The Value of Being in the Office

It's not always valuable to you, but it's definitely valuable to your employer

I see a lot of people talking about how they can do their job just as well from home and it doesn’t make sense for them to go into the office, but I rarely see anyone talk about whether it has value to be in the office. And it does! There are a lot of reasons I prefer to go into the office, rather than work from home, and one of them is that I often have to interact with other people to get my work done.

I have always found that the single most effective way to interact with another person is to get up and go to wherever they are. Sure, you can pick up the phone or text them or send an email, but some people don’t answer the phone or look at their texts or read their emails. Not to mention if you send a text or an email, they may not get back to you for hours or even days.

If you go stand in their office door, they tend to stop whatever they’re doing and interact with you. They want you to not stand in their office door. They would like to get this conversation out of the way right fucking now, please, so they can go back to whatever they would rather be doing. So whereas “I don’t want to deal with this right now” on an email means you will not get a fast response, “I don’t want to deal with this right now” on you standing in the door will typically get a really fast response.

Speaking of interacting with other people, I typically live with other people. And I have found that many such people do not fucking understand that while it may be the same three words, there is a difference between “work from home” and “home from work” because the order of the words is important. This is a type of interacting with other people that I would prefer not to be doing, as it is very much getting in the way of doing my work.

In a somewhat related matter, it’s well-known that your work productivity is improved when the only thing you do in a given place is work. I give this advice with coaching and training, too: when you are going to go learn how to do something, you should have a special place you always go to do that, and it should be the only thing you do there.

Your brain loves to anticipate what is going to happen and get prepared for it, so it can do a good job. If you go to the place where you work, and the only thing you do in that place is work, your brain will go “oh I know what comes next, we are going to work!” and it gets all set to work.

Whereas if you go sit in the chair where you browse Amazon and watch Netflix and check Facebook and listen to Spotify and play Umamusume and also work, your brain doesn’t know what the fuck you are about to do and it will just pick something at random. Usually it will pick the thing it likes, because your brain is aspirational and likes to encourage you to do the things it likes.

And hey presto, social media is optimised to manipulate your brain with dopamine though the algorithm, so it likes social media more than anything and now you are doomscrolling again.

I’m kidding. Umamusume is much better at this than social media. You’re gonna be playing the anime horse girl game. This is why I have uninstalled that shit. Seriously. Dump it. You’ll be better off.

A ritual is also useful. If you are going through the motions of getting your body ready to go to work, your brain goes “we’re going to work!” and gets ready to work. If you work in an office, you have the ritual of the commute. If you work from home, you may be in the habit of just wandering over to your computer whenever and trying to work.

Don’t do that shit. Get up and go shower and get dressed — really dressed, like go-to-the-office dressed, none of this casual bullshit — and have breakfast. Then go start to work. The ritual will tell your brain you are gonna work, and when you sit down to work your brain will be ready to work.

This is all built into the process when you leave the house and go to an office to work. Having a special room in your house where you work — and only work — is similar. But a different building works better, for all kinds of psychological reasons.

There’s also a matter of trust. When you see the people you work with, and you see them… you know, working… then you tend to have a bit more confidence that they are working, and whatever you might need them to do, they are gonna do it. When you never see them, well, they could be doing anything.

This is, of course, one of the things people like about working from home. They could be doing anything. They can take a break whenever they like and go watch a movie or have a snack or whatever. And while that is of course quite valuable to you, that doesn’t have any value at all to your employer unless it translates into more and better work, which it is kind of hard to argue it does.

I feel like most people who want to work from home are not wanting it because it makes them better at their job, but because it makes their job more convenient. But your job isn’t supposed to be convenient. That’s not how it works. The entire point of your job is to use your time and energy on behalf of someone else, to accomplish their goals and aims. And I feel like a lot of people are just not even trying to do that.