The coronavirus pandemic has changed our sleep
jeffhuang.com
jeffhuang.com
Honestly, work from home has been such a quantum leap in my quality of life. The fact that I am not spending 1.5 hours in the car every day has given me a surprising amount of time and energy. I don't dread the alarm clock going off every morning, and I can do fun things (at least, fun things that are COVID-safe) after work.
I would be perfectly content to never return to an office. Probably won't happen, so I'll enjoy it while I can.
Not to mention that I can make pretty much anything I want for lunch, take random walks around the house or down the street to stretch my legs, jump up and do calisthenics for a few minutes at random.
I'm loving this so much!
Likewise, but backwards. I hate not being in the office at least 2-3 days per week, seeing people, socializing.
EDIT: WFH is great and I love it, but for me, I'm not as productive full-time on-site or full-time off-site. Having a hybrid approach is my sweet spot.
PS: yes, it was nice to see some colleagues but I don’t wanna do it more than once a week. Max!
As an aside, I've always said I'll know I've made it when I no longer have to wake up to an alarm clock. This is not the scenario I quite had in mind, but I'll take it.
I wake up somewhat earlier than normal, though I'm groggy and take hours to fully wake up once out of bed. My productivity is completely shot. My wife, daughter and I spend the day grouchy and stressed out. I worry about my job and my sanity. After work, I find no joy in my hobbies -- I'm worried about how little I accomplished, and start dreading the next day.
I don't miss commuting, the one thing I find in common with your post.
I hope things turn around soon for you!
Good news is that there's so much more information about this nowadays. Start with a google of "deep work" and go from there. It'll be time well invested. You may not get to prefer WFH, but you can definitely improve things.
It's a killer combination and it's not merely "working from home" (which of course has its own challenges). A person without kids or single may find it ideal. I don't.
I have the same experience. I absolutely loved working from home every day.
Here in Denmark, where things have opened up again after COVID-19, there was lots and lots of talk about how working remotely had changed society, and things would probably never return to the old "normal".
Fast forward about 4 weeks, and everybody is driving to work like they used to like COVID-19 never happened. So much for change :)
Tomorrow is one of the black weekends in France (worst road conditions in the year because of people commuting to or from vacation) and this is exactly like every year.
The first graph in the article depicts April 2, 2019 sleep times vs April 7, 2020. But April 2 was just a day after the time change (Dec 31 2019), while the 2020 week was eight days after (Dec 29 2020).
How people adjust to the time change, given the ability to sleep in, is a very interesting topic. But it is different than a description of overall sleep, and it should be a separate analysis.
The author doesn't owe me anything, obviously, but I wish he had included a graph or two showing the normal variance (if any) over the same timeframe in a non-epidemic year. Then I'd have a bit more faith in his conclusions.
Same boat here, can confirm no changes in sleeping patterns. At this point I'm frankly jealous of people who got laid off during this whole thing because all it has meant for me is wearing a mask everywhere and my gym being closed long enough for me to get quite out of shape.
Same struggle here. My desk is also in the master bedroom, so any early morning calls I have tend to wake up whomever is in the room (which usually includes at least one kid that woke up during the night and migrated in). My other half handles it well enough (as I worked from home frequently prior to the pandemic), but when it wakes up a kid that ended up in our bedroom after staying up way later than they should have, it leads to a really cranky household for the whole day.
This feeling reminds me of the Mars500 study where astronauts simulates the trip to Mars and stays in a capsule for 520 days. The study finds that as repetitive routine sets in, the crew's mood worsened, as a result, the crew slept later and longer.
I've found I can focus so much more if I get up early and have been super productive these past few months. I am going to keep doing this when the pandemic is over.
I was the same way until daylight hours started getting longer and I found a good page turner. Before that I was out by 9:30 or 10 and up with the sunrise.
But work has been the same: no increase or loss in productivity. Lockdown forced WFH, but I used to WFH for years. The only difference is that in the last 10 months I've been going to the office daily because of a new job, enjoyed the atmosphere and the colleagues. And because it was only an 8 minutes commute.