A Year at Home
One of my earliest WFH setups, with help from a cat.
Roughly a year ago, the company I work for made the call for all of its employees to work from home, as a result of the increasing spread of COVID-19. We thought it would be a short stint of work from home, but for us, it’s been a year, and there’s no clear sign of when it will end.
As it turns out, I really enjoy working from home. It took some adjustment at first–figuring out the best place for my husband and I to set up our workstations that worked for the different types of work we do. We’re fortunate that we have a spare bedroom, and that we had enough desks that just needed to be cleaned to give us both our own at home desk.
However, work from home has also impacted my writing. I definitely did not produce as much as I have in previous years. I’ve had a few stints where the words just wouldn’t flow. It’s been particularly hard on my poetry, of all things. But slowly but surely, the words are coming back, and I’m getting back on track with the amount of writing that I want to be doing.
I definitely miss hanging out with writer friends at the coffee shop a couple of times a week, and I miss author events and conventions and other social things. But overall, I almost wish that we’d stay working from home forever.
Not having a commute gives me back two hours of my day. Granted, I often get about an extra hour of sleep because of that, but it means that I can boot up my personal laptop and start making dinner within minutes of the end of my working hours. I’m also the sort of person who generally catches a lot of colds throughout the winter, and though I continue to be allergic to things, working from home means I’m not getting everyone else’s germs on my commute and in my office. (At the very least, I’m planning to keep wearing masks on the bus during future cold and flu seasons.) And not having evenings where I’m feeling too unwell to write is amazing!
Whether you’re in a similar boat as me with gradually adjusting to working from home, or whether you’re someone in the future looking at the possibility of switching your life to a work from home option (or even someone who is considering quitting their day job and becoming a full-time stay at home writer), it’s important to know that it’s going to involve a period of adjustment, and things may not work out entirely the way you expect them to at first. But I’m here to say that it is something you can learn to work with, and maybe even flourish with!
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