I am working too much. 9 and 10 hour days, meaning even if I take a day off I end up working a 40 hour week, in four days. I am worrying more that I did before, I have a staff of five including myself to keep employed.
I am maxed out on vacation and paid personal days, I need to take about three days a month off, or lose time. We are meeting a friend in Baltimore this month and I added a day to that weekend to make it a long weekend. We are going to New York for a few days in early April.
I scheduled a week off in May. Plans for that week? We thought about obligation trips to see family and friends, and decided what we really want, what I really need is a few days with no obligations. We are thinking about exploring places in the northeast we have never been. I know I could lose my membership card for this, I have never been to Provincetown. I have a couple of Mayflower ancestors (along with an estimated 35-million other Americans) and I have never been to Plymouth, Massachusetts. It will be early spring in that part of the country, after spring break, and before summer break. Our kind of shoulder season travel.
My office has announced once again (this is the third or fourth time) an official return to office date, in late April. I am okay with that, I do hope that the subway system starts to fix and return to service the 60% of the fleet that was having problems with wheels falling off.
I participated in an exercise recently looking the future of work and offices. The assumption is that we have proven that most jobs can be done, and done well, without going into our office. There is some value in in-person meetings and collaboration, but requiring people to be there, just because it is something we have always done, is unproductive. That cheese has been moved and it isn't going back. And office space is rather expensive in Washington DC. The assumption is I would go in 2 or 3 days a week. Either there would be an assigned desk that I used on my days in, and someone else used when I was not there, or no one has a permanently assigned space unless the job required them to be in the office full time, and when I checked in each day, I would be given the keys to an open space, kind of like checking into a hotel room. It eliminates the accumulation of personal stuff in a workspace. Nearly all of our files are already paperless, I can make the rest paperless. Anyplace I can access the file server, is my office. The rest is personal junk. Having not been in a "coffee shop" work culture, it would / will be a change in mindset for me. Whatever I need to do my job, needs to be portable.
When I took the job in DC, I left nearly all of my books behind in the other house. I realized a couple of years later, that if I hadn't needed them in two years, I probably didn't need to keep most of them. And I parted with them. This shift in office will require that kind of shedding of personal stuff. But then we have done the job for two years without all of it, why do we need any of it. (I have one colleague who has not been in the office since March of 2020, another has been in twice.) When would we make a change? When we can get out of the lease on the space, that could be a few years, but now is the time to think about it.
Things I would not want to own, shopping malls, and large office buildings. They are going to be the same.
Comments
Post a Comment