What is Really Wrong with Remote Work and Distance Learning

Remember us a year ago? When we were not that scared of the virus and looked forward to spending some time at home. Wow! I don’t have to get dressed to go to work! I don’t have to commute! I don’t need to get kids dressed for school. I will become so productive now! 

First nearly everyone enjoyed it. Businesses started counting how much money they’ll save on rent, online training companies inundated us with offers of all sorts of courses on remote work and remote meetings, futurists happily chatted about the new “office-less” world, full of immense opportunities.

And then? Not so much…

Constant distractions, difficulties to focus, endless forced interruptions, difficulty to concentrate and multi-task. Increased tension and conflict, getting suspicious at your colleagues (“why did he smile in that way?”), screaming and shouting at your kids, being torn between doing your work and making sure kids attend their online classes rather than play video games… In the end, without actually doing much, we all felt exhausted and unusually tired.

So, what went wrong?

Let me start by asking you a question. Are you one and the same “person” at home and at work? Do you dress, think, behave, act in exactly the same way? Are you exactly the same with your boss, your colleagues, your friends, your husband or your wife, your kids?

The answer most probably would be: “no, not at all!”

We all know it, of course. We all behave quite differently in all these situations. I fact, it often looks as if it is “one person” who has breakfast and leaves home, then it is somebody else who takes the subway. It is the “third one” who works at the office, and we can only hope that it is the same person that comes back home in the evening. And there will also be plenty of other such “persons” or “selves” that “pop in and out” during the day.

Exactly the same applies to our children. Whoever wakes up and whines about breakfast is not the same that the one that runs to school. A “third one” answers all the questions in class, the “forth one” teases his classmates, the “fifth one” gets into a fight… The list goes on and on.

Now, imagine what happens when we suddenly stop going to work and the kids suddenly have to stay at home, looking at the screen for the whole day.

Our “Morning” (Home) Selves have never left home. And everything around us – our room, our kitchen, our slippers and our “pyjama” pants below a “smart casual” upper outfit – keep telling us to “stay in this self”. And now, all of a sudden, we want this “part” to move into our virtual office and do something that, frankly speaking, it has never done before.

Of course, after a while, our “Office Self” will slowly wake up and take over. But exactly at that moment, the screaming from the other room will trigger our “Mom and Dad” Self to jump up and sort out the conflict between the siblings. And when that has been finally dealt with, we’ll have to force ourselves back into the “Office Self”… until some other part suddenly emerges, literally pushing all the other “parts” away. And it goes on, and on, and on…

Now, remember feeling extremely tired and exhausted? It is not being “locked”, “distracted” or “interrupted” that makes us tired. It is this constant “pushing” and “pulling” into and out of different “Selves” that literally eats our energy reserves. And being locked, staying indoors, having no exercise does not allow us to sufficiently “recharge our batteries” that keep working all the time at the limit of their “capacity”. And when batteries constantly work at their limit, their capacity is constantly diminished, until eventually they “die”. Any “batteries”.

 By the way, remember how we all used to complain about spending hours to “commute” to work? Energy-wise that actually allowed us to gradually transition from our “Home Selves” to our “Office Selves” and back. In fact, dressing for work, leaving home “clues” behind, going through a known routine of seeing familiar places on the way to the office – all of that made such a transition smooth and easy. Without it, there is no “gradual transition”, but a constant “jumping” from one “self” to another… Very energy-consuming!

So, will we ever go “back to office”? I don’t think we have much choice, really. There will be changes and adjustments, of course, the work will probably become more flexible, better taking into account both a specificity of a particular job and our individual needs. But if we want to simply stay physically and emotionally healthy, we will have to be back in offices, and our kids will have to go back to school.

Otherwise, our “batteries” will die much sooner than intended.

And so shall we.