It’s officially one year since the great work from home experiment began. Of course when we began the experiment we didn’t know how long it would be so we did not properly prepare. No IRB forms were completed, no requests for funds were submitted, and no consent forms were signed. We moved rapidly to address the great health risks posed by the novel coronavirus.
This was not an ideal way to handle such a seismic change. There’s been plenty of insightful essays on the impact of this experiment on working mothers, librarians, and academic staff. These essays are beneficial to us as we look to the year ahead and begin to intentionally bring the experiment to a close. (See What’s Your Organization’s Long-Term Remote Work Strategy? for additional wisdom.)
With that in mind, I’d like to take stock of my year working from home.
I had more job duties at home than at the office. Here is an honest (and humorous) description of additional work I had to do while working from home.
- Lunch Lady
- plan and prepare all meals
- evaluate and monitor healthy eating habits
- Recess Monitor
- safe and timely dismissal and return
- safe, socially distanced activities
- Personal Secretary
- printing, phone calls, weekly calendars, meeting reminders
- maintain supply inventory
- Teacher’s Aide
- review assignments submitted
- enforce disciplinary actions
- monitor student activities
- Keeper of the Devices
- charge all devices (even the ones that require the special touch to receive the charge)
- hide devices when caught playing games or watching shows during the school day
- keep track of time on device in order to prevent brain melt
There are plenty of distractions in the office as well, of course; they just tend to be less demanding of ourselves and our identities. Eliminating distractions is not feasible at home or in the office, but we could be more intentional with designing work spaces to decrease unwanted distractions and establishing norms with our colleagues and ourselves to cut back on unproductive distractions.
Because I do think there are productive distractions. I’ve noticed that while working at home, it is highly productive for me to take short walks outside when I hit a mental wall or am overwhelmed by fatigue. When at the office, I tried to incorporate these productive breaks, but feel the impact was less. This may be because I often walked stairs inside and missed out on the benefit of nature. Or I combined the walks with other errands. Other productive breaks at home include pulling weeds, shoveling snow and making a latte.
My physical workspace and digital workspace were not designed for my health and productivity. I’m currently working with a makeshift stand-up desk and a sitting desk that is not ergonomically beneficial. While I’ve transitioned most of my work to cloud-based enterprise solutions offered by my employer, my workplace has not. Too many processes and too much teamwork rely on either paper-based systems or asynchronous workflows. We could spend more time orienting new staff and training current staff on utilizing productivity technologies. While many of these tools are simple enough to use, we aren’t always clear about when we should be using them, so we treat most of them as optional.
My optimum productivity times at home are similar to my times in the office. I am most productive in the mornings- I’m alert, fresh and not bogged down by the needs of the day. When working from home I can maximize my prime productivity time because there is no commute to sap my mental focus and there is no school drop-off time dictating when my day starts.
I am not reading as much professional literature while working from home. I’m keeping up, but not diving deep. When working in the office I am constantly looking up books and making requests for items we don’t have on our shelves. Having to rely on fully online sources has decreased my interest in reading deeply and narrowed my choices. I miss the ease and accessibility of resources within my place of work.
People are still perplexed by what I do. Even when working in the library, folks just assume that when you say, “I’m a librarian,” that you must spend all day working with books. Now folks mentally pause as they try to figure out how I get the books if I am working from home! It’s a great opportunity to point out all of the great things libraries do that don’t involve books. (Although books are pretty great. I read 37 books (10,333 pages) in 2020.)
I think the experiment we began on March 16, 2020 has mostly been successful. We’ve met goals, delivered services, and started new initiatives. On the whole we’ve adapted well. We’ll need to adapt again as we leave our home offices for our library offices. As we do so, I hope that we will be thoughtful, kind, and holistic. That we will pause and ask ourselves what we’ve learned, what we could do better, what could be gained, and what might be lost. Maybe it would be beneficial to employees and employers to keep an open and inquiring posture about how, when, and where we work to fulfill the mission of our libraries.
