What is Work-from-Home revealing to you about yourself?

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Photo by Daria Nepriakhina on Unsplash



There is a saying that money does not ruin people, it just enables them to reveal who they truly are. From this, we can derive that the same goes for freedom, as money merely is a tool acts as a lever to increase one's freedom.

The New Freedom

Over the last 3 months, with the sudden arrival of work-from-home as the only option for all knowledge-workers, you suddenly have more freedom than ever before. There are things to be said about how the offices are handling it - suddenly having specific office closing time. There is also the issue of the undertone of panic that each one of us is going through with the pandemic touching our near and dear ones. There is the pressure of increased household chores. However, in this discussion, I want you to focus inward, and think about what this unprecedented time of being mostly by yourself and with your close family, with minimum time outside the home - has revealed to you about yourself.

Yes, specifically what it has revealed to you, not to your colleagues or others. Having been around the social media for over a decade now, we are all masters of keeping a positive image outside with wreckage on the inside - so be honest with yourself, get out of the image of yourself and rather focus on the reality of what you have experienced yourself to be like over the past months.
Unless the company is logging your PC, no one knows how long you are sitting at your desk working and how long you are spending just panicking over the latest outcry on the internet.

The boss is not keeping an eye on your arrival and exit times. There are only sporadic conference calls, which you can join at the last second, say hi, and turn the video off - to focus on something else. If you get caught missing a key discussion point, blame it on the internet connection rather than your own distraction.

A Quick Self-Assessment

Take a little time and think back, here is a small checklist that you can go through and mark yourself:
  1. Are you having less office work than before? (If the whole company is experiencing a lower level of activity, this can be excused.)
  2. Are you missing deadlines and forgetting small tasks more often than before?
  3. Do you feel like your health is deteriorating amidst all the worries? E.g. more time being dizzy, late to sleep and late to wake up.
  4. Have you lost touch with a lot of your informal colleague-buddies?
  5. Are you in touch with family members at least on a weekly basis?
  6. Are you spending a lot of your time counting days just waiting for this nightmare to be over?
  7. Are you consuming more scattered information than long-form and in-depth articles or books?

If the answer is yes to more than 3 of the questions above: then there is a serious need to pause and rethink here. Do what you can to help the people in the outside world - but you also need to look inward and deal with your lack of discipline, and your lack of control over your mood and emotions first. Only that will make you help everyone else even better than before.

Looking into Your Excuses

If you are complaining about all the problems, did you really think you would never face any problems in life? Or that no bigger problem can ever befall you? Do you really want to be this stressed about it? Or would you rather go ahead and deal with it? As the neuroscientist Sam Harris puts it. Of course, you knew there will be accidents, problems, and worries in life. That is LIFE.

If you are letting go of your health and your important contacts, remember "how you do the small things is how you do everything". Consistency is a series of small efforts that over time add up to create a big impact. Marketing Guru Seth Godin calls it the Drip. Like any subscription you sign up for, once you sign the $5 a month contract - it actually means thousands of dollars for the company in the long run. If you are wasteful of your time and thoughts today - it means they all add up to the big picture a less well-lived life.

Here is an age-old quick example of the compounding effect of small change:



If you are thinking these are not the "right times" for you, and that you would rather take the opportunity to doze off and burn your days, think about how little time any-one of us really have in this world. As Ryan Holiday puts it as "alive time" vs "dead time":
More than two thousand years ago, Cato the Elder advised that in rainy weather, farmers must “try to find something to do indoors. Clean up, rather than be idle. Remember that even though work stops, expenses run on nonetheless.”


Here is a brilliant example from WaitButWhy blog, where the author Tim Urban shows how small life looks when you detail it out in weeks, and plot in where many of the most famous people died. How many of these dots (weeks) are you willing to go to waste?




Do not be a leaky roof for your office. Do not be the person where work goes to die - so only the last tasks can be assigned to you. If you need to take time off, take a leave and sort yourself out. Just because it is home-office it does not mean you cannot ask for a week's annual leave to be stable again.
In many situations, a leaky roof is worse than no roof at all. If there’s no roof, we’re not surprised or disappointed if we get hit with some raindrops. But a roof that leaks has raised expectations and then failed to meet them. Promising us a roof and then breaking that promise might be worse than no roof at all. - Seth Godin

The optimist in me hopes the crisis of COVID19 ends soon, and we all go back to our old lives. But it is important you do not forget what this time has revealed to you. Take the time to think and fill in the gaps you see. For tomorrow when all the regular noise returns, you may not be able to see those gaps anymore.

There it is, my lengthy rant about things I am seeing– and a lot of it is a reminder for myself now and in the future, as we all tend to forget our own acquired lessons through time. If you have skimmed or read through to this part, thank you and congratulations. I hope you can take something from it. It was a quick write-up, if you find any typo or factual errors, or if you think I am missing something - feel free to put it in my inbox or in the comments. I will update it in the next version.

Radi Shafiq
Dhaka, Bangladesh
21 June 2020

#career #development #workfromhome #covid19 #growth