Five years of remote work? Try 25 years.
For a comic strip starring stick figures, Randall Monroe’s xkcd has long been unusually relatable. Never more so than five years ago this month, when the strip offered its iconic response to COVID lockdowns around the world.
“Experts are saying people may need to self-isolate to combat the virus,” says a TV reporter in the first panel. A stick figure viewer takes a beat, then announces: “I’ve been practicing for this moment my whole life.”
Introverted homebodies everywhere could relate. But I could relate for another reason. As the pandemic broke out, I had been living the brave new world of working from home for exactly 20 years.
“I have watched, shocked, as the world has basically mandated that my life apply to everyone,” I wrote in my diary at the end of March 2020.
The times were dire — but for an introverted work-from-home journalist, life actually became easier. Almost every source, for almost every story, was stuck at home too, eager to talk. I didn’t have to drive to a single interview, suggest a lunch spot, pick a bar. Companies had to send their products for review without the interminable in-person demo. The publishing industry suddenly discovered it could instantly send PDFs of upcoming books rather than making reviewers wait for hard copies — the bulk of my once-bulging mailbox.
And there was no longer any FOMO about the endless parade of evening events available to someone who’s supposed to keep up with the exhausting luminaries of Silicon Valley. I expressed my feelings with a line from an episode of Doctor Who: “Did you wish really hard?” Amy Pond (Karen Gillan) asks the Doctor in “The Doctor’s Wife,” after his beloved TARDIS takes human form.
I must have wished too hard, I concluded. And then a much older line, from Aesop, also popped into my head: be careful what you wish for. “Now I’m like a cat,” I wrote. “Told that I can’t go out, I scratch at the door that held little interest before.”
Working from home, the first 20 years
As the new San Francisco bureau chief for TIME magazine in March 2000 — arriving just in time to witness the dotcom crash — I’d been given a choice. My job was mistitled; the bureau was basically me, and I could work from anywhere in the city. We’ll rent you an office downtown, New York HQ said, or you can work from home and we’ll put what we would have spent towards your (even then) sky-high San Francisco rent.
Well, I replied, “let me think about that for five seconds.” It was a no-brainer, especially for a night owl who hates commuting. I found an architect’s home with a view of the Golden Gate Bridge I never would have been able to afford on my own. It was workplace heaven.
And I spent the first few months dealing with a feeling I hadn’t expected: crushing guilt at my own good fortune. In the year 2000, according to that year’s census, a mere 3.2 percent of people in the U.S. worked from home most of the week. Office dronery was all around me. Driving to Silicon Valley a few times a week, I shuddered at the nightmare of Highway 101.
What about all the other night owls, commute haters, homebodies, or introverts stuck on that clogged freeway at rush hour in both directions? Didn’t they deserve what I had? (Perhaps that’s when I started wishing really hard.)
There were other challenges to overcome, as months of WFH (we didn’t have that acronym yet) turned into years. How not to fall into the dispiriting trap of wearing pajamas all day? Get review products delivered throughout the day, so you always need to be dressed for the UPS guy. How not to overheat your thighs when working with old-school laptops on a couch? Cushions are your friends.
And then there was the question of how not to feel lonely, which I’d sometimes do when I looked up from a raucous conversation in Campfire (a predecessor of Slack) to find that I was not in fact in an office full of jokers. My favorite solution was an IRL one: find artists who wanted to co-work. Obsessed with creating their latest thing, unlikely to want to chat about tech or news, Bay Area artists were great for getting into a state of flow; they also often came with a hard drive of MP3s I could add to my stash.
And then there was the never-ending challenge of how to draw a bright line between work life and home life when they happened in the same place. In part, this was a problem of my position. Any major news event could upend my week at any time; if a major earthquake struck, I had to be ready to hire a helicopter to survey the damage.
Some editors in New York didn’t understand time zones, and would call the bureau phone by my bed when they got into work. I became very good at sounding awake at 6 a.m., and a day when I could have coffee before my first call instantly became a very good day.
Regardless, the fact that WFH was more productive, at least for me, became clear when I spent the occasional week at New York HQ. The aimless watercooler and kitchen conversations seemed to eat as much of my day as the commute I was suddenly taking. My diet was worse, not aided by all the sugary goods that office life often presses upon you (who could say no to birthday cake?).
I walked less overall: no afternoon constitutionals around the neighborhood. And desks with no optional couch? C’mon, how are you supposed to work in a vertical position after that much cake?
Eleven years into my WFH lifestyle, 4.3 percent of Americans were working from home most of the week, up from 3.8 percent a decade earlier. The pace of change was strangely slow; the office lifestyle had America in its grip. Still, I’d moved on to other publications, and acquired a manager who heartily approved of couch working: my cat, Mowgli, who loves to gaze into the screen and supervise the writing process, purring when he likes a paragraph.
This can be so conducive to long productive laptop sessions — more so than coffee, more so than any perk in any office — that cats should probably count as a business expense.
Granted, Mowgli was sometimes less keen on the keyboard part of laptops. Sometimes he would lean his head on it, looking reproachful; other times, more of a helicopter boss, he would use his paw to redirect my hand. When I wrote How Star Wars Conquered the Universe from that couch, Mowgli began trying to push the laptop out of his way with his back.
I gave him a shout-out in the acknowledgements, for being a true Jedi master and helping me find a way to let go of my conscious self and reach out with my feelings.
When the world went WFH
The percentage of WFH workers ticked up over the decades as the internet seeped further into our lives, but never as fast as I expected. Then came the pandemic, the moment I’d been unintentionally preparing for. A quarter of U.S. employees were WFH full time in 2021; by 2023, with the pandemic largely over, that number had ticked up to 28 percent. The trend seemed irreversible (whether it actually is or not is a different story).
I tried not to be a WFH hipster as social media filled up with accounts of people learning all the pitfalls I’d dealt with for decades. They also discovered new ways to deal with them, beyond the saving graces of Slack and Zoom. I’ll never forget one stylish friend’s solution to the pajamas/sweatpants problem, as described in her Facebook post: “I am promoting all my evening gowns to workwear, effective immediately.”
It reminded me of the surrealist artist Rene Magritte, who was very deliberate about putting on a suit (and the meticulous mindset that went with it) to go paint in his home studio between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m.
It was good to be ahead of the game, to know what was most necessary. The more we work from home, the more structure we need: this was clear a month into the pandemic, when I wrote about my new time management system. Paradoxically, the more we work from home, the more loosey-goosey we can be about when we actually do the work.
By 2020 no one in my New York HQ was calling me at 6 a.m. PT anymore, and work became something that could be done on a night owl’s schedule; I also wrote about how the pandemic could de-throne the larks.
By that time, the cat-like restlessness with being inside once I was told to be inside, as noted in my diary, was reaching critical levels. And so I began constructing the most epic outing I could imagine: a series of end-of-day hikes that would together comprise the entire Bay Area Ridge Trail, a 250-mile loop through San Francisco and all its surrounding counties.
Because when you’ve been working at home for decades, regular off-sites become more necessary than ever.
This column/article/etc reflects the opinions of the writer.
