There’s a lot of “stats” being thrown around about the newly work from home. As someone who has worked from home full-time for awhile, I can’t help but laugh as they reflect the typical change curve of someone beginning the work from home process. Yet the “stats” are presented as if they are an accurate reflection of future direction.
Quick caveat: this is just one person’s experience, but it matches from when I have compared notes with others.
Guilt phase (0 to 6 months): Welcome to working from home for the first time. Your schedule is your own, you don’t have a commute, you can do laundry at lunch, you can eat anything you want, you can start and end on your own schedule. This is a lot of sudden freedom. Most people feel guilty about how much they are now getting in the trade-off and end up working longer hours.
Burned out (6 to 9 months): It’s been 6 months of change and developing new habits all while putting in more hours than usual. You are tired and worn down by the grind of it. This is the period in which you physically and emotionally feel the toll. Most likely you scale back your habits to try and replicate the office environment again.
Realizing this can work (9 to 15 months): You’ve passed the feeling of burn out as you come to grips that this is something that you can actually do. You still put in more hours than normal because the guilt is not entirely gone, but it’s not as bad as before. Your new habits are starting to be a comfortable routine.
Settling in (15 to 18 months): It dawns on you that you’ve been doing this for more than a year yet it still feels like you started to work from home just yesterday. It’s easy to draw on the lessons you have learned as you rationalize your new productivity style. While it still feels a little bit wrong, it also now feels right (and maybe a little bit normal). You are still refining your habits to make them as effective as possible but they are now second nature.
New normal: After you have settled in, it is just another way of working. You have not forgotten how to work from home, but now you’ve learned a new skill of working effectively outside the office.
If you have worked from home 2 to 3 days a week before starting this, the time frames will likely go quicker than those above and the phases will be less noticeable. But for those this is new to, don’t underestimate the time it takes to pick up these habits. It takes time to build effective habits, and working from home is no different. There are no shortcuts.