COVID-19. This isn't what working from home is really like.

A few days ago, I posted on LinkedIn how working from home could greatly improve in the future as a result of what many of us are experiencing now due to COVID-19. Agile companies have acted rapidly to accelerate the development of technical systems and workplace policies to allow the vast majority of our employees to work from home. This has seemingly immediately removed so many of the past issues including network speed, connectivity issues and network licence settings. Perhaps most importantly, it has removed some of the stigma associated with those who work from home for health or logistical reasons by forcing everyone to walk a mile in our shoes.

What I want people to understand, is that this is not what working from home is like for me under normal circumstances.

• I'm not alone.

A lot of my colleagues choose to work from home when they have an imminent deadline and need to focus. This is especially great for report writing or things that require concentration without interruptions. Home is usually the perfect place for this. During COVID-19 isolation however, my husband is also trying to work from home and my kids are home from school. The level of distraction is arguably higher than a normal day at the office and so that benefit has largely disappeared.

• My colleagues aren't in the office.

On a normal day, if I am required to work from home, I can rest easy knowing that my colleagues are all in the office. The benefit of this is that I don't need to be there every step of the way. My colleagues can bounce ideas of each other informally without the need for me to check in so regularly. Most importantly, they would access to the faster connection so that I could direct them doing complex modelling tasks in the office. Today, we're all in the same boat fighting the same problems working on 12d models from home and we can't delegate the modelling tasks to those in the office for efficiency. As a result, I can't rely on my colleagues to keep the ball rolling at 'normal' speed so much.

• I'm doing two jobs at once.

Working from home sounds fine until you realise that with kids home from school, I am responsible for their education and emotional development during the day when I would typically be working. If you've ever tried it, you'll know that it's not as simple as just giving them a bunch of school worksheets and walking away for 6 hours. There is not only time teaching the children but also with lesson planning and reviewing content before you try to teach the kids to make sure you understand it. I've found myself madly printing off mazes, find-a-words and other simple puzzles to have on hand for my kids when they're eager to learn but I'm not quite ready!

There are times in the last week where I have been in the middle of a discussion with someone at work and had to walk away from my desk just to hold my crying child for half an hour. It's a lot to deal with which is not normal, is not forever, and family must come first.

• Too many people are at home and online!

Kids are home, workers are home, Netflix is on, VPNs are connected. Everyone in my house (and every other house around) is connected to the internet. If you live in a more rural area as I do, the internet is various shades of terrible on a normal day so this is really testing the limits. You'll have to consider connecting your laptop to your mobile hotspot just to be able to get through a Zoom call or download a file. While for me, this is usually a challenge, it's become worse now as even the mobile networks are struggling.

So what's the point of this article? There are a lot of people now trialing working from home for the first time. There are teething issues, positives and negatives but it's important to realise that your experiences over the next weeks and months need not scar you for life from the working from home experience. This is not normal working from home. Hang in there but please do give it a try once all of this is over and see how much nicer it is!

(cover image https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/348307)