Home office day

I love my one day a week when I can work at home. ‘Hjemmekontor’ as it’s called in Norwegian—literally, ‘home office’. Home office day. Has a nice ring to it. I usually work at home on Wednesdays these days. All I know is that it seems to be a lot more common now than it was ten years ago. I started working at home around eight years ago; I was one of the first employees at my hospital to take advantage of the opportunity. I get so much work done at home. I am disciplined and structured enough to make it work; I know people who are not and who shudder at the very idea of working at home. I love it because I am not distracted by telephones, knocks on my door, or other interruptions that make up the daily life of the workplace. And I am not complaining about those interruptions—they are part and parcel of the work world. But if I want to think, write or be creative, home is the place I need to be.

I work at home the way I do at my workplace, from 9am until noon with a break for lunch, and then the rest of the day until around 5pm. Today I did some food shopping at lunchtime, and on my way upstairs to our apartment with my two grocery bags, I ran into two other people who live in our building. They were also working at home. It struck me that more people may end up working from home in the next ten years than will be working in a formal workplace. And wouldn’t that be ok? I would welcome it. With computers, smart phones, fax machines, webcams and pagers, aren’t we well-connected to our workplaces? Aren’t we sufficiently connected? We are on an honor system, yes, that’s true. If we say we will be at home to those who work for us, we have to honor our promise. I want to honor it, because I want my co-workers to know that I am available to help them whenever they need me during work hours. After hours is another story. After hours—those are my hours, and they are ‘do not disturb unless it is a crisis’ hours.

There are a lot of advantages to working at home. There is no formal dress code; pajamas are quite ok, as are tattered jeans. Makeup is unimportant. Additionally I can take a five-minute break from time to time to find my camera to take photos of the pigeons who sit outside my kitchen window—my camera is in the next room a few feet away. If I was at work, I would miss those shots because I don’t carry my camera with me to work. Perhaps I should start to do so. In any case, I cannot come up with one disadvantage to working at home, unless of course one brings up the loss of social contact. But being a scientist, I am alone a good portion of my day anyway, so I don’t normally experience an overabundance of daily social interaction at work. And I’m fine with that. I know others who would miss having their daily group around them, and who would not enjoy being at home. I also look at working at home as preparation for retirement. And since I’ve been doing this for eight years, I am used to it and I know I'll be fine the day I no longer have a formal workplace to go to. 

The 'homework' cloud

It occurred to me recently that certain aspects of my work life remind me very much of how I felt in grammar school. I live with what I call the ‘homework’ cloud over me. I cannot seem to shake the nagging feeling that I have homework to do after a full day at my job (and how many years have I been working?), and that when I get home I need to be focusing on some work-related project in addition to everything else that awaits me when I come home—shopping for dinner, making dinner, cleaning up. The reality is that I don’t have homework and that there is no one waiting for me at work the next day to evaluate what I did last night for work. It’s just that the habit of homework became a lifelong affair along the road of my life, and I don’t really think it is a good thing, because it also occurred to me that this is one of the reasons I never feel completely relaxed at home. It hasn’t helped that we have taken our work home with us throughout the 1990s and even into the new century. I stopped doing this about four or five years ago, but the guilt about not doing so still rides me. So that when I do find myself relaxing at home, reading a book or article for pure pleasure or puttering around my kitchen, the thought suddenly strikes me—do I have something to do for work that I have forgotten about? The answer is usually no these days, but it jars me nonetheless. I never feel like this when I am on vacation. I manage to put work in a box and store it away someplace until I’m ready to open the box again. I don’t know if other people my age feel this way. Do more women than men feel this way about their jobs? Are we overly-driven, and if so, why? Is it because we were the homework generation? We should be able to leave work at the door. We should be able to relax at home. And yet, how many people really do? I know many people who work the whole weekend long. The teachers I know have to work on the weekends—it’s the only time they have to prepare their lesson plans. Academicians don’t have to work on the weekends, but they often do because that is the time they use to read articles and update themselves on what is going on in their respective fields. My husband and I have done this for years; he still does occasionally, but I no longer do.

You would think that weekends would be like little mini-vacations for most people, vacations from work. Indeed they should be. My parents’ generation was better at relaxing on the weekends, better at leaving work at the door. Sometimes I manage to make my weekends feel like mini-vacations; other times I just feel like I have a list of things that need to get done. The list includes housework and other house-related things that are also ‘work’. Perhaps that is when I stop relaxing—when I am living my life according to my list and not according to what would be most relaxing. We should also be able to free ourselves from a chore-driven life so that we don’t continually berate ourselves for not doing this or that chore or project. I think the problem is that we work too much and have worked too much, and that carries over into the home environment. My generation grew up with a strong work ethic, and it stuck. And that’s fine, except that somewhere along the way it turned into this—that too many hours of our lives went to our jobs, and not enough hours to our homes and families. I don’t believe in the concept of quality time. I just want enough time to live in harmony with myself and the people around me. Five days a week, ten or more hours a day devoted to work is too much, and it detracts from a harmonious life. And yet it’s expected of us. So why then do I feel guilty for not giving my workplace my nights and weekends too? I think it’s part of our generation too—to feel that we would like to do it all, have time for everything, but we know deep down that we will never achieve that. It’s not possible. If we use fifty or more hours a week at work, then we don’t have a lot of extra time to do everything else we would like to or have to do. That’s life. Perhaps the best thing would be to start letting go of ‘having’ to do something every weekend—letting go of the lists that make us feel guilty when we don’t achieve the tasks listed there. I don’t know the answer; I only know that I would like to reach a state of harmony inside myself—where I can truly enjoy living in the present without worrying about what I have to do, either at work or at home. And I want the guilt to disappear. 

Home renovations

We’ve all been there—home renovations—never-ending home renovations. You start on one room, and by the time that room is done, you see that it puts all the other rooms to shame. So then it’s time to start on the others too. One at a time, of course, or should I say unfortunately. Because one at a time means we’re looking at years of renovations ahead of us. That’s how it’s been for us since 2005; one bathroom underwent renovations in 2005, two bathrooms at the same time in 2007 (a re-renovation of the one done in 2005 was included), our kitchen in 2008, and the guest room and entrance hallway in 2009. When we renovated the first bathroom in 2005, it took several months because the electrically-warmed floor under the ceramic tiles had to be laid carefully and tested, and so on. And then came the decisions about what kind of shower to install, what sink looked best, and what types of tiles should be used for flooring and for the walls. The design part of it was fun, but I’m glad we didn’t have to do the work ourselves. As our luck would have it, our co-op decided that it would undertake a large bathroom renovation project in 2007 that started in January, and this meant that the newly-renovated bathroom was to be newly-renovated again in order to conform to co-op standards (standard design). Luckily for us, the bathroom renovations in our building (there are ten buildings in all) started in April so that our daily trip down to the provisional bathroom in the basement of our building was not an exercise in freezing to death on the way down and up again. Other co-op residents were not so lucky, especially those who lost their bathroom to renovations in mid-December. But it was no fun to lose two bathrooms at the same time, because we also lost our kitchen privileges since all water to the apartment was shut off. Most people in our building moved out to live with friends or family during the four to six weeks it took for the bathrooms to be finished, because all bathrooms in one apartment building were renovated at the same time because new water pipes had to be installed from basement to attic. We stayed put and roughed it—using the bathroom in the basement, getting water to cook and wash dishes from the faucet in the building’s hallway, and cooking on an electric hot plate or going out to eat. Every now and then I would go to my gym and train and shower there. On the plus side, we got to know all the workers, who took over all floors of the apartment building as they worked with their tools and materials, boom box radio blaring out rap and disco music as they worked.

We are now re-doing our dining room, and have removed several layers of wallpaper from the walls (some of which are brick) and all floor and ceiling moldings. We have help with most of the prep work from the same guys who helped us with previous renovations. So the walls have been stripped bare, the ceiling also, there is spackling of cracks and crevices, wall-papering, painting, gluing, you name it. I forget from one project to another just how much work is involved when you first start to work on a room and aim to do it thoroughly and correctly. There is dust everywhere, a fine white grit that wears its way into all wooden surfaces. We are eating dust, breathing dust, dusting dust, vacuuming dust. And if we ‘dust’ it all away it just settles again somewhere else. I keep telling myself that it’s worth it because the end result will look nice, but with each renovation project, I am ever more determined to never undertake another one. And in truth, we really only have one more room, our living room, and that doesn’t look too bad these days. I’ll live with it. I want my life back, I want all the different pieces of furniture returned to their rightful places, I don’t want to see layers of dust everywhere, and I don’t want to clean anymore. Mostly I don’t want to clean anymore.