Those who WFH or partners do

[Horseskeepmesane]

Many people seem to still work from home, I’m intrigued by this.

if you do what is your field of work, and what do you actually do most of the day working from home productivity wise?

there seems to be so many ‘meetings, calls’ scheduled from home and what else?!

I work in Accounts for a small business, office based.

The whole wfh argument feels like it's quite specific to office culture. I've never worked an office job and I find them weirdly abstruse somehow.

I started as a teacher (TEFL, then TIE, then tutoring kids with SEND, then later uni lecturing), then landed a job running sleepovers and presenting interactive educational activities at a museum. With the exception of Zoom tutoring (hell) none of them were jobs you could do from home.

Now I work fulltime as a novelist and screenwriter, which is inherently a wfh (or work from cafe) job, unless you happen to rent your own little private office space.

Apart from the very occasional meeting, I completely set my own hours and work from anywhere. I tend to 'write' my books in my head first, so I spent months going on lots of long walks, going swimming every day, and reading tons of books and going to museums and stuff for research, kind of working out the plots and figuring out all the tricky bits in my head. Then at the end when I'm starting to panic and plan how to fake my own death to escape the deadline it just kind of unlocks and starts pouring out, and I physically write the book via a few weeks of intense typing that goes on till 3 or 4am every day.

I feel like there's a divide between people whose jobs are entirely about finishing actual tasks (regardless of how much or how little time it takes them to finish), and those whose jobs are about their bum being in the seat for the requisite number of hours (regardless of how much or how little actual work they get done during that time). Sometimes my museum job definitely felt like I was just killing time till the clock hit x o'clock and as long as we finished the event with the same number of kids as we started then I'd basically done an adequate job. If most of them were smiling, I'd done a good job. In my current job it doesn't make a tiny bit of difference how many hours I work or what hours I work, the only thing that matters is the end product. It's a huge mental shift to get used to!

Do you mind me asking what sort of job needs a timer like this?

Both my DH and I work from home, and have done pretty much full time since covid.

We're both Principal Engineers in different companies. I usually walk the kids to school in the morning at 8am, go the long way home, back by 8.40, breakfast, clean up the kitchen, bit of makeup, then at my desk for 9 or shortly after.

My day is spent working in a cross-functional agile team on software development - we have a standup at 10, then I'll spend the day planning, writing specs, working on various technical or design meetings, testing, working on presentations or training documents, answering queries from other parts of the business - I'd have some 1-1 meetings with senior execs and my manager during the week as well as some quiet focus time. I'd probably have on average 3 meetings a day, sometimes 1, busy days I might have 6. I absolutely LOVE my job. I do go into the office about once every 2 weeks as its only a short drive away but I'm so much more productive at home.

My dh works up in the attic so we don't see or hear each other during the day, apart from lunch (thank god, I like my space). I sometimes pop out but generally take a short lunch at home.

WFH.

Insurance / medical / underwriting

Phone calls, meetings, lots of digital paperwork and contracts.
Lots of audits and compliance things.

DH is hybrid.