Working from home like it or not?

TBagpuss

ushjr said:

ACG said:

I read something the other week that said generally speaking the older you are, the more likely you are to want to work from home, the younger you are the opposite can be said. 

There are pros and cons for both. On the face of it, working from home sounds good but I think you have to have a certain mindset otherwise you end up doing less work (I am one of those people). I have my own office, if I have the odd bit of work to do, I do it from home. If I have a lot of work to do, I go to the office as I know that as soon as the work is done I can come home. If I stay at home, it just gets put off. 

That would be more to do with an individuals circumstances. If you live in a bedsit then you've got limited space and have to share the kitchen and bathroom with strangers anyway then you'll probably want to go into the office. If you live in a big house in the country where you can dedicate a spare room to working and getting to the office is expensive and time consuming then you'll probably want to work from home. People in the bedsit are more likely to be younger and people in the big country house are more likely to be older.

I agree that it has a lot to do with personal circumstances - that older people are, on average, more likely to have the kind of home where there is space for working from home, and are probably less likely to have a social life linked to their work colleagues. Also, in the current situation, younger people on average are probably less anxious about the risks of in person working, although of  course as with everything in life, there will be exceptions and outliers! 

TBagpuss

Tokmon said:

Reading all the comments about people needing to "unwind" on the way home from work and hate being reminded at work while at home must really dislike their job?.

I personally can't understand the need to unwind at all when you finish work.

I don't think it's about how much you dislike your job. I think it has to do with the nature of the job, and how difficult / stressful it is, and also about the individual. 

Some people fid it easier to compartmentalise than others - many need external cues to be able to effectively change gears between work mode and home mode, and things such as having a separate work space from your living space, time (such as a commute) between the two, or physically going put and back in, or dressing for work even when WFH, are all ways of helping people to make those mental adjustments.

Perhaps you don't need them, but many, perhaps most, people do find that it is helpful to have definite difference between the two, and the commute, or change of pace by going outside, are simple and common ways of achieving the mental change of focus.

I personally have always preferred to go in early or stay late, rather than take work home, as it is easier to keep the two separate that way, and during the first lock down when I did work form home i found that it was much easier once I had been able to setup workspace in a spare bedroom rather than having to work on the dining table as I did at first. I also found that going out for a short walk immediately after I stopped work for the day was helpful in disengaging work-brain. 

Ditzy_Mitzy

Tokmon said:

Barny1979 said:

Our workplace referred to them as “thin clients” where you just log onto the server, but it’s not a computer or laptop.

A thin client is still a computer, it just doesn't need to be very powerful.

They're more like the old mainframe terminals than anything; the box does little but provide plugs for the various components and act as a conduit to the company system.  They don't really function in their own right.