Although the COVID-19 pandemic made countless things worse, it still had a silver-lining: working from home(or remote jobs) as a norm.
2020
It still feels like a fresh memory when I recall how the working from home transition started. Before 2020, it was a blessing if one could work from home 1 day a week. But suddenly everyone needed to do that, 5 days a week. I was skeptical about it too, thinking it would go back to “normal” in a few weeks, or months at most. And with this mindset, I only put minimum effort into setting up my workstation at home.
I commandeered a corner in my garage and set up a standing desk there. The good part of working in the garage is segregation, because my children were also learning from home, guess I don’t need to explain more. However when winter arrived, it’s almost as cold as outside in the garage. Still hoping things would go back to normal shortly, I hesitated to move my workstation into a proper room with heating. Instead I was working with UGGs and fingerless gloves on – like a bombardier without goggles.
Also, doesn’t matter how much people hated the lock down, it was effective to say the least. My family and I didn’t contract covid until the rules were more relaxed in 2022
2021
I had the first 2 shots of phizer vaccine, not sure if it’s because of them or the lock down, or both, we were covid-free for the whole year. I have to admit we were very lucky. To avoid contact with crowd we decided to drop-off and pickup children at schools instead of letting them use public transport.
Convinced the pandemic wouldn’t go away just yet, before winter came I finally moved my workstation into my bedroom – I learned a lot from previous winter. I also upgraded my home broadband to a shiny fixed 5G which was faster than the one shared by 100 colleagues at the office.
I played badminton but since the lock down the venues were shut down. Terrible thing for the business owner aside, I lost my exercise which was bad as the virus was still at large. That’s when I restarted to ride my MTB, and turns out it’s great.
2022
I spent the New Year holiday with covid. I forgot what strain was that but it was definitely stronger than the vaccine I had earlier. I was shut down for more than a week but at the same time it wasn’t serious – I was able to watch Netflix a lot.
My parents were getting anxious because the visa application I lodged for them didn’t make any progress, thanks to Liberal government’s policy to pause all overseas visa processing. Then, during a weekend in May a Labour government was elected which didn’t happen in the past decade. So I thought things might be able to move forward again.
For my career, I felt thrilled that my covid-temporary remote job has been replaced by a permanent remote job. By now I think working from home will be there to stay because it worked well for me and by the looks of it it also works for a lot of people.
2023
Working from home pays off even more this year when I kicked off my backyard project: A granny flat!
When I took public transport to work in the CBD, the commute took me roughly 2.5 hours a day which probably just a bit longer than average. That’s 2.5 out of 16 effective hours a day so roughly 40 days a year(260 work days) I used to spend on commute. I wouldn’t say that was a complete waste of time because I have an Audible subscription but since working from home started I did make better use of those 40 days.
I learned quite a few useful skills throughout the year such as carpentry and would yell “I built a thing!” once in a while. Overall I was quite happy for my progress in secondary skills.
There are more and more news regarding remote jobs vs. office jobs. It’s not black or white obviously but for me I’m happy to leave commute and rush hours behind and it would be really discouraging for me to return to the old way of work.
🙂