The only things that were on my desk was my laptop, its charger and my phone (that I always ignore anyways, I hate looking at my phone). I just don’t feel like working when I’m at home. I mentioned, it may be because I “marked” the room in my head as a place to relax and rest (I mentioned that I may have a different behavior if maybe I wasn’t in the same room). I don’t have another room, I live in a studio apartment, I would really love to try that. What I’ve did this weekend was move furniture around, hoping that will at least alleviate some of my lack of concentration (I sometimes feel like falling asleep, and I got plenty of sunlight during work hours).
Nah, it’s fine, I don’t consider myself the ideal employee either. I’ll proudly say that I’m a lazy guy, which is the reason why I always look into automating things and making life easier (for both myself and the people that will come after me). With that said, I wouldn’t skip on the things that I must do. I also love what I’m doing (with very, very few exceptions). But my productivity is still very bad when I’m at home.
I’m not saying there aren’t people who aren’t more productive at home. That would be a stupid thing to say. What I’m saying is that we can’t know whether “the majority” is part of one or the other, which is why I’m a strong supporter of choice. Let people choose their work environment. Let people try them and only if they appear to be sloths under both circumstances, then maybe fire them (if indeed, they are slacking on their job). This is why I asked for the studies, because after all, studies are just random data collected from some points. These statistics on “wfh productivity” are a soft science, people’s opinions change. And moreover, I’m rather curious as to “who was asked” - people in a city? People in a country? Continent? A few people in different cities? Also, “how was it asked?” Did people report to feel more productive, or was there some substantial evidence, like solving more of the same issues in the same or less time than usual? These aren’t hard measures and the studies can be repeated countless times and give different results. If an experiment does not produce the same results, I don’t trust any of the results. But we don’t need to do experiments, we just need people to be free - though that is taboo to ask during the lockdown.
I can understand your frustration when you’re at work (more like, I understand where you’re coming from). To me that’s not a problem, because I got my own office, shared with my colleague and maybe 1 more person from time to time (we invite people over when they need to concentrate, we got both our IT office and the “library” for that). People do interrupt me from my work when I’m at the office (they just barge in), but even with that, I still get to concentrate and do more stuff when I’m there than when I’m alone at home. When I’m home, time seems to fly so fast and I barely manage to do anything. It is frustrating and I’m feeling bad for this (I don’t like cheating or receiving money for work I don’t do, but what can I do in such circumstances?).
I can order from home. In fact, we do order laptops for new employees while at home and configure them at home. But for servers, that is a different story, especially when none of the IT Department dudes (me and my colleague) have cars, we use public transport. I’m certain you don’t need an explanation why carrying craptons of HDDs and SSDs, some RAM sticks and network cards in our backpacks is a terrible idea. And we can’t order them at work, because nobody can answer to take them. And again, we wouldn’t be in this situation if it weren’t for the previous mistakes. We are just praying that nothing will fail or become insufficient during the lockdown. We are twice as vigilant at our monitoring system during this time (which only makes me feel more frustrated, because I’m not there on the spot to fix things).
Edit: typos
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