I’ve had a few days where I’ve worked from home lately. One and a half due to weather and one due to a stomach bug that left me mostly fine but unwilling to share bathrooms/run the risk of not being able to find a toilet in time. These are the first days I’ve worked from home in a while and the first ones where I was actually able to work on my highest-priority work while working from home in a year and a half or thereabouts. You see, the project I’ve been working on for that time has necessitated me being in the office. I can’t exactly bring it home with me and, even if I did bring some stuff home, it wouldn’t be terribly useful for all the work I had to do. So, on days that I felt less than stellar, needed some time to myself, needed a mental health break from being around people, or just felt crummy, I still went into the office. That’s the job, you know? Gotta go to where the work is and do the work, at least as long as you’re not sick or contagious or putting yourself (or someone else) in harm’s way by doing so. And I was not, so I went into the office and suffered through a lot of days where I’d have much rather been working from the comfort of my home. Now that I’ve got a bit of a reprieve from that sort of work, though, I’m absolutely working from home every chance I can get.

Generally speaking, I can focus a lot more at home. In addition to having a better work station at home (with a good chair and a desk at more-or-less the right height for that chair), I also tend to be able to focus better at home, despite all the other things I might rather be doing than work. What tends to pull my attention away is motion or the presence of other people, neither of which are an issue I’m likely to encounter at home but are both things I’d be encountering almost non-stop at work. There’s always someone moving around, one of my coworkers is often stopping by my office to chat or to ask a question, and I’m always getting restless or feeling stifled in my office and wandering around to fix that, which usually winds up with me distracting someone else. At home, when I need to get up from my desk, I’ll walk up or down my stairs, wander briefly into another room, or just go sit in a different, more comfortable chair for a little bit. All things that don’t wind up taking more than a few minutes and don’t really break my chain of thought. I get a lot of good thinking done during those breaks at home and relatively little to none of it done at work. It’s rude to talk to someone and not actively pay attention to them, after all.

I don’t know that I could completely work from home, at least not with the way my life currently is. Work is my only reason to leave the house most weeks and 2020 proved that I would probably do poorly cooped up in my apartment all by myself. That said, I do have a lot of experience with coping with that problem, specifically, and doing with some of the broader problems of being fairly isolated that I’ve developed in the years since. I’d get back to my midday walks, probably make a point of visiting friends every weekend, and try to find an activity to do outside my apartment at least one night a week. Maybe also go for more walks, perhaps shorter ones at a greater frequency rather than just doing one longer walk around noon. Getting my exercise routine back to its original strength and consistency would also be super important since that would be my main source of activity for the day. Walking’s great and all, but it’s more about sunlight, fresh air, and leaving my home than it is about healthy exercise. It certainly doesn’t hurt on that account, but it’s not the main purpose and I learned last time around just how important it is to tire myself out enough that my body is ready for sleep at night.

All of which is incredibly hypothetical. If I work from home any time soon, for reasons other than weather or feeling unwell, it will only be for a few days at a time. My boss doesn’t much care for working from home (he’s an extrovert) and it’s difficult for me to overcome my “must please the authority figures in my life, even when they’re not actually asking me for something” reaction. Not so difficult that I won’t work from home when I think I really need the quiet or the rest (or both), but enough so that I’m only going to ask when I need it rather than when I just want it. So all this hypothetical consideration doesn’t mean much unless I suddenly change jobs and that’s even less likely to happen than ever, given how bad things are in the US job market these days (and likely to get, what with things are getting more and more tumultuous in the economy as the current governments tries to pull itself apart). It’s not like I feel secure in the idea of changing jobs any time soon since I’ve got no idea what business might actually stay afloat or which ones might suddenly decide the discrimination is an okay thing to do since the enforcement arm of the law is currently doing nothing but persecuting people who haven’t done anything actually wrong. It’s a difficult market to want to move around in, right now. So I’ll just keep my working from home to a few days when I need it and keep imagining a world where that might change some day.