The most high tech dressing room
Here I am, sitting next to a dozen hanging coats, a box of scarves and a disorganised pile of shoes, while typing this text. The air smells like leather and a touch of moth repellent. Strangely enough, it doesn’t smell bad!
Whenever I tilt my head, like I usually do when I need to think, the upper-most case of the shelving unit catches my eyes, as it is stuffed with my son’s colourful jackets and boots, and reminds me of why I need to keep going.
The rest of the room barely fits a desk and a chair, a wide screen, laptop, various peripherals, and a pile of documents.
Honestly, it must be really funny for our friends who come to visit. If I leave the door open, the first thing they’ll see after going through the main door is the inside of my cubicle / dressing room 🧥.
Yet, I wouldn't trade it for any desk in an office space. I would have to drive there at the same time as everyone else in the city. Sit in the traffic for hours every day. Rush to be back in time to pick up the kid. Make a detour through the crowded grocery store… thanks, but no thanks. I’ve been working from home for too long.
Yesterday I drove a friend to the airport during rush hour and got stuck in traffic for way too long. This reminded me of what I used to experience when I was working at a corporate office. And quite frankly, even if some of the arguments put forward by back-to-the-office advocates were true (and they aren’t), there's no way they could compensate for pollution and the human distress caused by these daily commutes.
During the pandemic, we saw the carbon dioxide levels drop. If you factor in the long term effects on asthma, cancer, traffic accidents, and the quality of life in general, I’m not even sure the economic argument of a so-called decline in productivity still holds.
Of course, transitioning from the office setting to the remote paradigm takes some effort. First of all, your employer must allow it. If it doesn’t, there aren’t that many solutions:
Change job
Become your own boss
The latter being even more challenging, as you’ll also need to find new ways to make money. It is also a very liberating feeling, but that’s a story for another day.
Personally, what I did back then was to ask my employer to lower my salary in exchange of working 4 days a week for them. Leaving me 1 day to work on developing another stream of revenue. It can be a way to ease the transition into both remote work and self employment, if said employer doesn’t expect you to squeeze 5 days of work into 4…
Habits must also change to fully embrace an async work mindset. It has to be an effort of the whole organisation though. If you’re the only employee working remotely in an on-premise team and nobody changes the way they communicate, the game is rigged.
If you have no power on the internal processes and tools, then again, there’s not much to do except switch to a new company (possibly your own).
One last thing that is really important from the get go, is setting boundaries.
Time boundaries: “I only work from 9 to 5 max”
Spatial boundaries: “This area is my home office and I won’t bring the laptop in bed”
I heard some remote work influencers say they work from everywhere in the house, depending on the type of work they do. While I agree it’s great to bathe in the sun with a glass of juice when answering emails, I never do it. I prefer staying in my hyper-focused zone until I did what I had to do, or I reach my time limit. If I’m not able to work correctly, I give myself the permission to rest a bit in the living room though.
9 times out of 10, I know exactly what to do next when I open my eyes again.
I then cuddle my dog. I make sure he doesn’t want to go for a walk, and I fill his water bowl. Five more steps and I’m at my desk, in my dressing room of an office, ready to work on the next thing. Until it’s time to pick up my son again and let him tell me what he did during the day. The new bruises he made from falling. The new squiggly drawings. The songs and games.
I’m glad I’m not stuck in traffic. I’m glad I work remotely.