Maybe “productive” means “occupying the space someone pays rent for”.
Really it depends on the individuals and what their home and office environments are like. I work from home 95% of the time and much prefer it over being in the office, but if I lived in a house share with housemates or had very little space then I’d probably feel more productive in the office.
One thing I do miss about commuting is the return journey. It was nice to have a gap to decompress from work before getting home, now it’s straight off calls and 10 seconds later I’m dealing with a trillion questions from the kids and immediately start cooking dinner.
I go into work one day a week. Guess which day I don’t get much of anything done…
London Tube, maybe the Green Line that goes the Heathrow?!
Using the Tube at rush hour was so bad I switched to cycling for my commute (which turned out to take the same time whilst being far more pleasant), this before before cycling in London was fashionable so when I started doing it there weren’t all that many of us and drivers weren’t yet used to cyclists so you had to be extra careful with things like being on their blindspot near places were they might turn.
Also some of the Tube lines in London are old and hence the tunnels are less high, so the tube trains that run there (like this one) have lower ceilings and feel extra opprossive.
Mind you, using the Tube is still a superior experience to driving since you can actually bring a book and distract yourself by reading in the Tube.
Definitelly not the thing I miss about London.
I start a new remote job on Monday. It’s been a while since I was laid off. Just about 7 months. But I was lucky to find a firm looking specifically for a remote engineer in the specific support territory. Bingo!
They know this. They don’t care, they want your asses in their office buildings that they’re using as passive assets. Those assets lose value if there’s no demand for office buildings. Simple as
It’s not just that. Employers think you’re “getting away” with…something…if you can manage to be productive while having something which advantages you.
For one example, several firms - including Microsoft - have conducted experiments where they move an office to a 4 day, 32 hour week while paying people the same. They unfailingly found that productivity either stayed the same or went up. So, at the end of the experiment they…went back to a 5 day week. Because otherwise people are just getting an extra day off, aren’t they? When they “should” be working.
Even if productivity went up and it was better for the company and for the workers, it was still ultimately seen as a bad thing because the workers were better off.
Another example: at a previous job I had we got an hour’s break over the course of the day. 15 minutes 2 hours after start, 30 minutes 4 hours after start, and another 15 minutes 6 hours after start. On a Friday, however, the workday was 7 hours rather than 8. This meant that an hour before leaving people would have a 15 minute break, and then it wasn’t worth actually starting anything because before you’d have a chance to get into it you’d be getting ready to go home. So the workers went to management and said “let’s work through the last break on a Friday and go home 15 minutes early instead”. Management agreed, productivity went up, and everybody was happy at getting off an extra 15 minutes early.
Then the old upper manager was fired and a new one took their place, and this arrangement was deemed to be “getting away with it”. Taking a final break & going home later was mandated. Suddenly none of the management who had agreed it had anything to do with the initial decision and they’d always thought it was a bad idea.
So the workers were unhappy because they had a longer workday, less work got done because everybody was unproductive after break, and the company was getting less value for money becuse they were paying people the same amount for less work. But they thought it was a better situation because people were physically in the building for an extra 15 minutes, and therefore not “getting away with it”.
There’s very often a mindset in management that employees are naughty children, and that strict rules must be good just because they’re rules, rather than because they actually lead to better outcomes for the company.
I work from home and never want to go back, but I don’t use the time I used to commute to work. I usually sleep until my dog gets me up and roll into my first meeting
Idk about you but waking up at least semi naturally really does boost my productivity for the day
I remember what life was like before COVID/being in the office full time. I used to travel to work for an hour and a half on the M25 motorway, and for that I had to wake up stupidly early hours.
I’m genuinely surprised I never got into a car accident considering how lacking in sleep I was. And that was every day, 5 days a week.
Now I work from home in most days, can’t say I miss it.
Sleeping for an extra 60-90 minutes is using the time.
I get to be in sweats all day and look like holy hell. I can get up and wander the house on a whim. Drink coffee, snack.
I’m way more motivated to do actual work than if I was forced out of bed at an ungodly hour just so I can sit and traffic and go somewhere terrible for eight hours then do it all again the next day until I die…
But the shareholders already reinvested so much in the shitty office spaces for their excessive tax write-offs! /j
…joke?
I assumed that’s what /j meant, was I wrong? I assume way too much
No, it does. My reply is questioning how it’s a joke, and not just an accurate retelling of recent events.
My commute is 20 minutes of curvy back roads. No traffic. Some farms and livestock, some forest. The roads get too much heavy truck use to be safe for cycling, but it’s a really nice drive.
All I see is collaboration!
In misery.
I would go to the office if they provided office cocaine like they did back in the day. I would be hella productive then.
Nah, I was most productive for maybe a few hours after lunch.
the hours after lunch are my crashdown hahaha
Same. 7-3:30 most days. Some an hour or two earlier. I always crash out after lunch, or guaranteed by 1:30. At that point I’m just walking around trying to find shit to do.
more 9 to 5 here (although variable depending on events and film work etc.). all going smooth and well until lunch at about 12.30/1 and then only doing very small tasks until about 4 when I get a productivity boost again
That can certainly depend on the lunch. Usually in the morning I would do idling tasks like checking email and just simple stuff. I would be hungry and mostly just waiting for lunch. Thinking about that now, I wonder if it would be different now that I’m taking GLP1. That’s that “food noise” that gets muted. I would always take the earliest possible lunch and then come back ready to knock some stuff out.
Had a breakdown today because, after being on sick leave for a week, I came back to school and realised I need to prepare three therapies for tomorrow in between classes and barely any time to thoroughly prepare even one of them. But nooooo, working from home for those days where we just have school wouldn’t work because we have a contract that obligates us to be physically present. Plus, we’re just not as productive. Sure. Fuck my 2h of commuting everyday
Gotta keep that inner city property value inflated enough to keep the boomers in a prestige class somehow.
(This is the actual reason the governor of NY and a bunch of city higher ups made shady deals with CEOs to keep the property value up)
Also gotta incentivize illegal banking through social pressure and less online monitoring some how.
(This is also true work from home during covid almost completely stopped bank fraud and the banks competing sold the fraud as an advantage from the companies that kept employees at home)
