As a result of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, during which social contact had to be strictly limited in order to stop the spread of this new and highly infectious disease, many industries had to very quickly adapt to working from home. While essential workers continued to attend their places of work, any employee who could do their job from home was instructed to.
While there were initial hiccups and roadblocks for some – parents with small children struggled to keep their toddlers out of their meetings, as did technophobes who had difficulty keeping track of and making use of all the different new streaming and scheduling platforms – many of us grew to enjoy the flexibility, freedom, and comfort of working from home.
Now, as the pandemic begins to come to an end in many places, let’s have a look at the pros and cons of working from home.
Pro: Using your own tech
Who doesn’t remember a time when they showed up to the office to find that their computer needed an update that was going to take most of the day to complete? Or else having the servers crash across the whole company so that an entire afternoon was wasted? Possibly the worst thing ever was trying to get your work done on an ancient computer because the budget wasn’t there to replace it.
These things aren’t a problem when you work from home. Having the latest computer technology – a Lenovo AMD Ryzen 5 laptop, for example – means you can move at your own pace without worrying about glitches or issues.
Pro: Lunch at home
Possibly one of the best things to come out of working from home was the sudden ability to eat whatever you wanted for lunch without having to pay through the nose for it. Being able to cook a healthy, inexpensive lunch meant saving money and staying healthy. If you were lucky enough to be cooped up with a partner or a friend who was also working at home during the pandemic, lunchtime could even become a little daily party!
Con: Snacking all day
On the flip side of having easy access to your kitchen throughout the workday: at the office, you can’t snack all day long. Many people struggled to keep their desire to snack in check when they began working from home. So many, in fact, that the topic has become something of a news item worldwide!
While some did keep snack drawers at work that helped them get through the day, there was something truly dangerous about being able to wander to the fridge at any point and munch to your heart’s content.
Con: Accidentally sedentary lifestyles
Staying at home for work means totally removing the time you would have spent commuting, which is a boon for many, but it also means that you don’t actually have to move. At all. All day. This means that, very quickly, you can start living a totally sedentary life. This is possibly the worst and most dangerous aspect of working from home.
Given that we may start heading back to the office – either part-time or full-time – as the pandemic comes to a close, it’s worth taking stock of what was great and what was not so great about our home offices.
