in the media or by corporate bosses of “going into a physical office” with “returning to work” is offensive to people who have, by many accounts, worked even more productively, from home, throughout a public health crisis. Remote work means more family time, more time to cook and/or have meals together, the ability to run errands at off-peak times, and a lot of savings on things like commuting and dry cleaning. It’s made a difference in our finances. It would be hard for me to go back to an office every day.
But after two years of COVID-era working from home (and one year before that) I can see some of the downsides or challenges. Given what I do, networking and being seen by coworkers and managers isn’t an issue. So I can’t speak to the professional downsides of remote work, but I can imagine there are some. Mainly I’ve begun to see why some people actually like having an office. Part of it is being able to focus on work, and part of it is being able to turn work off at the end of the day. (Although smartphones have badly damaged that boundary.)
At home, those boundaries are blurred. And when you write for a living, there’s no “work day.” You’re always sort of working. Every scroll through social media is a chance to craft your personal brand. Every day trip is a possible photo essay. I enjoy my work so much that after a day of work, I often relax by doing…more work. The little ritual, the mental border, of turning off your work computer, rounding up your stuff, and heading out doesn’t happen at home.
My wife’s company has also basically gone remote. They got a smaller office, in a less prime location in Reston, without enough room for everybody to come in every day. Most of her team is fully remote and expects to be for the foreseeable future. One of them moved to the next county over, anticipating few or no commuting days.
Back when they were downsizing, everyone was asked to clear out their offices (not because anybody was being laid off!) All of that office stuff—multiple monitors and stands, a laptop docking station, mice and keyboards, audio equipment, etc.—came home with us. It’s all under the bed or in a box in the closet. Most of it is unnecessary, and it takes up space in our little condo. Does anybody at corporate know it’s in our house? Will they ask for it back some day?
It seems pretty clear that one of the reasons for the housing market insanity right now—in addition to general housing shortfalls—is actually, seemingly contra some of what I might write, a shortage of spacious homes, whether single-family or larger townhomes. I’ve spent years studying or working at a table, hunched over a laptop, with or without a mouse.
But as I near 30, I can’t really spend the whole day at the dinner table hunched over a laptop. Because the table is near the kitchen, I can’t neaten up the freezer or clean the counter while my wife is having a meeting. Some days, from an early wake-up to dinner, you’re just at that table all day. If you’re going remote for the long haul, you need a true home office.
And in exchange for no commute, remote work outsources the office space and equipment question onto the worker. If you buy or rent a larger home in order to make it feasible for two people to work remotely in a house every day, are you saving anything in the long run?
I’ve been looking at real-estate listings in Fairfax County, and the listings go out of their way to let you know you’ll have an office. Many are the usual spare bedroom with a desk. But others are repurposed formal dining rooms, desks and laptops conspicuously set up in a minimally finished basement, etc. Like so:
It’s also strange how remote work, combined of course with COVID, has shrunken my world. It’s so easy to sit at the laptop during work hours and do nothing, and then go run an errand and feel guilty for not working. I think of all the different people and places I used to see on an average day in grad school or working in the city, and so many days now are just 12-hour, breakfast-to-dinner-with-work-in-the-middle table days.
Once you add kids in the mix, I can imagine it gets very, very difficult to summon the kind of concentration and unbroken time you need to get through a day’s work. There’s already packages, cats, appliance breakdowns—all the stuff that you can leave at home when you’re far away in an office. It creates a sort of domestic gravitational pull; it produces a certain feeling friction when you go to leave the home.
Now I’m lucky—very lucky—because my work is flexible, and when I’m just too bored at the desk, I can take a trip that will yield material to write about. But even so, I’ve become aware of these difficulties, and I’m trying more consciously to put some variation and notoriety in my days. It’s getting easier as the pandemic is ebbing away, but it takes some effort.
I’m curious, if you’ve been working remotely and/or are self-employed in the way that I am, how do you handle these challenges? Has remote work changed the way you think about housing, office policy, transportation, work-life balance? Leave a comment, send an email!
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Like so many things, I think it depends on the individual. For me, remote work is almost all benefit and no cost. I feel more productive, less stressed, spend less money filling up my car and waste less time driving. Most importantly, I find maintaining a self-care regimen (exercise, home-cooked meals, a full night's sleep) is much easier when I'm not coming home from the office every evening feeling physically and emotionally drained after being sedentary all day, dealing with silly office politics, and having a supervisor breathing down the back of my neck. When I have downtime at home, I can do other things, like household chores, instead of having to invent some redundant task for myself or my team purely for the sake of appearing busy. I end up accomplishing more in less time. Freedom, efficiency, flexibility, all major quality-of-life enhancers. That said, I've known plenty of people who really do seem to thrive in cubeland. I don't get it, just like I don't get wanting to live in a detached single family home, but I wouldn't want to take that option away from anyone. Ideally, I think everyone should be able to do what works for them. Some employers don't seem to like that because it means giving up some degree of control, but those who are willing to try it usually end up sticking with it because happier employees tend to be better employees.
So, I only have limited direct experience with this topic, as I'm active-duty military and a major chunk of my day-to-day work requires access to classified information, which just can't be done from home really. During the height of the pandemic, when my command was trying to minimize the number of people present in the building, I did some "working from home" that was really just doing limited amounts of administrative work (personnel fitness reports, awards, etc) and some unclassified online training. Otherwise, I was more or less just hanging out at home.
My sister, on the other hand, is a full-blown work from home machine. She does medical coding (ie, telling the insurance companies what a doctor did so the doctor gets paid) and she has a fully set-up home office. Having visited her and seen her in action with this, she is very disciplined about going into that dedicated room, shutting the doors, and focusing on work. When she's done, she comes out and doesn't tend to go in unless she needs to work some more. So, in that regard, she has some of the compartmentalization that you talk about that can sometimes go missing in a work from home environment. It also helps that she and my BIL don't have any kids (other than their dogs lol).