My favorite quote:
While employees in the office might kill time messaging friends or flipping through TikTok, remote workers take advantage of being far from the watchful gaze of bosses to chip away at personal to-do lists or to goof off.
Nearly half of remote workers multitask on work calls or complete household chores like unloading the dishwasher or doing a load of laundry, according to the SurveyMonkey poll of 3,117 full-time workers in the U.S.
Oh noes, people actually doing things that are useful for their families instead of even more computer time.
It’s insane that this is even considered strange or surprising. When I work from home, I take longer lunch breaks and I often stop working earlier, but I’m still three times as productive compared to sitting in an office.
At home, I actually get focused time to do something and think. At the office, this is extreamly difficult with all the distractions and noise constantly interrupting my train of thought.
So whilst I do this myself and 100% believe that multi-tasking like this is a good thing, the one argument I’ve seen which I don’t have a suitable response to is the idea that if you have time to spend on other thing rather than working, you’re not managing your workload correctly. I.e you’re being paid to work, not paid to fill the washing machine, pop to the shops etc. If you find yourself with spare time you should be proactively asking your manager for additional work, rather than goofing off. Same applies for working in the office.
Yeah but think about this: is it reasonable for companies to expect human beings to spend 100% of their focus on work for the entire day, five days per week, as if we are machines?
Companies expect people to last their entire life. This is not happening if you are working hard all the time. You will get injuries and feel like shit, which is not sustainable. We are not made to work like machines.
Also, happiness means higher productivity, with no exceptions. Also, what the fuck are we working for? Is there any point besides increasing the profits? There is no point to any of it. Except to get money to eat and relax.
If anything I shouldn’t be doing chores, I should be relaxing. Doing chores is working.
As in, I’m being paid to work, some of the process of working is recharge time. By instead doing chores, I’m arguably not recharging as effectively.
Of course it’s a bit more complex than that, and uncompleted domestic tasks create mental overhead that distract from focus, so where the balance lies is hard to say.
I do, as it happens, ask for more work when necessary. I like to have a queue of tasks to work through, then take them on at a sustainable pace. So far it’s been several years and no one has expressed anything negative about my pace of work. In fact it got me promoted a couple of weeks ago.