[yurlungur]

You know, last week when we were starting to WFH I thought of it as a blessing in disguise since I always liked staying indoors and often take a day or two to WFH per week to focus on docs etc.

However, once everyone is WFH the experience turned out to be less than ideal to say the least. I found that I worked more, worked more at overtime hours and have been more stressed out than usual.

I think it really had nothing to do with my habits and preparedness. I already had everything set up (multiple displays, standing desk etc which I've had for a long time) and had almost no productivity drop on my side. However, now all my colleagues are pinging me, the video meetings take longer to finish since people are talking over each other and now I'm asked to write much more documentation and communications for rather trivial matters instead of just talking to someone face to face for a couple of minutes. People (management) also have less respect for normal work hours.

In the end I think if your company doesn't have the preparedness and more importantly the systems ready for remote work, you won't be ready for full remote work either.

I just hope people will begin to adjust to the new normal better as time goes on.

[jasonkester]

> I found that I worked more, worked more at overtime hours and have been more stressed out than usual.

Here's how I deal with this:

The work computer lives in my office, which I close up and leave at the end of the work day. None of my other devices have access to work email, and none of them receive any form of work related notification ever.

If you ping me about something after I've signed off for the evening, you'll get a response in the morning after I've had my coffee.

Everybody else is free to work around the clock if they like. If they need me, they can catch me while I'm at work.

[SoulMan]

Exactly my situation. I am used to working from home and earlier I did only when I had independent work to focus on and not many meetings scheduled on that day. Now it does not work as it seems (it has always been) the other side is not prepared. I know for some people documentation (even simple MOM or writing description in the story ) is an overhead for them. Even some architect level folk love to just talk for an hour in random topics in meetings without any conclusive decision jotted down in notes for future reference. Later after implementation there is always confusion what had we decided to be the behaviour like. Junior engineers do not respond to email or public chat as they think something as to be serious and escalated to do so else just ignore. Overall it seems my family has ben more supporting and confortable than the team while working from home. I don't have dogs and my kinds are happy to be engaged with their grand parents as schools are closed (One of the advantage of traditional Indian famly)

[feanaro]

It seems expected that the whole company, viewed as a system, has to adjust to remote work. This cannot happen instantly. It does sound like the kind of thing that is resolvable, though.

[miranda_rights]

I feel similar. I worked best wfh 1 day a week, whenever I had a sizeable chunk of work that required concentration time, as my open office is impossible for that. I run to work otherwise, so my commute was also my gym time, so I feel like I've lost a lot in moving to complete remote during the pandemic.

I also felt comfortable turning off Slack notifications for a few hours to focus, and so on. Now, we(my manager for the team)'ve established a rule that we have to prioritize responding to pings (leaving Slack on all the time) so I feel like I've lost that quiet concentration time. I'm thoroughly not enjoying WFH for days at a time, but I appreciate that my company is letting me wfh to stay healthy. I also appreciate that I got this data point, so I can seriously think about this if I ever want a remote job.

[croh]

Wholeheartly agree. Other side not prepared problem is so true. Having less respect for other's time and office work, is one of the reason. What I observed is in case of WFH, it is very necessary to mandate office-timings else people just misuse WFH uncounsiously.

Update: Another problem I faced is lacking awareness in family about your work. People thing you'r sitting idle on laptop and end up doing errands for them.