How to Work from Home As If You Actually Want to Enjoy It
Now that everyone is stuck at home during the Time of Coronavirus, you may be getting a lot of advice on how to telecommute.
It usually runs somewhere along these lines: make a separate and closed-off space just for work, keep a regular 9-to-5 work schedule, and get dressed and ready in the morning the same as you would if you were heading to the office.
I'm sure this sort of advice will be useful to a lot of people--but on the other hand, I've been doing this for 25 years, and I routinely violate every single one of those rules. In fact, being able to violate those rules, flagrantly and repeatedly, is the whole attraction of working on the Internet.
I mean, if you can't work sitting on the couch in your pajamas, I don't know what the point of telecommuting even is.
Illustration by John Cox.
The advice people are giving you is to try as much as possible to recreate in your home the exact routine of work in an office. But a lot of us figured out years ago that working in an office is annoying and counterproductive, filled with useless distractions and unnecessary rituals, all chained down to an artificial schedule. What's the point of working from home if you're just going to re-create everything that's wrong with working in an office?
So let me welcome you over to the Dark Side and its many seductions with my own advice on how to work from home as if you actually wanted to enjoy it.
Read the rest at The Bulwark.