Let’s investigate two cases together:
Case 1: You wake up. It’s 6 a.m. You realize you forgot to turn your alarm on last night. The sun hasn’t even risen yet, but you have to go to work. The bus you must take will be there in 20 minutes, and you are late. You get up, wash your face, brush your teeth, back up your stuff for work, dress up… And when you check your phone, you see that you have only a minute left till the bus comes to pick you up. So you skip breakfast and grab your keys to run to the bus waiting for you outside. Finally, you come to your office. As you were about to sit down, you saw one of your colleagues waving at you. You smile and wave back, feeling satisfaction from the encounter you just had, forgetting all the stuff you had to go through when you woke up. You work till midday and get up to have dinner with your friends. You decide to eat out, and you chat the whole time you are out. Then you go to the office again to finish what you had to do, and later, you go back to your house. Feeling tired from work but joyful from the whole day, you open a new show and relax a little since you don’t have any work to do because you finished it at your office. You fall asleep on the couch, knowing you’ll regret it tomorrow morning from the back pain it will cause.
Case 2: You wake up. It’s 9 a.m. You decide to check your phone for a while before getting up to take a shower. You make yourself some breakfast and watch a film while eating it. Afterward, you check up on the new tomatoes you have just planted in the garden and do some yoga in the park, where you take your dog for a walk. It has already been 2 p.m., but you haven’t done anything yet. You knew that the reason you wanted to work from home was to test how self-disciplined you were and for comfort. You decide to start working, and you work for long hours with regular breaks. When you finally finish your work, you decide to go for a run and buy some groceries on the way back. While you were out, your boss called, complaining about you not having submitted your work yet, even though you had all day at home. You try to explain the situation, but they hang up, telling you that you are basically on vacation. When you come back home, you decide to forget about it; maybe call your mom or your old friends to have a chit-chat and sleep afterward.
Well, which one sounds better? To be honest, none. Because neither of them is balanced. In case 1, you go to work, but you are late in the morning, so you have to hurry. Usually, in situations like these, we tend to get stressed and angry, which can affect our daily mood. Whereas when you are home, you wake up later, so you get more sleep. The time you spend going and coming back to work can be spent on things you want to do, like watering your plants, taking your dog for a walk, running, or doing yoga. That means you will have more time to have new hobbies and spend some time enjoying yourself. Home office jobs usually involve small businesses or jobs to do with computers. Both can lead to spending an uncontrolled amount of time working while sitting still and bending to reach the table, which may result in problems with posture. The same thing goes for office jobs if you constantly sit. It’s no lie when I say that you are more socially active in office jobs as you can interact with your colleagues, but home offices don’t have that, at least the physical ones. In case 2, we can see the boss complaining and telling us that we had all day at home. This frequently happens, especially when we had the COVID-19 pandemic, as employers tend to blame you for being lazy and not doing enough just because you are at home. Also, if you are not self-disciplined, you can’t succeed in any kind of home office job.
So, to sum it all up, working from home has both pros and cons. It’s comfortable, but you can lose track of time if you are not careful. You’ll have more time but also more work; you’ll be able to spend time on yourself, but because you are at home when everyone is at work, you won’t have as much physical social interaction as you would when you work at a regular office. The most important thing, though, is being self-disciplined. After all, self-discipline is like a flashlight you use when you get lost on the way to achieving something. The batteries are what you do, and if you have self-discipline, you can create light out of them for it to enlighten the way to your goal.
