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, I work in a maintenance position that really isn’t possible to do remotely but we have a fair amount of desk work too. We’re in the process of setting up a workstation to program and new head ends for our systems. The first thing on everyone’s list when we were deciding on a location was “as far from everyone else as possible” because we all know that other people being around to make small talk is a distraction that will easily double the time it takes to get this shit done.
In every maintenance position I’ve had, every one of us has had our own secret workspaces where most other guys didn’t know to look for us just so that we could get some desk work done in peace. Co-workers are a distraction more often than they are a help and I think we’ve all known this for years.