This photo, which was taken by Wesley Lapointe of the Willamette Week a couple months into the pandemic, shows my standing desk set up in The Lucky Penny. Like so many people, I started working remotely in March 2020. In October 2020 I started working remote(r) in Vermont.
This past Friday, the 14th of November, happened to be the second Friday the 13th in the year 2020, and while I’m not superstitious about it, it was interesting to realize that the first one was March 13th, the day the COVID-19 pandemic was declared a national emergency. On Friday, March 13, 2020 my colleagues and I at Green Hammer packed up our stuff for the weekend saying things like “I’m think I’m just going to work from home next week.” Little did we know that 8 months later, on Friday, November 13, 2020, we’d be pretty darn good at the whole work from home thing!
This spring the Willamette Week ran a story I was included in called These Portlanders Have Spent the Last Two and a Half Months Quarantined in Tiny Homes. I found working remotely in The Lucky Penny was fine. As I noted, I don’t take up any more room than I did before the pandemic started (though some folks have joked that they do now because of stress eating and less ability to get exercise and that’s a good point!) I found with a garden to spend time in and parks and hiking trails in abundance, Portland was a pretty awesome place to be, even in the pandemic.
However, this summer when I acknowledged that one way or the other there was a long Covidian winter ahead of us, I realized that maybe it was time for a change of scenery. I’d long been curious about Vermont, so I approached my supervisor and Green Hammer’s owner, noting that we’d learned over the past six months that I could work remotely, so what if I worked remote(r) from Vermont? They were amenable, so I transferred responsibility of the portion of my job that does involve tangible objects to a colleague and hit the road, Brattleboro Bound.
Yesterday marked 4 weeks since arriving at My Brattleboro Landing Pad, which means a month of working remote(r). I’ve found that there are some aspects of working remote(r) that I’ve really enjoyed and a few that are amusing. One of the amusements is that I can’t commiserate about the weather with my colleagues because we’re not experiencing the same weather. So now we compare notes on the weather instead. We do the same about the daylight and the darkness. And, of course, I’ve gotten much better at accounting for time zone differences, though there have been a few amusing mix ups (and thankfully no problematic ones!) Another interesting factor is that the Covid regulations are different in Portland than in Brattleboro so now I’m keeping up with two sets of restrictions.
Probably my favorite aspect of working remote(r) is that since I’m keeping a west coast work schedule my work day starts later and ends later. I’m finding that having a slower paced morning enables me to not be in a hurry in the morning, which makes my entire day less stressful. I didn’t realize how much the morning rush stressed me out until I didn’t have it anymore. Wow! Working later isn’t as hard as I worried at first it might be. I think that’s because there were times I worked till 6 or 7pm anyhow. And now, when the work day is done, I’m done with obligations for the day. I don’t try to fit anything else in. It’s just time to eat some supper and wind down.
Otherwise, I’m finding it’s not much different. While I certainly miss seeing my colleagues, I was mostly interacting with them via video conferencing and Google Chat anyhow, so that part isn’t any different. The shift to working from home due to the pandemic was definitely a bigger transition than the shift to working remotely from a different place.
I recognize that the pandemic has changed work for many people in ways they didn’t choose. I recognize that I’m one of the lucky ones to have so much flexibility and safety in my work. I also know that since the pandemic started many other people have experimented with location, timeframes, and other work-related things we never considered flexible before all this. Are you one of them? If so, what have you tried out? If not, what would you do if you were to try something else out? Let us know in the comments.