Work From Home

Covid-19 has forced me and most of the world into staying at home. Since most of my work does not require my physical body to be present at the company office, we are all working from home. I was pretty skeptical about the amount of work I’d get done considering I will be working from Mysore and I have too many distractions over there (TV and PC mostly) and the past couple of weeks have just confirmed my beliefs.

I had read tens of articles on Hacker News and hundreds of answers on Quora describing how amazing it is to work from home. No set timings, no nagging manager looking over your shoulder all the time (disclaimer: my manager doesn’t do it, yeah he’s amazing), no colleagues disturbing you every 5 minutes (not that anyone disturbs me), no meetings unless absolutely necessary and even those meetings are on calls. It’s a dream come true for any guy who wants to get their work done without any distractions.

Or so I thought.

When I was working from the office, there was a working environment that forced me to stop daydreaming or any other unproductive tasks, and work. That was actually a good thing for me. The work would start at 11-ish and I would toil till 7-8 in the evening. When I returned home, unless the work was high priority, I would stop thinking about anything related to it until the next day. This gave my mind a chance to rest and relax before tackling it again.

But ever since I’ve started working from home, my life is becoming messier by the minute. Although I like my work (it’s fucking awesome) and am motivated enough to get it done, my disorganized and unfocused ass, for the life of me, will not let me sit still for more than 20 minutes. This means every 10-20 minutes I’ll end up on Instagram or YouTube or Hacker News (I still can’t believe that I can get distracted by a website that focuses on latest trends in tech world, which includes most of the geeky stuffs). Not to mention, now that I have no set timings, I wake up at 10AM. 10 FREAKING AM! I mean, I’m not a stranger to that routine, but this results in me starting work at 11.30-12AM. Compared to my office timings, that is not so bad, but you need to understand that to actually get into the flow, I’ll need at-least 30-45 minutes. Couple that with my distractions, I end up doing far less work than I would for the same amount of time in the office. This leads me to my greatest problem: the guilt.

Now that I work less at my home due to . . . me, I feel guilty. In order to feel less guilty, I start working more. But I don’t start focusing more while I work, nor do I stop the distractions, because those are too tough to do. Instead, I increase my work hours. Now, my end time goes from 7-8PM to 9-10PM. Why you ask? Because I’m an idiot.

So due to working from home, I am now working more than I used to, I have no human interaction apart from my family (not that I interacted too much before), I have lost all sense of time (I’m thinking of announcing a reward for any information regarding this, last seen before lockdown), I don’t even want to think what happened to my biological clock and I’M STILL NOT GETTING ENOUGH WORK DONE!!

I hate work from home.