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.
If anything I shouldn’t be doing chores, I should be relaxing. Doing chores is working.
As in, I’m being paid to work, some of the process of working is recharge time. By instead doing chores, I’m arguably not recharging as effectively.
Of course it’s a bit more complex than that, and uncompleted domestic tasks create mental overhead that distract from focus, so where the balance lies is hard to say.
I do, as it happens, ask for more work when necessary. I like to have a queue of tasks to work through, then take them on at a sustainable pace. So far it’s been several years and no one has expressed anything negative about my pace of work. In fact it got me promoted a couple of weeks ago.
Makes sense. Probably the best answer I’ve had, thanks.