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Comment by ordinaryperson | Hacker News Reader

I do not have kids and do not love WFH during lockdown.

Simple things that would be a 30-second conversation in the office are now 30-minute Zoom meetings.

Slack noise -- already a distractor to begin with -- has gone up 10x.

If I have X hours at home or in the office I know exactly what limited amount of time I have to accomplish a task and can more easily allocate chunks of that time to specific needs.

In lockdown it's like living/working in a casino with no clocks and no sense of time or progress and it's harder to do time management (IMHO).

If I need something from someone in the office I can walk over and ask, virtually people have the ability to ignore you for days on end without consequence.

I have no doubt that some people's personalities prefer this style of interaction but I hate WFH like this (in lockdown) or this much (months on end vs once a week) despite having no kids.

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>I have no doubt that some people's personalities prefer this style of interaction

I think its more that other workplaces do not have this kind of interaction. I have found that a 30 second conversation might take a 1 minute call now but certainly a 30 minute call sounds absurd.

For me time has stayed the same. I start and finish at the same time and I go for lunch for the same time as I did before. I don't have work email or IM on my phone so once I close my laptop work is done.

> a 30 second conversation might take a 1 minute call now but certainly a 30 minute call sounds absurd.

It is absurd, but people do it. People are always late to meetings. Then 5 minutes of kibbutzing since many have recommended personal chit chat as a way to connect during lockdown. Then there are people who just want to hear themselves talk. It happens.

In a normal office you could streamline some of these but in lockdown you can't.

It's great that you don't have this experience. Consider yourself lucky. But I was responding to the generalization that people who don't have kids "love" WFH. I do not have kids, do not love WFH, and anecdotally from my professional circle my experience is not that uncommon.

I'm glad we are not co workers then. I would hate it if you decided that my time is not important and that whenever you walk over to my desk I should drop everything I'm doing to serve you.

As you can see, that goes both ways

Not really.

It's an office, not an isolation chamber. You have to work together.

That may be a frustrating concept for some -- from your comment it appears you only care about your work, you don't care if others' work is completed or the larger corporate objectives are met -- but that's why teamwork is so important.

Yes, it would be great if everyone could just singlestream on their own tasks but that's not how companies work. I'm sorry you find helping your coworkers to be such a frustration and distraction from your own personal achievements.

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