On Work Environments

Of the last nine months, I have spent six working in an office and three working at home, and I can't decide which I prefer.

The office belonged to one of those tech companies that has finally figured out that happy employees are productive employees. It had an open floor plan, which made it easier to talk to my team about important things, but also meant that I could be distracted by something happening fifty feet away. There were great views everywhere and the cafeteria was amazing, and it was really nice, after spending most of the previous six months at home looking for work, to be out in the world with people and doing things, and to be able to leave my work at work when I went home.

The downside to being in an office was mostly the commute. It took forty-five minutes and two buses to get to work, and the same or more to go home. And the air conditioning was always turned up too high, and when I got home I was always too tired to do anything.

At the end of December, something happened to my contract which meant that I, and one other member of my team, had to start working from home. Now I no longer needed to commute, and I have even more freedom to set my hours, so much so that I could reasonably spend a week at the Geek’s place any time I wanted. And now that it’s spring, I can run errands over my lunch break and actually spend some time in the sun.

But now the structure of my workday is basically gone. I don’t have work as a place to go to and come back from, so it’s harder to get into and out of work mode, and it’s not nearly as easy to talk to the other remote workers on the same project as it was to talk to my team in the office. I feel like I’ve been stuck in a box for the last three months, isolated from whatever meaning my work (which is mostly manipulating spreadsheets of language data) has.

I really hope a lot of that isolated feeling came from where I was living, which was a tall narrow townhouse where I wasn’t very comfortable around my housemates or spending time in the common spaces. I moved across town over the weekend, to an apartment that’s much closer to places I actually want to go, and that gets more sunlight, and so far I get along well with my new housemate. I hope all that, plus the ability to visit the Geek whenever I don’t have other things going on, will make working from home less depressing.