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.
A good boss doesn’t give a shit about whether the workers do other things during work time, as long as the work is done satisfactorily.
At my last office job, years ago when I was young and lived with my parents and had very few financial obligations, I would always ask to clock out and leave whenever I ran out of work to do for the day. It was always busy mornings and slow afternoons. My boss thought I was insane for not wanting to get paid to sit there and fuck around on Facebook (her exact words.) But to me it was worth losing $30-60 to gain back 3-6 hours of my personal life every week.
The boss and most co-workers were great, and the work wasn’t even bad when it was busy, but just physically being present there was soul-crushing.
Most bosses: hmm but if you worked instead of doing small important things for your family you could four double your productivity instead of only triple it!
Most bosses equate having fun with not working and so not having fun with being productive. However, most workers are in a twilight state of not having fun and not being productive.
The first hour in the office was spent staring at the screen wiggling the mouse from time to time when the screen saver came on because too tired from commuting every day. But, it was at the office so it was productive staring I guess.
Haha it’s so ridiculous that these articles never take into consideration that people in the office don’t have a lot of productive time.
I had the same, I would have a somewhat easy first hour, then spend 2 to 3 hours really focusing and then I’d basically be done for the day and would spend some time idling after lunch until I deemed it was an appropriate time to leave and “work some more from home”.
My best year billability wise was the first year of the covid lockdowns, I managed to generate something like 25% more just because of being able to work from home and cutting back on the travel time to customers and being able to multi-task occasionally when I had a quiet day for a customer. I’m glad I live in the Netherlands, hybrid/remote working seems like it’ll remain over here at least.
And they they go on about the free flow of ideas, innovations and cooperation. Please, we were all sitting there with headphones trying to isolate ourselves to get anything done because some manager would always be on a loud phone call and using a meeting space to work was forbidden.
Driving to customers or flying to the other side of the world for a meeting was such a big time sink.
It also reminds me of the story of Rotterdam harbour where they just couldn’t find any people anymore. Turns out that the cost of commuting was so high, people made more money doing lower paid work closer to home.
Turns out that the cost of commuting was so high, people made more money doing lower paid work closer to home.
This is true for a lot of people everywhere. It’s often ridiculous the amount of time and money lost from commutes that gets forgotten about.
For me commuting outside the city costs at least an hour of time every day, and $1+/hour in fuel weekly that I don’t get paid. For me WFH is like a $1.50+/hr raise that is far more convenient and stress reducing than a better paying job.
Gotta love how the articles frames it. While at work people “kill time” with tik tok but at home they “goof off” folding laundry
I feel like they’re just trying to use variety in their wording and either configuration would have upset you
I can tell you it wouldn’t… We usually do not have multiple words because they are completely and 100% interchangeable.
It is the exact same message manipulation when a cop outright murders someone the headline often says something super tangential like “Perp lost life in altercation with police”… words matter and you’d expect journalist to know this
And in the office there are people who literally hang out at the coffee machine for 30-60 minutes at a time, talking to everyone who comes by under the guise of “networking”.
The media gotta stop reporting on the laundry like it’s the equivalent of stealing from the company.
It’d be cool if the media did a piece about how companies are stealing the excess labor of their employees. It will never happen though because “the media” also steals the excess labor from it’s employees.
I worked with people who could easily spend 30 minutes scrolling social media while pooping.
You think that’s bad, wait until you hear about the shareholders and landlords.
They dont even have to pretend to work to get paid.
There is a class difference in there though… Some people own while others slave
Thats exactly what I mean. My aim is to point out the ridiculousness of them trying to moralise it, by making the people who ease off a little bit to put to washing on out to be lazy and undeserving of their wages etc.
That wrath for people not working or “slacking off” slightly while getting paid is only reserved for poor people.
The regime relies on plebs larping this bushit.
If tomorrow every fucking wage slave got a pair of balls and started acting like daddy capitalist, half of issues would be solved and parasites would be punished.
But instead of we got bootlickers serving as regime enforcers 🤡