WFH or Not
As consultants, Barbara and I have been working from home (WFH) since before doing so was a thing. Granted, we planned our transition from a corporate office to a self-employed home office.
We’ve long enjoyed the flexibility of moving around to work—around our respective houses, or to other locations, like coffee shops or cafes. That’s why an article from The New Yorker on May 21, 2021 entitled “What if Remote Work Didn’t Mean Working from Home?” caught my eye. The author, Cal Newport, drew me in discussing the writing habits of famous authors. According to Newport:
Peter Benchley didn’t actually write Jaws in his bucolic Pennington, NJ home. Rather he “rented space in the back of a furnace factory” nearby.
Maya Angelou would rent hotel rooms to write, asking the staff to remove all artwork from the walls.
David McCullough abandoned a nicely appointed home office in a beautiful white-shingled house in West Tisbury, on Martha’s Vineyard, to write in a glorified garden shed in his back yard.
John Steinbeck, late in his career, spent his summers at a two-acre property in Sag Harbor but escaped this waterfront paradise to instead write on his fishing boat, balancing a notebook on a portable desk.
Newport writes that historically, writing was one of only a small number of professions that required demanding cognitive work outside the context of an office or workshop. The coronavirus pandemic has radically increased the amount of knowledge work conducted at home, with predictions that more than twenty-five per cent of the United States workforce will remain remote.
However, Newport sees problems with WFH and offers some provocative thoughts. Putting aside the experiences of 2020 when everyone, even the children, were at home, our homes are filled with the familiar—familiar things that distract individuals from work, such as piles of laundry. Interestingly, I must confess that I often welcome these household distractions when I need to clear my mind or just move around.
When performing cognitive work, environment matters. Resetting your work environment, no matter where it may be, is a necessary thing to do from time to time. Indeed, I often leave the confines of the four walls of my home office and work outside.
Newport offers a third option between returning to the office and WFH for today’s knowledge workers—work from near home or WFNH. He suggests that organizations subsidize the ability of workers to escape household distraction by renting offices in co-working spaces, as one example. He argues that the cost would be recouped in increased work quality and the overall well-being of employees, resulting in less burnout.
Interesting ideas. Would employers be willing to subsidize WFNH options as Newport describes? In the meantime, for individuals who WFH, there are likely nearby coffee shops, cafes and parks that can provide the needed reset for their work environment.