Initial Reflections from the WFH Trenches

This is a blog post I started on July 18 when we were three days into officially working from home.  It's all still so true and resonates with me, probably more so than ever, as I spent the entire weekend working and we are still working from home.  I can't believe it's been 3.5 weeks - the time has both dragged and flown by.  In a really sad way, often I have found myself shutting my eyes and kind of just hoping for this year to be over. 

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So, as part of Hong Kong's third wave of Covid-19, we went back to working from home last Wednesday.  I say "back to" because it was a return to prior status for everyone except me, who returned to work from maternity leave when our Hong Kong office was already back to "normal".  I can certainly see the benefits of WFH sometimes - the cut down on commute time, the freedom to do other things in moments of downtime, etc. But other times it seems absolutely ludicrous and impossible.  There is absolutely no separation of work and life and the only realistic time to be able to do anything is when the kids (really, just Lola) are asleep - which leaves me approximately two hours in the day and then the hours after 8 pm at night.  Lola also wakes up unrelentingly at 6 am every day, so any hope of getting up early to get work done before that is easily dismissed before it can even be considered.

This was how I found myself hunched over my small desk in my bedroom on Friday afternoon with my door locked and my Zoom call on mute while Lola screamed and banged on my door, increasingly frantic that I wouldn't answer her.  It was very stressful, not to mention nearly impossible for me to catch everything that people were saying on the call.

There were a couple of moments this week when Michael and I looked at each other aghast and thought, "is this really our life now?"

 

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