6 Reasons Why I Don't Like Working Remotely

Remote work is becoming more and more popular. Many professionals indicate in their resumes “Remote only”, and HR is sympathetic to such candidates. Everyone talks about the pros of working from home, but no one talks about the disadvantages. But there are. And I want to tell you about them.

What are the disadvantages of remote work?

I first experienced the pleasures of working from home long before the pandemic. About 8 years ago I couldn’t find a full-time job for several months and decided to try freelancing. I did copywriting and spent 4–6 hours a day at my PC. It was an interesting experience, but as soon as I was invited to the office — I did it right away.

In early 2020, the whole world became familiar with COVID-19. Countries were closing for lockdown, and workers were going to work from home.

In March our company also switched to remote work mode. The boss created in a Skype special chat and told us to turn the cameras on at the beginning of the work day. And do not turn them off until the evening — supposedly we would be checked. But, of course, no one did that.

For the first couple of weeks it was fun to work from home. But then the problems started.

Always Online

Even if you lie on the couch with your laptop all day, you’re still tired from the fact that at any moment you may be asked to do something for work.

Even late at night. “Hey, isn’t it hard for you, it’s just a few minutes?”

Inability To Focus

If you live alone, that’s okay. But if you have children (especially little ones) — working remotely is quite difficult. Because: “Daddy, how are you doing? Let’s play, look what I draw, let’s go out!”

And, of course, you go and watch. And then you try to remember what task you were working on.

Monotony

Yes, if you work from home you can sleep one hour longer. It really saves time. But when you’re sitting in self-isolation and see nothing but your bed and laptop — it’s exhausting.

It’s very important to me to switch from one activity to another — and it works great when you walk home from your office. And it doesn’t work when you turn off your laptop at 6:00 pm and… turn it on at 6:26 pm to watch a movie.

So when after 3 months of remote job we were offered to go into the office at will — I was at the top of the list. After all, there are live colleagues in the office, and there is also a gym!

Remote Access Issues

In the early days of distance working, my fellow sysadmins and I had a very large amount of work to do. After all, we had to configure remote access for each employee.

At first, we tried to do it with Teamviewer, but we quickly realized that we needed an alternative — it took too long to explain to users what to configure and how to do it.

So, we started looking for analogues and found Getscreen.me, a cloud solution for remote support. It was enough to send the user a link in the browser and he could connect to his computer.

Problems With Connection

When there’s a breakdown in the office, everyone just sits around and drinks coffee. But if someone’s connection goes down at home, no one cares. You’re trying to set up Wi-Fi instead of drinking coffee.

Colleagues call you and ask why you left the meeting. You make excuses: “Sorry, I lost my Internet” And no one believes you, of course. “He just went to the store,” they think.

It happens rarely, but it does happen. I recently lost my Internet connection for two whole days. The sweepers were shoveling snow off the roof and hit the cable. And there was nothing I could do about it, as I had no access to the roof. All I had to do was wait and drink my coffee.

Laziness

That’s probably the main reason. I don’t know about you, but I’m just too lazy to sit at the computer all day when I can lie on the couch instead.

The temptation is too great.

That’s why I personally can’t work effectively from home. And coordinating tasks via Zoom is not as quick and convenient as in person in the office.

Of course, there are advantages to working remotely. And they are being talked about more and more. But I’m one of those dinosaurs who prefers the classic scheme home-office-home.