The pandemic handed us all a super easy win on doing something about climate change by forcing a large chunk of us to (temporarily, it seems) stop sitting in our cars twice a day. Instant reduction in the amount of CO2 we’re producing. It’s not 100% of the solution, but it’s not nothing, and a year in, most of us had adapted just fine (I’d argue, most who could WFH, prospered, seeing a lot more benefit than negative).
But nah - let’s get back in our cars, waste time at the beginning and end of every day, spend more money on coffees and lunch, and breathe in the cubicle goodness because, fuck it - that’s the way we’ve always done it.
Cubicle? Laughs in open plan…
Anyways, seeing as we proved without a doubt that I can do my job from home, any time spent on a forced commute I now consider company time.
I drive into an on-site location a few times a year at most and I 100% consider any time traveling as work time.
Also fixing rent by not making it necessary to live in the same city you work in giving everyone more choices
Hell, you don’t even have to live in the same COUNTRY! My brother teaches “at” a school in Greenland from his apartment in Denmark, only going to Greenland (flight paid by the school, of course) a couple months a year.
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Being yelled at through a screen just doesn’t hit that hard
“Oh hey Bob Wageslave, I see your tasks on Redmine are falling behind your coworkers. Gotta keep up. By the way, I’ve just opened another 4 tasks that I need for tomorrow. Oh, and don’t forget to report them properly, everything needs to be orderly and you have to post your progress as it goes”
and pants!
who the fuck needs pants? so overrated…
And also making US more dependable on oil.
Do you know what I learned during the pandemic? CO2 emissions by PEOPLE are a rounding number. The pandemic hit and CO2 barely changed.
It’s industry and corporations and farms that output like 80 % of all CO2, yet we’re made to believe it’s “on us” to make a change.
It’s the same with recycling, it’s pushed like we’re saving the planet recycling some bottles while a paper plant will pollute the equivalent of 200,000 homes…
You are totally right, industry is the big polluter, but I think it’s important to also realize: what we consume drives industry to produce polluting goods, the only reason they pollute is to produce stuff to sell us, if we want them to stop polluting, “part” of the solution is to stop buying their stuff.
There is some truth to that, but you also need to be reminded that companies will look at profit before they look at environmental impact.
Yes, producing goods pollutes, but it could pollute way less if they changed the way they produce.
But corporations won’t do that because it cuts into their profit.
So it is much cheaper to blame the consumers for wanting products.
(Products they try to convince you to buy through marketing I might add)
As long as he pushes out that report on time I don’t see anything wrong here, moving on.
That’s the crazy madness of this. Some of these jobs out there require so little actual work that in office work is just to torment the workers. If love to have one of those jobs though
also who doesn’t automate their reporting? New reports should be made once, with dynamic date filters (e.g. “31 days ago to 1 day ago”) and then just refresh for data.
Y’all applauding this, when it reads more like an Anti-WFH comic than anything else.
Cause this is exactly what all the anti-WFH propagandists are trying to get people to think WFH is, just a scam used by lazy thieves.
Idk I read this more as “work is bullshit” more than anything
Or, they have hit their numbers thanks to WFH.
And the employee is happy and will get the report done
CEOS HATE THIS PRODUCTIVITY TRICK!!! /s
Actually that’s often the most productive thing you can do. If your mind is fuzzy and you try to work through it you will continue to have low productivity for the rest of the day, but if you take a 30 minute nap to refresh your mind then you’ll have higher productivity for the whole rest of the day.
Sometimes a 30 minute nap accidentally turns into a 4 hr nap, which I believe will improve your productivity for the rest of the week 😂
It took some practice for me to get comfortable putting something I’m working on down instead of hammering it out that evening, and just picking it up in the morning.
99% of the time, what would have been an hour long slog filled with distractions and snacking becomes a 10 minute, low-effort task after a good night’s sleep.
One thing I do when I’ve got a big task is to take a break and do some chores. I’ll think on it in the background while I’m focused on folding laundry or whatever, and then grab a cup of coffee and get to work with a fresh brain and at least some idea of where to start.
(I don’t like naps but I imagine the principle is the same.)
15 minutes of just sitting in the calm quiet is proven to reduce stress hormones in the body by helping regulate the hypothalamic-pituatary-adrenal (HPA) pathway. 15 minutes of quiet every day can work wonders on your mental and physical health. Deactivating the HPA pathway reduces the stress hormones in your system, which reduces every bodily systems stress reaction. This can help your mood, obviously. Anxiety, depression, irritability, all responses to stress. It can also help with autoimmune issues, though. Stress hormones cause your immune system to go into overdrive because your body is expecting to have to deal with a wound as a potential source of infection. Lowering those stress hormones has been demonstrated to help with autoimmune disorders like lupus, fibromyalgia, psoriasis and others. It’s said that we operate in two modes: fight or flight, or rest and digest. When you’re stressed, your body moves resources away from your digestive system. It’s basically saying “We dont have time to digest food right now, we gotta run away from this bear”. If you’re stressed all the time, you’re always running your digestive system inefficiently. So regulating the HPA pathway has been correlated with improvements in shit like Crohn’s, colitis, IBS and other digestive issues. Constant stress boosts your heart rate, constricts your blood vessels and increases your blood pressure, so regulating the HPA pathway can lead to decreases in the risk of cardiovascular diseases.
Thing about sitting quietly in a calm space is that a lot of us, myself included, will fill that space with thoughts that just cause more stress. Luckily for us anxious folk, meditation exists and is quite literally the culmination of millennia of smart, dedicated people trying to solve this exact problem. There are tons of resources online where you can learn how, many of them are free. They’ll teach you how to detach from stressful thoughts and situations, how to stop agonizing over what’s already done and being terrified of what could happen and just acknowledge what’s going on right now. Try it. If I’m totally wrong and you hate it you’re only out 15 minutes.
Tldr - stress hormones make your whole body go into emergency mode. Emergency mode is good during emergencies, but not good all the time. Bringing your body out of emergency mode when there’s not actually an emergency helps pretty much every part of you be healthier. You can bring your body out of emergency mode with 15 minutes of sitting quietly in a calm space. Meditation can help you establish that calm space.
I’ve been on edge almost all the time when I’m at work. I feel like it’s mostly my mindset though, and most of the time things happen to be not as bad as I imagined.
Now I can’t work unless I’m listening to music.
When I can’t sit in the quiet it’s because my brain is circling around something uncomfortable. I wouldn’t dare to presume to tell you that’s what you’re doing, or what to do about it. It could be something as simple as “I’ve got something I want to talk about with my partner”, it could be something foundational to who i am as a person and I’m gonna have to acknowledge it and work on it.
Things like this are why meditation is important. Few if any of us are able to sit comfortably in the quiet in a way that will benefit our minds and bodies. It’s natural to be looking to the past or the future, and doing so has its place. We learn from the past, and we plan for the future. What meditation will teach you is how to delineate between looking at the past and future and obsessing over the past and future past the point where it serves you. It teaches you how to, in the words of Ram Dass, Be Here Now.
Is it the quiet that does or the time to meditate? I have found in my own experience I can calm down and rest with music that is aggressive and chaotic. I think for me I find it very soothing to find the structure in the chaos.
I can’t really answer that one other than to lean on my personal experience, which is that sitting and quieting my mind is what works for helping me maintain balance, and I get a different but equally joyous feeling from listening to the most violently aggressive and chaotic music I can find. What I can tell you is that you may be accessing a sort of concentration meditation. There are many techniques, some involve trying to empty the mind and let thoughts flow through like leaves floating on a river, some involve checking in with all the individual parts of your body one at a time, concentration meditation involves hyperfocusing on one thing to the exclusion of all others. I think that might be the space you’re in. If you’re curious to find more, Buddhist Geeks has a wiki with a great set of tutorials on focus meditation.
Thank you for this.
Oh, the number of times my introverted mind has become exhausted after a meeting, and instead of taking a 30 minute nap and play time with doggo followed by a 4 hour focused work session, I’m borderline catatonic with a headache for the next 2 hours until it’s time to head home.
I left a job of eight years for a WFH job. I lasted 15 months and they worked my ass off. 11 and 12 hour days for weeks on end and still unable to keep up. I left and took a 49% pay cut. I’m selling shit on ebay to pay the bills and no longer WFH, but I’m back to 40 hours a week.
Are you literally selling shit? Or what kind of shit are you selling?
Sounds like OP has a shit buyer here
20+ years in IT and I’ve never been closer to leaving the industry. It’s either a good old boys club or a cesspool of dysfunction. Sometimes both.
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That’s completely out of line. Why is he wearing pants?
I do this mentally at the office
You may joke but this is real.
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"How DARE my employees use WFH to take the edge off the negative aspects of being at work! I’m canceling WFH! They make me so mad I need to… have a tumbler of bourbon… from the fully stocked bar… that I keep prominently displayed in my office… for ‘client meetings’… next to my office chaise lounge.
sips
I feel like the last hard worker left. Tsk tsk tsk."
Not that different with companies with power nap rooms in their office.
lol, this is why employers want everyone back at the office
If im hitting my deadlines and getting my shit done, my employer can fuck off
Nap breaks included.
Nap breaks mandatory
They want everyone back at the office so they can justify spending so much money on the 10 year lease they locked in during 2019.
