Work From Home, not enjoying the experience!

When the spread of the Coronavirus began in India, I was eagerly awaiting for my organization to bring out the WFH policy, based on my conversation with friends/colleagues in other countries, it seemed like a logical step, but none of them shared with me the mental challenges of working from home. 

Humans are a social race, we are encouraged to mingle and chat since the day we are born, our uncle/aunts relatives pick us up, play with us, we go to parks and socialize with friends and family. For the past 4 days, I have just been sitting at home, doing my office work but not been having any facial connect beyond my immediate family and for some strange reason it has begun impacting me and I am sure many others like me. 

My daily routine has broken, while earlier I used to start my day by going to the gym, get motivated by fellow members. It has now turned into a home workout and then starting office work. Weekends seem like weekdays and vice versa. 

I have been taking dancing classes every Sunday, which stopped because of the lockdown. Thereby making weekends all the more boring, at the end of the day how much Netflix can one really watch. 

So I proposed to my group “Let’s have a virtual class”, the organizers quickly figured out the technology, we used Zoom and began our class. Was the experience equivalent to a physical class- “No”, but it was definitely better than being in self-isolation. The interaction with the group led to a more positive day overall. 

Later in the day, I caught up with friends over a video call and everyone was just simply thrilled to see each other face. 

I would encourage everyone to do more video calling, while business solutions are more friendly. There is a need for social networking companies like Google (Hangout, Duo), Facebook (WhatsApp) to enable options like invite/schedule group video calls and for business solutions like Zoom to revisit their pricing and plans. 

In these times we need to be able to re-create our earlier routine in the virtual world.

We need to see this as an opportunity, do we really need people to migrate into cities if the work they are doing is for a client sitting in another continent? Should we move away from a location concentration approach to a remoteness approach? 

Just a few thoughts running in my mind, I wanted to share.

"Don't live like Chuck Noland from Cast Away, he did not have the power of the internet, you do!"