You're not working from home, you're living at work
>but one main take-away jumped out at me: The workweek got longer, by about three to four hours per week.
>A new “night shift” emerged, as instant-messaging work communication soared between 6 p.m. and midnight. Remote work also meant more meetings. Researchers monitored the brainwaves of some employees during these video meetings and found that “dramatic changes in brainwave patterns, consistent with being over-worked or stressed, began to set in after about two hours.” (I’m not making this up — they really went all mad scientist over at Microsoft and hooked workers up to electroencephalogram skull caps).
>As work and home became one, “all these meetings and messages were spread out over a longer workday,” one tech site summed up. “Weekends were no longer off-limits when it came to collaboration and work, and more people spent their ‘lunch hours’ instant-messaging with colleagues, suggesting an unending workflow.”
>A study of software developers found that productivity was up — but listen to some of the reasons why.
>“Sometimes an idea clicks in the middle of the night, and with work-from-home, implementing that idea is literally 2 seconds away,” one Microsoft engineer said.
>“I feel like I can solve problems more easily since I don’t feel constrained by a clock. I can start a job and cook dinner, then come back to check the job results while I leave something in the oven or when I’m done cooking,” said another developer.
>Said a third: “I sometimes feel I just sit the whole day, and only do very few steps to the toilet and coffee machine.”
>The reality of remote work seems, to me, kind of like when people got smart home devices like Alexa in order to access the internet, but it turned out it was the device that was accessing them. Who is it really benefiting?
