Working from home: The advice you haven’t heard

Welcome to home life! A lot of people find themselves working from home for the foreseeable future, a big change in a society that has long valued the office culture to a ridiculous extent.

Three years ago, after spending the better part of a year driving to Cincinnati 4-5 days a week, leaving the house at 5:30 a.m. and getting back after 6 p.m., my boss came up to my desk and said, “You know, I don’t care if you come into the office at all.” From that point forward, I worked for the company for another almost-three years, and I went back to the office exactly twice. I did not miss that drive.

In the spirit of full disclosure, I am now unemployed, but I can very confidently say that my unemployment has nothing to do with my work output during my home time. I worked fine in the office, and the fact that that work transitioned into being done in my living room did not hurt that. So with people working from home who never expected to, I figure my experience might be helpful — especially since my advice will not jibe with the popular opinions on the subject.

(One note: This is what worked for me. What works for literally any other person who works from home might be different. General advice is fraught with the peril of overgeneralization, and pretending you can actually advise “random person who reads thing” is a level of egotism I find off-putting. If what I say here does not work for you … well, do what works for you. This ain’t hard.)

First off, find what works for you

The first few days of working from home should largely be a fact-finding mission, a trial-and-error session of deciding whether you can work from a desk or the couch, the living room or a closed-off office, in shorts or pants. I know what works for me, and I plan to continue doing it my way as long as I can, but your conclusions might vary.

Be comfortable

Not so comfortable, obviously, that you fall asleep or what-have-you, but one of the perks of not having to go to the office is that you don’t have to dress like you’re going to the office. I spend my workdays in basketball shorts and usually (but not always) a T-shirt. Many work-from-homers say you absolutely have to get up, get showered, and dress in a manner that at least approximates job attire, but … I didn’t find that to be the case. When I’m able to work out in the morning (which happens increasingly rarely now that the twins decide they like to get up at 5), I work out, shower, and toss on my shorts and T-shirt. When I’m not able and don’t shower first thing … well, I wear the shorts I slept in. Be comfortable.

Be willing to change it up

My twins are two and a half now, and I should have named them Evel and Knievel. They are enormous jerks who will climb, grab, or otherwise disturb things whenever they can. As such, I most certainly cannot have my computer within their reach, because it would very quickly become an expensive smackin’ paddle. Last summer, I invested in an adjustable sit/stand desk, with the expectation that I would stand to work when they were around, sit when they were napping or otherwise out of the house, and maybe even migrate to the couch at bedtime. Well, naptime has completely disappeared in the last few months. They just don’t anymore (help!). So literally yesterday, I gave up and moved my desk chair to the shed. It will come back before too long, when the boys get just a little older and they can allow me to sit without attacking.

Don’t have 2-year-olds? Great! This is much easier. You’ll probably work at your desk most of the time, but a willingness to move around offers a freedom you don’t get in the office. When you go to work, you have a spot you sit and that’s where you work, with few and unexciting exceptions. At home? You can spend Monday at your desk, Tuesday on your couch, Wednesday at Starbucks. Or you can spend 8-10 a.m. at your desk, 10 a.m.-1 p.m. on your couch. The world is your oyster! You know, in a limited range.

(If you have office space in your home and can close yourself off from the rest of your home? Do it! Do it some. Working from home isn’t the place to completely isolate. That kind of defeats the purpose. If you have to really focus, or you have a meeting, or if you’re just fried of the family for a bit, definitely close off if you can. But if it’s an easy workday — we all have them — and you can work while being a parent/spouse/roommate/etc., take advantage of that.)

Don’t be afraid to not work

Work comes first. Work has to come first, or you’ll either be back in the office or back out of a job way too fast. But one of the benefits of working from home is that you can get things done that you can’t if you are out of the house. There are vanishingly few jobs that require you to work doggedly from start to lunch and then lunch to end. People would burn out of even the best jobs in a hurry if there was just no downtime.

So you’re going to have downtime during your work-from-home time that, in the office, you might use to grab a coffee, chat with a coworker, surf the internet. Those are all great, but in an office setting, you choose to do them because you have limited options. At home? Instead of mindless chitchat with an officemate you don’t even like, you can … do laundry. Or start dinner. Or heck, go for a mile run. Even if you walk it and you’re particularly slow, a mile is, what, 20 minutes? You can take a 20-minute break to get some fresh air and not work. You have more freedom at home. Use it.

Start work and stop work

This is one I struggled with mightily. Still do, such as it is. But one of the disadvantages of working from home is that in a sense you’re always at work. Can’t sleep at 4:30 a.m.? Well, you can get a jump on your day’s work. Think of something at 8 p.m.? Computer’s right there, knock it out. By all means, work some extra time on occasion if you have nothing else to do and/or have a particular task to complete. But as much as possible, figure out when you need to start working and when you need to stop working and stay within those hours. A job that would be a 9-to-5 in the office should still be as close to a 9-to-5 as possible at home.

(As I said, I really struggle with that one. Particularly in football season, I would start working by 7 in the morning and would often work — perhaps not constantly, but steadily — until I went to bed, because heck, there was work to be done. So this is definitely a “do as I say, not as I do” situation.)

Consider whether this can continue

The TSA relaxed rules on liquids on planes to allow people to carry more hand sanitizer than normal on board last week. Interest is suspended on student loans. Any number of things that places, businesses, governments are putting on hold now just go to illustrate how those things don’t have to exist in the first place. That goes for working from home as well. There are some jobs, many jobs that have to be done in an office or other sort of building. But there are a lot (a lot) of them that don’t, but we’ve continued doing them in person because of societal inertia — Beaver’s dad went to the office every day in a world of no internet and maybe a phone, so we have to go in to the office despite the fact that we just sit at a computer all day and can do that anywhere.

There are going to be plenty of workplaces that, when this all passes (whenever that is), insist on employees coming back into the office for no other reason than that’s what they expect to do. But there’s a chance that you’ll spend the next two weeks, a month, whatever, working from home, and you and your boss realize there’s no reason to occupy a workspace that can be accomplished with you at home on your couch (or whatever). Whether that means you can go from driving five minutes to your office, or you can now justify working “in” New York City but paying for housing in a much cheaper place like West Virginia, I don’t know, but it does mean you might soon have more options available to you if you want them.

Don’t attach yourself to any of these

It’s worth reiterating. Shea Serrano works from home, in the sense that he doesn’t go to the office, but he has three kids at home so he rents out his own office space and goes to a different office. Craig Calcaterra works from home and gets dressed in work-ish clothes every day. Mikala Jamison works from home and believes in a dedicated work-only space and no access to social media during work. I don’t subscribe to any of those approaches and have found that my work hasn’t suffered. You might be learning as you go this week, working from home in a way you never expected. There are a world of work-from-home guides out there (I should know; I pitched this piece to a couple of places that might pay money for it only to be shut down because the market was already saturated), and every single one of them comes from a place of (a) good intentions and (b) experience. But one size never fits all. If you realize that you can work perfectly fine from home completely naked, on your couch, watching Masked Singer, then do that. You know you better than any of us know you. Find it out.