COVID WFH = real Remote?
How is working from home in today’s COVID crisis different from “normal” remote work?
In several ways.
What can’t we do in remote / work from home today?
We cannot really, or we can rarely:
- Travel across borders
- Travel inside our borders (hotels/airbnb shut down)
- Sit inside cafes & restaurants
- Hang out in bars
- Party in clubs
- Visit museums, entertainment venues
- Go to gyms, exercise in many places
- Go to spa/beauty salons
- Visit family & friends
- Have our kids attend school
- Attend university in-person
What happens when we can do the above?
Well, life’s back to normal! We can stay healthier, more connected, enjoy ourselves better, be more social and relaxed. Remote work becomes easier when you can exercise easily in the AM or over lunch, when you can spend time with friends and more distant family easily in the evenings. When you can offload the stress and enjoy the beauty our planet and environments offer. Here’s just three examples.
Coworking remote communities
There’s major benefits of co-locating with other remote workers. No conflicts of interests and no office politics. Open cooperation. Brainstorming and idea generation across organizations becomes significantly easier. Only possible through remote and co-location. Hard nowadays, but this’ll be huge post-Covid. 😊
School
With no kids at home, productivity jumps up x-fold. Research has shown that …
- Remote/work from home parent productivity pitfall research from Nick Bloom at Stanford University
Travel opportunities
This is a biggie for all you singles. 😎
If time-zones work out, there’s amazing opportunities to work while traveling, combining the pleasurable with the productive, and there’s a bunch of startups and initiatives catering to this.
Check these out:
- Remote Year helps you plan your remote / digital nomad work and travel – cool startup ✈️
- Hawaii’s Movers & Shakas remote travel program sponsors in exchange for skill development – sweet 🤙
- Portugal is active in welcoming remote workers to travel and set up there for work 🛬
- Nomad list has an awesome list of places to work and colocate/colive with other remote work ‘digital nomads’ – the biggest digital nomad community in the world 🥳
If your image of remote isn’t good – think about if you could do everything there is to do in ‘normal’ times, while avoiding the commute and waste of time and resources just to be socially present in a company office.
There are huge benefits to collaboration, sharing ideas/knowledge and relationships in teams – which makes “pure” remote hard – we’ll write about this later.
Have a look at our remote & personality assessments at https://www.gyfted.me/all-tests
Robert