5 Misconceptions About Working From Home

1. You have more time on your hands. If anything, working from home doesn’t allow you to disengage and fully unplug from work, and may propel you to keep working until the wee hours of night. It’s hard to compartmentalize work from home when your office bleeds into your bed. 

2. You get to wear PJs all day. Okay, not quite a misconception, because it is true that there are days that I get to wear my lazy sweatpants all day, but I still have to get dressed up when I leave my place to join other working members of our society.

3. Life is grand. Yes, working from home saves you the hassles of a commute and you get to block out distractions like none other, but it can be alienating if you don’t schedule stop breaks to see actual people and interact with other human beings. Lately, I’ve not gone a day without seeing someone for a meeting, but in the beginning, I used to walk down to my local Starbucks or 7-11 with the excuse to buy something, just so I could say that I had some sort of meaningful “Hi! How are you? Okay, bye!” interaction with someone — namely, the store clerk.

4. You get less done. I actually get MORE done working from home, as I get to block out the chatty Cathys and nosy Nancys of the world. At home, I get to avoid interruptions and fully absorb myself in what I am doing, all while brewing multiple cups of strong Intelligentsia coffee. (Call it my secret to super productivity, but I’ve come to recognize that I’m actually only social in meaningful spurts. Otherwise, I am a diehard introvert who would rather churn through emails, research, and documents than hang with people and be idle/unproductive.)

5. You can run errands/grocery shop/workout in the middle of the day. Relating to 1, people who work at home do not all of a sudden have 3 hours of free time magically appear in front of them. Those 3 hours they might spend commuting are hours that they (hopefully) use in a productive manner. As such, it is often hard for someone like me to go drop off my dry cleaning, buy groceries, or run other general errands in the middle of the day, as everyone who does NOT work from home is on their computers steadily pinging your inboxes from the hours of 8:00am to 6:30pm. (P.S. Whatever happened to 9-5?) Due to this constant stream of accessibility, worker bees who work at home often still have to stick to a relatively strict schedule of 8-6:30pm and be available at those times, to appease others that they work with, who abide by a typical office day schedule.