The world after coronavirus
sfree.life
sfree.life
Introverted people who had long commutes because they wanted a big garden, garage, etc (or couldn't afford to live somewhere popular) are living the dream right now.
Extroverted people living in city centres who chose small flats based on being able to easily access the shared amenities, get to work quickly etc are worse off because none of that exists any more.
It pretty much comes down to whether you made a housing decision (whether by choice or necessity) in the 'old world' that would become better under lockdown for you.
By the numbers, I have no proof, but I guesstimate that the majority are losing out. Poor people have bad commutes and that's the group hit hardest because their jobs don't exist any more and they have no savings.
I consider myself an extroverted person (I love talking with people, to the point I have to restrain myself because I get the feeling they had "too much of me") and live in city centres for the reasons you describe.
Yet, I've been working from home for 13 years, now, and totally love it. I still get the advantages of getting anything deliver to my door (it's way harder further from the city) and to be able to go out do anything should I wish it (which almost never happens).
All in all, I'm glad working from home is seen as a new normal, because it's one less reason for people to call me "weird" and ignore anything I say.
EDIT: oh and also, at almost 40, I still never had a driving license nor a car. I guess this can only happen working from home (no commute) in a city (good public transportation).
I think this is TBD. There will no doubt be more prevalence of WFH allowed or WFH oriented companies, but I don't think we can say this will be the new normal quite yet.
I, for one, would be happy for it to become "A new normal", where I get to take advantage of it, but understand there are people who prefer going into the office. No need for it to become "THE new normal" because there are all sorts of different kinds of people.
Not to mention it's highly dubious to suggest that introverted people can or do avoid the city for housing and extroverted people avoid the suburbs.
They also lost ice cream stores, toy stores, cinemas, etc if they were doing that as well.
They don’t have any control. Their natural instinct is to continue to play if they can and push the boundaries if they can. And when kids get depressed they often act out more paradoxically.
This leads to chaos if you’re also trying to work from home.
I feel for my kids. So I don’t apologize to others if they intrude on my work; they are people too and going through the crisis too. But yes it is extremely stressful some portion of every day.
I try myself to not blame them or myself for putting up with the situation, because that leads to frustration and anger and more stress; my wife and I are trying to create more and more capability in my home for the kids to self-entertain every day. We have a new daily structure. Goal charts. School time. Online learning games. Outdoor time. Messenger kids. Etc.
It’s not painless. My wife and I are taking shifts during daylight hours so I work well past midnight every night to catch up. That also is impacting my ability to stay positive.
But every day is a new day. Good luck and don’t be hard on yourself.
The other day one of them said they can't wait for summer break. I asked what would be different and they said 'no school work', haha. They have about 60 minutes per day of remote learning to do. Apparently more of this would be okay.
I thought they'd miss socializing a lot more than they do so far. Instead being trapped at home with dad is similar to vacation.
I surprise myself taking breaks to drink tea and play with her (puzzles, reading, having her read, do some short yoga, sometimes even dancing with her a bit).
It has brought my kids and I far far closer.
Taking care of kids for the day while parents are busy working is one of the many key functions of modern education institutions, and they're not fulfilling that function right now - this gap needs to be filled somehow, and it's not an easy gap to fill without major changes of how millions of people work. E.g. going back to a situation where one spouse is a dedicated housekeeper and is pretty much forced not to work is technically a solution but I'm not sure if we as a society really want to go there. And the usual alternative solutions e.g. using extended family/grandparents for childcare, or cooperating/sharing childcare in a community tend to be explicitly prohibited by the social distancing measures.
It can be the parents only if we expect the parents (at least one parent in every family) not to work, which would require an immense reversal in our social structure. Something like 25% of families are single-parent families, do we expect all these people to quit their jobs in order to raise kids?
To put it bluntly, if the alternative is to put women back in the role of 'Kinder Kuche Kirche' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinder,_K%C3%BCche,_Kirche) then it justifies declaring that "warehousing kids" should be one of the key functions of educational institutions; simply because it's an important function that needs to be done by someone other than the working parent(s) and they can fulfil that function reasonably well. Sure, education should be a priority, but IMHO it's better for everyone involved if we explicitly acknowledge all the various valuable functions what our society needs (and gets!) from schools instead of falsely pretending that it's only the education.
Or do you have in mind some other option that removes this role from the educational institutions while still allowing the parent(s) to go on full time employment?
Much like global supply chains, our decisions are optimized quite tightly to our individual lifestyles; what worked well in normal times suddenly doesn't when lifestyles are forced to change.
For the record:
- lots of people make decisions they later regret. Sometimes they make these based on assumptions that later turn out to be incorrect, sometimes on incomplete information, sometimes based on stress or strong emotion, sometimes in line with advice, and sometimes against advice. Sometimes the effects are small, sometimes they are large, sometimes they ought not be regretted.
- some people have children without planning to beforehand (for various reasons)
- most people can’t take extreme worst case scenarios into account when making big life decisions (eg “If I become unemployed or unable to work in 5 years I wouldn’t be able to afford any mortgage therefore I shouldn’t buy a house”)
- some people are constrained by other factors (eg “I’d like to have more space but I can’t afford a larger house which is sufficiently close to my work”)
- It’s reasonably natural for people to want to have children and sometimes they this even if they know it will be hard.
Self isolation is pretty easy if you're single or with a partner with no kids, in an adequately sized home where there is enough space not to feel cramped, and with a garden. If one or more of these things is lacking, it gets ever harder and harder the longer the lockdowns are in place.
Single folks without children have no gauge on reality during a lockdown, especially if they still have jobs and are working from home.
Almost anyone else would currently better off in a bigger home with more outdoor space regardless of personality, family, etc. The same is not true outside of "wartime".
You can want to go back to visiting museums and galleries and pubs, playing team sports etc. Without wanting to go back to working the same hours as everyone else, shopping in crowded shops and struggling to get a coveted weekend appointment at the dentist or hairdresser or whatever.
Since this started relatively recently, we are living off already established network. But what is not visible is the network we are not creating, new people we are not meeting, our kids who are getting more impaired socially, and so on.
It's a very old school way of thinking, exacerbated and encouraged by urban planning schemes, tax deductions if you open an office in X instead of Y etc.
It might not be easy to fix in many cases, but we must start decentralization if we want a better world. The pinnacle of centralization is France, where virtually everything important and interesting happens in a few areas of Paris, and putting stuff in Paris is the default, no-brainer decision.
Which then has the advantage of competing with crap private and public sector jobs and eliminating them via simple market forces. The “what about the jobs, can I have a bailout” line no longer has any traction when everybody has an alternative job available on tap. Competition can be allowed full rein. Business has to pay the full cost of the labour it uses and innovate around that cost.
But we prefer to use an unemployed buffer stock to constrain wages rather than an employed buffer stock. Always fewer jobs than people that want them. Then we wonder why productivity gains have largely gone to capital over the last 40 years.
We respond to our environments in the moment, not how we think we will. As we tune our environments to our situation, we create environments we like and get rid of parts we don't.
When lockdowns end, unless we consciously choose to lead ourselves, we'll revert to our old wasteful ways. Companies seeing opportunities to regain market share or fearing losing it will send people flying again. People who have found ways to get closer to loved ones remotely will start flying again, ironically probably not bonding as well by choosing convenience over shared effort and struggle. We'll waste again when marketed convenience.
That is, we'll revert to what marketers promote to us if we don't consciously choose to keep our lives simple and sustainable. That's the value of leadership -- personal and of others. I see virtually no leadership around the environment, which is why I work on it. It takes effort, but I find the rewards more than worth it.
That's not so much ineffectiveness of prediction as it is living through hopes and ideals. And that's human.
Are there any people that you consider the least worst at it, even if they don't make the cut?
Are there any personal things you do that you could share in some detail, or any other good ideas you might have to improve the general situation?
TEDx talks: http://joshuaspodek.com/my-tedx-talk-is-online-find-your-del...
Podcast: http://joshuaspodek.com/podcast
A couple episodes on my podcast strategy
- Clarifying My Strategy: https://shows.acast.com/leadership-and-the-environment/episo...
- My Modified Tesla Strategy: https://shows.acast.com/leadership-and-the-environment/episo...
"I used to think that carbon dioxide caused global warming. Carbon dioxide is a molecule, it has no volition of its own. It can't make choices. We can. It reacts to us, to our behavior."
Such a simple idea, so simple that the significance is easily overlooked. I've had my eye open for people who have this perspective (and take it seriously) for quite some time, but it's rare to encounter such people, at least in my experience.
I'm going to go through the rest of your material today, but I'll throw out some questions in the meantime, if for the sake of conversation if nothing else:
- it seems you've kind of identified beliefs as kind of the root cause problem - have you tried going a bit deeper?
- do you think some improvements may be possible in your strategy/approach (setting aside pragmatism for the time being)? For example, I sense some imperfections (unnecessary restrictiveness) in the MART in SMART[1], although if we add back in pragmatism, it's probably a good place to settle. (EDIT: the same, to a much larger degree, applies to "301: Does it scale" - I think there are significant improvements that could be made, and also some risks that should be taken into consideration.)
- have you played around with the idea of pointing this strategy at other problems? If so, do you find that you'd want to make some alterations depending on specific domains?
You have a rare combination of skills: good/novel ideas, the ability to articulate them persuasively, the gumption to go out and make it happen.
[1] Rough summary of your strategy:
1. What does the environment mean to you?
2. Is there something you can do to act on that?
3. Make a SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, time-bound) goal
4. Accountability
EDIT: if anyone's having trouble figuring out how to listen to the podcasts, there is a player embedded at the bottom of the page.
Regarding beliefs as the root, once I reach beliefs I try to learn where they come from, especially very common ones like "If I act but no one else does then what I do doesn't matter." It's an belief in many places, especially entrepreneurial communities where people want to act quickly before others react. I also want to learn other motivations to learn how to help people act on their motivations to help others.
I describe and teach my leadership style in my book Leadership Step by Step http://joshuaspodek.com/leadership-step-by-step. My environmental work mostly applies that style to the environment. The four-step strategy you outlined is Unit 4 of that book applied to this field.
Do you have ideas on going deeper?
I see huge gaps I'd like to improve on -- for example, engaging community on a wide scale. I believe people would want a community like Mr. Money Mustache's https://forum.mrmoneymustache.com (which I found through Hacker News five or ten years ago), I just haven't started it. I expect I have many blind spots.
I welcome constructive criticism, recommendation, and most of all help. Volunteers have contributed to major developments in the podcast. Actually, most of all, for others to start their versions of the podcast, applying it to their fields, like Leadership and the Environment Entrepreneurs or Leadership and the Environment Silicon Valley or wherever someone wanted to meet the top people in their field, talk to them on a podcast, and help them become role models.
I apply the technique in my teaching, coaching, and public speaking -- also in my personal life since it is based on helping people do what they care about.
Did I answer most of your questions? I'm answering publicly so anyone interested in helping grow the podcast into a movement can see what's happening and how they can make a difference while advancing their careers and lives. I'm also happy to follow up somewhere with higher bandwidth. My email is at http://joshuaspodek.com/contactconnect.
This smacks of trying to exploit tragedy to further one's pet cause. Too soon.
In hindsight it may well be that the actuarial math didn't make sense - this isn't the first disease humanity has faced by a long stretch and we're potentially looking at severe self inflicted wounds for something that doesn't look like it is going to be the next Black Death or Ebola. The obvious historical precedent I remember is 9/11. Making any changes after 9/11 was a mistake the US never really recovered from. This would be a great moment to be a little hard-hearted and remember that everyone has to die of something.
We don't know what is going to happen from this economically. The economic forecasts are as flimsy and there is a lot of room for unpleasant surprises.
The other difficult issue is that an order of magnitude more people end-up in hospital, many in intensive care, for at least 2 weeks.
That's an enormous amount, even if you were to spread out that effect, assuming we lift all restrictions and let the virus loose, we would be talking -at the very least- about more than a million people requiring beds at any given time, in the US alone, just for COVID-19...
Imagine the economic effect of that on medical costs and the economy at large...
A year-long confinement is not workable and no nation can afford it, western or otherwise. However, strong social distancing and hygiene measures, as well as travel restrictions, could/should be implemented until we have a universal solution for this.
That's not what lockdowns are for. The point is to avoid overloading the hospitals. If we didn't slow the pace at which COVID19 spreads, hospitals would become full of COVID19 infected people, leaving no room for people with other kind of afflictions. So we'd still have 1-2% death from COVID, but also a bunch of unrelated death due to reduced hospital capacity.
"Good years" for who? The accumulation of experience, knowledge, historic context, etc., tend to make a person's life more meaningful with time not less. To insinuate that the good years come and go with youth is either a statement about your own life or a failure of your imagination. Not even getting into the fact that you feel you can measure the worth of millions of stranger's lives and determine they're not worth saving.
However, I don't think it's in any way like COVID-19 situation. In this pandemic, the economy was going to go down anyway, due to simple self-preservation of individuals. Without social distancing and lockdown measures, once you'd seen people around you getting sick and dying left and right, you'd too be reluctant to go to your work, or to run your plant.
Other than being completely calloused, this argument also isn't true. We don't know the exact mortality rates because we haven't seen proper data for it yet. Depending on when you get your numbers, Italy has had up to 34% of their infected die.
Furthermore, this isn't just a Boomer and Silent Generation killer. Asthmatics, immuno-comprimised, and otherwise healthy people without access to decent health care for socioeconomic reasons are at risk.
I'm not arguing for or against such a long quarantine time. I'm only stating that we aren't just trying to save the last holdouts from the 40s.
As for the elderly dying more than all others by far (including younger immunocompromoised people), the numbers are plainly available for a variety of regions and countries. They speak for themselves clearly enough.By far and away, the absolute majority of all dead are those over the age of 70. Most of them over the age of 80, and even those with what would normally be comorbidities among younger populations ide so rarely of Covid that they're outliers. Healthy young people are extreme outliers to the mortality count. Even in northern Italy at the worst of its saturation of the healthcare system, the same thing was observable: deaths among younger people are outliers across the board.
Even ignoring the mortality rate, this thing is causing lasting and perhaps permanent damage to the body.
https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/conditions-and-diseas...
In 10 years the world will be more concentrated around the big cities. People will travel more. Things will be more international, more global. The people will rely more on services, eat out more. IT will play an even bigger role.
Basically a continuation of the globalisation process that has been in full force for the past many years.
(Though I do think Germans finally will stop on using cash payments for everything.)
You are right. We will see only buying electronically in the future.
They haven't made the effort yet to turn off the signature collection step. So you get to handle the pen. I expect they either don't particularly know it is an option, or have some false beliefs about it.
A little bit of reading I did suggests that the till software is often the stopper.
Modern cards (anything that supports EC) can handle using only chip+pin or contactless.
I one of the few who default meeting to video on.
If nothing else I'm enjoying demonstrating I can be an effective worker at home.
On the other hand, I'm putting on weight. I'm not listening to as many podcasts. I'm sitting on my arse for very long periods.
With a child in the house to care for (schools and childcare closed), it just doesn't work. And the emotional consequences of not being able to go for a walk don't help either, at least in my case.
I hope this crisis makes more companies support work from home under normal (non-lockdown) circumstances, but most workers and employers that are trying it now for the first time are going to get a very negatively biased sample of how it works.
Let's all be sure to remember this is equivalent to saying:
"I don't have to spend 10% of my life commuting."
It will give you energy(unlock your lymphatic system, improving your circulation, clean your waste) , activate your brain and body(generate activation hormones and oxytocins).
I recommend using the TV so you don't have to think(plan) what you do, just do it.
You can do yoga, you can do zumba, you can do samba or dancing, you can do strength, martial arts, bike, table tennis.
Right now everything is downloadable in torrents, and you can test any good program about any discipline before you decide you want to buy it(once you know you will use it).
I suggest you try for 30 days something different each day and you will find what you like to do and what not.
Once you know what you like, it is a good idea to buy the program so you make a(small) financial commitment that will help you to get used to the routine each day.
Once the routine is set in place, the difficult part will be not following it.
This changes overtime IMO. I've worked from home for years now, initially it's a blessing, in-time it can be a curse.
If you WFH and want to be productive you _must_ learn to plan your day and that usually involved some type of discipline.
If I force myself to go to sleep at midnight, I'm up at eight, no matter what (well, except in sleep disrupting circumstances, like drinking alcohol, no matter how few - I don't do that in the middle of the week anymore).
I think the need for alarm clock is actually a symptom that we live in a culture of sleep deprivation.
I know people who have quite irregular "natural" sleeping periods, and furthermore when they sleep 10-12hrs, they feel ill the whole day. They use the alarm clock to ensure a more regular period, and feel better for it.
If I need more sleep, I let my body sleeping more. Most of the time I don't need it.
In fact I use an alarm clock for working in chunks of 50 minutes, resting 10 minutes. Over time I have a very good idea how the timer is doing without looking at it.
> I've worked from home for years now, initially it's a blessing, in-time it can be a curse.
I had the opposite experience. For me working from home was a curse initially. Over time I have made that a blessing learning lots of different techniques and cultivating them.
But as I am working from home, I am getting more sleep too. I am too waking up without alarm. I dont travel to/from work anymore and therefore it is enough to wake up a bit later. I am also more ok going to sleep sooner, because there is more time for own activities not then it used to be.
There are no hard boundaries preventing your routine from changing into less-focused one over time. E.g. you may get away with a Netflix break in the middle of your work day now, because nobody is looking at what you're doing. And maybe you're susceptible to TV shows, and you'll soon find yourself watching TV shows when you should be working, and then trying to catch up with the work in the evenings or just having your conscience cause you distress. That's one example, maybe you're immune to that, but there could easily be others.
Also on my end, I'm stuck at home with my wife and 11 m.o. kid and, while my wife and I have an agreement that between ~10:00 and 18:00 I am in my office working, it's really hard to resist the urge to help with the kid (especially when she starts crying). It's taking an emotional toll on me. It wasn't that big of a problem before the pandemic, even though I've been WFH for the last ~3 years, because my wife would take the kid for a walk, or arrange playdates with her friend (who's also a mother of similarly-aged child and lives in the apartment building next to ours).
So while technically, you can take a short walk (AFAIR 250 meters from home) and can take your pets and kids out for a walk, whether you actually can do it often depends on the specifics of your particular neighborhood.
They didn’t say they slept in or woke up at varying times - you’ve imagined that - they said they woke up without an alarm clock. That could be at 5am sharp every day for all you know!
For parents and kids to be together 24/7 for several weeks is really quite unprecedented. At the very least it's a forced chance to get to know each other better and that should have some long-lasting consequences.
I think kids spend few weeks with parents anyway. It’s called summer vacation and schools are closed.
A fair few parents I know miss the escape that work provides so they can come home refreshed to their kids.
I am curious to see what affect this might have on urban centers.
On the other hand, I am sorely missing the concerts, festivals and other social events I normally do in my free time. Everything has been cancelled until the 31st of August, which has completely wiped out the festival season.
I fully expect this policy to be extended, so that only small events are allowed at first. Odds are the next festival I will be able to attend will be in November at the earliest.
So it's 50/50 for me. I have gotten back into some old hobbies again, now that I have more free time, but I sorely miss social interaction, despite being rather introverted.
Hopefully we will see some positive effects of this lockdown, such as challenging the idea that medical services should be profitable at all costs.
I’m using this time to accelerate my push to work for either Amazon (AWS) or Microsoft (Azure) in a mostly remote role (with lots of travel) in their consulting division.
I would have been happy working as an FTE for a smaller local consulting company, but I suspect that most of the small consulting companies are going to go bust. I don’t see too many companies wanting to start new initiatives. Microsoft and Amazon have enough capital to both weather the recession that we are going to be in, enough large customers, and are always looking to keep their bench warm.
-- As you say, there aren't activities like theater to go to
-- I normally am doing 1/3 travel, which is where a lot of my in-person interaction happens. (And essentially all of my professional F2F.) If events are canceled well into the fall, assuming that society is otherwise reasonably opened back up, I'll have to come up with some sort of Plan B that involves taking some significant time off.
I'm just waiting for the time to kick my kids to the kindergarten again, to gain a better concentration, then there will be much more improvement.
Eating out: there will be a down tick of people that eat out because they discover and become more handy at cooking.
Biotech: Uptick in interests in biology, major speed up in biotech collaborations and tools, govt removing certain red tape.
Social: Extroverts discovering solitude become more introvert. Introverts becoming a bit more extroverted because of the critical need of online interaction easing them back into social circles.
Health: There will be lots of people under exercising and slew of injury after things reopen and ppl start playing sports.(please be careful)
The demand for telehealth will spur remote Standard tools that are installed at home that allow doctors to diagnose most things, like blood pressure, heart beat, stenograph, some type of all in ones. Sponsored by health insurers.
Can economies compete if one is operating under quarantine conditions and another doesn't have too? Anyone know any past examples of that?
The push to improve economic output every year has as the effect that people have left very little time for themselves, that they have created smog hells in cities around the world.
I would argue that this environment we created is the antidote, where productivity has not gone up based on what you expect from the amount of hours worked. People keep putting more effort in but the output is not moving much.
I would expect that after some time of stabilizing (and articles like this show its already happening) that people will be more productive and be competitive with those that just keep chugging on.
It is easy to see on an individual level: you can try to put in 80 hour weeks, but a competitor that gets plenty of sleep and is happy doing his job just might outcompete you anyway.
I think the same can be seen on a larger scale, and probably with larger difference as well.
An economy where people are able to work in clean air, with much less pressure and much less feeling of being a consumer will end up being more productive even though a lot of people are working from home.
Because, remember, the main reason a lot of jobs are lost is not because productivity went down. It is because money is not spend. And money not spend is left available to be spend on other things. This will re-balance itself.
But I am not sure about your other point. People who put in 80 hours and burn out, can be replaced as there is an endless supply of labor in some parts of the world. At an individual level you compete against that pool. Not just one person. And many in that pool have been told for long, consumerism is the reward.
A lot of populists elected world over have promised their bases (who already feel they are owed) certain things. So they will push to get back to "normal". And given the mistrust and polarization that exists, its going to be a hard sell for big change.
Hopefully someone will show up who can do the selling, as I more or less agree with you things need to change. But I feel it will take multiple generations.
Scandinavia.
Low population density together with a population that finds one metre separation to be less than usual and two metres perfectly manageable.
Saw a joke recently, not sure where now: Swedes were alarmed to be told to stay one metre apart as that was rather closer than they were used to.
There is also an ongoing study in Australia to try to find if there's really a relationship[4] and some talk about trying a similar trial in Boston[5].
It will probably be while before we see any specific results.
[1] http://www.bi.cs.titech.ac.jp/COVID-19/Death_vs_BCGpolicy.ht...
[2] https://mobile.twitter.com/hshimodaira/status/12474763673707...
[3] https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/industry/healthcare/bio...
[4] https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04327206
[5] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/03/health/coronavirus-bcg-va...
It's interesting, because the way I feel about working from home has completely changed, and I suspect will continue to change as this pandemic progresses.
Previously I'd work from home for a day or two tops, and didn't really enjoy it. Didn't like the lack of company, especially not as I live alone, and found myself becoming easily distracted if I tried to work from home for longer periods.
I've now been working from home continuously since 16th March. Whilst loneliness and difficulty of focus were problems to begin with they've substantially passed, and I'm finding my ability to focus has improved.
I've come to appreciate the quiet and (ironically given what I said a couple of paragraphs back) lack of distraction. I can get up and move, or do something mindless if I need some time to get away from my screen and think without running into anyone. I can also make a cup of coffee without it turning into a 10-minute project where I have to queue/make smalltalk/empty and refill the coffee machine, and whatever else can distract and delay.
In general, if I'm frustrated by a situation at work, it's easier to get some mental and emotional distance from it, which is helpful for clarity of thought and better decision-making.
I've managed to set boundaries and regular hours for working that I rarely stray beyond, and I find myself more creative and energetic in the evenings.
Not everything is perfect:
- Lots of video calls and meetings becomes draining, and we've had to learn to change our ways of working somewhat to deal with this.
- Related: I find that preparation for meetings is even more valuable now because it helps to keep them shorter.
- I also prefer to have difficult conversations face to face in a way that video calls don't really substitute for.
- I miss my family and friends, and am missing out on my newborn nephew's first months as he grows and develops. Again, video calls go some way to helping (and I'm certainly grateful to have them - imagine what this would have been like 15 or 20 years ago), but they're obviously not a complete substitute.
- I've got flabby around the middle: did a virtual black tie dinner for a friend's birthday last night and couldn't do up the trousers of my tux properly - thankfully the cummerbund saved the day, and video calls cover a multitude of sins. I'm getting back into an exercise routine but clearly I need to do more.
Still, right now, I don't want to go back to the office, and this is even taking into account that my commute is generally less than 30 minutes each way.
Who knows? In another month I may feel differently. Only time will tell.