Something on these crazy times

Working from home, smart lockdowns and baking powder

Some weeks ago I received an email from a recruiter (probably, if this was you and you are not a recruiter, sorry) saying “Hope you are good in these crazy times”. I liked it, and since then, this has been the first sentence of all the cold emails I’m sending around during these days. Crazy days.

This weekend has been my fifth of quarantine because of the COVID-19 worldwide crisis. I still feel bad for saying quarantine considering that here, in the Netherlands, we are not actually locked at home: the Dutch government has opted for a smart lockdown, leaving it to the citizens’ civic sense to decide when actually leaving their homes (bars and restaurants are closed anyway, of course). Last week has been the fourth full week in which I worked from home, and there aren’t a lot of clarifications to make on this statement. If I had a time machine to go back to my four-weeks-ago self, to ask him how he would imagine the upcoming month, he would probably be way more pessimistic than how things actually went. Truth is: not this bad. Hypotheses are always worse than reality, under almost all circumstances. On the other hand, it is also true that humans have this amazing ability to get used to basically everything. Whatever seems uncomfortable, weird, hard to stand, it is just a matter of reiterating it a certain amount of times, getting used to it, making it a habit, to start considering it normal and completely acceptable. The same goes for exciting things, of course, that at the beginning are amazing and almost unbelievable and then slowly start to get normal and boring. Could be just me though.

If I had a time machine to go back to my four-weeks-ago self, to ask him how he would imagine the upcoming month, he would probably be way more pessimistic than how things actually went. Truth is: not this bad.

I have never been a fan of working from home. Flexibility is cool, but having a well defined workplace where you have to dress up in order to go and where you are supposed to focus and be productive helps me a lot. Since I was a student I have always had the tendency to overwork, or the complete opposite: wasting hours in scrolling my Twitter feed. Working from home doesn’t help much in both the cases. Waking up, spending 30 mins at home, going to the office, being productive there, going back home and doing your stuff is still a routine I strongly believe in. But I would lie if I said that during these weeks I haven’t changed my opinion a little bit. Being productive is a function that depends on you more than on the place you are in that moment. You can be productive at home exactly as you are in an office or in a cafe. The surroundings help, but they are not the cause. On a very personal level, I discovered that getting in the zone is very related to my mood and to the attitude I have towards what I have to do: if it is an easy task or an hard one, if I know I can do it quickly or needs some investigation, how strict is the deadline, if me delaying it is causing other people to wait, etc. Being in a place where I have a generic pressure to delivery helps, but it is very very minimal looking at all these variables together.

Being productive is a function that depends on you more than on the place you are in that moment.

In the last month my team and me accomplished quite important results and closed some tricky tasks while we were fully remote; we had meetings, we took some decisions over the upcoming months. I don’t have the feeling that we would have been quicker, or better, if we were at the office. It is a matter of getting things done and having serious and dedicated people that care about what they are doing. I don’t have the presumption to say that would have been possible with different teammates, less dedicated, results oriented, and somehow less in love for what they are doing and the company they are working for. But you see yourself that working from home isn’t the biggest problem there. It’s true that I might have solved some issues during the weekend or late in the evenings, but I definitely wouldn’t say that I am working more now, or that my work-life balance is deteriorating.

Interestingly enough, what is probably deteriorating is the quality of the time spent not-working-when-supposed-to. When you waste time at home you are just wasting time, or, best case, using it for your self-improvement. When you waste time at the office (i mean, no one actually works 8 hours a day, 5 days a week) there are good chances that you are spending it with your colleagues, and you are randomly talking about work-related stuff. Some ideas or projects that we did in the last year, very likely came from these sessions. We probably wouldn’t have had those ideas if we worked remotely during that period, if we didn’t take that coffee together, didn’t go to the supermarket to buy energy drinks, you name it. This is probably the biggest impact that working from home will have on businesses: the lack of creative ideas and random improvements that spending time with your colleagues leads to.

This is probably the biggest impact that working from home will have on businesses: the lack of creative ideas and random improvements that spending time with your colleagues leads to.

One of the trickiest aspects of this crazy period is that no one knows how much it will last and how big of a problem this will be. As somehow privileged human beings of this epoch we are used to live in very well scheduled times where basically everything has a start, an end, a cause and some quite clear consequences. This crisis didn’t start as a consequence of an easily distinguishable moment, there isn’t anyone to blame for, and most importantly, we don’t know when it will end. We are just living it, struggling a bit but definitely managing. I was having a conversation the other day with a friend of mine and I told him that I feel like the past and the future are equally distant now, and he kinda agreed with me. We are living in this limbo and we are starting to feel comfortable in it, developing habits, routines, and putting some metaphorical furniture into it. What will happen when this period will finish? It will be gradual, for sure, but not just because of the fear of a second wave, but mainly because we will need it to be gradual. I personally cannot imagine myself in a place with 50 people now, going to a concert or to the stadium. I already over-think a lot of scenes in movies or tv-shows because of gatherings and social distancing. It will be interesting to see how this will apply to our life. It is just the power of habit, and we will get back to normality way quicker than all these hypotheses, but this period definitely taught me a lot about me, people and society even if in a very unnecessarily brutal way.

What will happen when this period will finish? It will be gradual, for sure, but not just because of the fear of a second wave, but mainly because we will need it to be gradual.

There is a lot of rhetoric over social media about this, mainly on how these times should show to people what they actually care about, that we are usually surrounded by a lot of useless stuff and that we should be more thankful for what we have. During this period and (again) on a very personal level, I learned (1) a couple of things that will be definitely useful when I’ll eventually have grandkids and (2) I discovered that a lot of stuff I didn’t like before wasn’t because I didn’t have time to appreciate them but because of a genuine dislike. In random order:

• Baking powder and yeast are two different things and one cannot easily replace the other. The first one grows in the oven while the latter grows outside. So yes, it is pointless to wait for a dough to grow for two hours if you put baking powder in it;
• Documentaries on Netflix for how well done they are make me fall asleep after 20 mins;
• If you wash a winter coat in the washing machine it doesn’t come out exactly as it went in;
• Audiobooks are not a good replacement for books, they are a completely different thing that I have all the rights not to like. I started an audiobook on Spotify and after 1 minute I downloaded the ebook from Amazon;
• Same goes for podcasts. Make the script available, at least.