You Are Grounded, A Personal Reflection on #WFH

This is a personal reflection and not intended to reflect the views of any institution with which I am affiliated. I hope in this time of crisis, you are taking the time to take your mental temperature as well as your physical temperature.

Punishments for children when I was a child in the 1960’s ran a broad spectrum. It was an era before you could call child services if you were paddled. Physical punishment was always “on the table.” My mother, having grown up on a rural Minnesota farm, wielded a wicked wooden spoon, and although I am sure she never studied Pavlov, she knew after we had experienced the sting of the spoon a few times, the simple sound of the silverware drawer opening would check whatever unacceptable behavior we were exhibiting. My father was somewhat of an egghead (it apparently skips a generation) and he was not into any type of corporal punishment. This made him, at least in the 1960’s, ahead of his time. My father’s preferred form of punishment was a combination of two punishments: “go to your room” and “you are grounded.” Being “grounded” meant you had to stay in your house, and you couldn’t watch TV or play with friends. “Go to your room” meant you were confined to your bedroom, which in those days were tiny. My siblings and I used to think of being grounded as being in prison and going to your room as solitary confinement. Remember we had no computers, PDA’s, cell phones or any connection to the outside world. 

I don’t know to this day what my parents expected me to do while I was in my room “grounded” and there were certainly no instructions. I think the idea was you were supposed to think about your behavior and what landed you in “grounded” status. Being grounded was a very negative experience and while I was grounded, I tended to have negative thoughts about the world, especially early in my experience with grounding. I hadn’t linked my current feelings towards working from home to my childhood until a couple days ago. I learned while I was in a family Zoom conversation that my two-year-old granddaughter, herself not able to attend day care, apparently keeps asking my daughter if she is sick. Even a two-year-old knows something is amiss. But she thinks she is home and grounded because of something to do with her. When she is sick, she is home instead of in school. She is not in school so therefore she must be sick. Now we know that is a fallacious argument, but for a two-year-old it is not causal, just coincidental reasoning. The two go together.

I tried working from home for my usual 10-12-hour days and I didn’t feel near the same level of productivity. I felt in fact a bit anxious and depressed about it. Sure, I have put in hours at home before, but it is very different to work from home at night or on occasion than to wake up and work there the entire day – at least it was for me. Fortunately, as I work in a field of essential services, I can still go into my office, which although it is accustomed to housing 100 staff members, has only 5 or 6 working in it, including me. In my office, I found myself super productive, especially because my assistant is there. We have worked together for nearly 17 years and we can keep our distance and really get things done. We have been leading from the front. We have been engaging customers, employees and staff. It has felt great.

But why wasn’t I working well from home? Why couldn’t I have those same positive feelings working in our two-bedroom condo 9.4 miles away. I didn’t understand why my attitude changed in that 9.4 mile commute. How can we get at those feelings? I then remembered the advice of my friend Dr. Jamie Pennebaker, who is a world-renowned social psychologist. He said that people who write about their experiences in traumatic times really come out of it better, stronger and happier. I encouraged the students I have in my law school class (I teach a business lawyering class every Spring semester), who are totally displaced by this crisis, to write about how they feel and this experience. I had intended to do this myself but got too busy.

But this Saturday morning, I was determined to understand the divergence in my feelings towards working from home and working from my office. And now I have. Having written this essay, I am confident that my early experiences of being grounded and confined to my room have affected my adaptation to #WFH. I began to reflect on those childhood experiences with grounding and it came back to me that after those early negative feelings, my boredom led me to examine my surroundings. And one day I found some of my egghead father’s dusty old books, many of them by great philosophers, and so I would lay down on my bed – the only real furniture in my room – and read books by authors whose names I couldn’t pronounce like Aristotle. Now, having written this essay, I am reading and writing again and feeling better about my home surroundings.  

Now that I have identified the reason for my #WFH anxiety, I can cure it. If only I can tape the silverware drawer shut, the rapid opening of which still makes me jump, I think I will be fine. A sincere thank you to Dr. Pennebaker and my mother and father. I am starting to feel better at home at my computer already.

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@cashnickerson

Please take the time to write and share your own experiences of working from home.