I felt like working in the office again and it was even better

Despite of spending half of my life alone in a small room with a computer, it seems that I’ve reached my limits too. It was almost exactly a year ago when I last worked in the office and at the beginning of December I also started to experience the lockdown-fatigue like many others. It takes extreme effort for me these days to get out of the bed, to have a shower or to do anything useful (or useless). I don’t feel lonely, I don’t feel sad, I don’t feel depressed. I’m just very very exhausted. It seems like that every task I do consumes ten times more energy than what it normally requires and it feels like that no matter how much I rest during weekend, it just won’t last until the next one.

If you work from home for a long time, your daily tasks become extremely repetitive, you do everything the same way every day, you start to lose the sense of time and purpose and you start to feel that everything you are and everything you do is molding together into some sort of a weird soup. Simply things are losing their clear boundaries and they are starting to mix up, just like when you mix different colors together until they end up in a grayish-brownish mess. This is how it happened this week that a colleague called me to discuss some mockups and we kind of just stayed in the call afterwards without a clear purpose, without anything to discuss.

In most of the time we did not even talk to each other or when we talked about something, it was completely irrelevant to work. It started to feel like that I’m back in the office again. We did not use webcam, we muted ourselves when there was something else to discuss with someone else, it did not really matter. I think what made this “virtual coworking” cool that I knew that there’s another person at the other end of the line and because of that I had a sort of feeling that I work with someone in the same space. We interrupted each other quite some time, but I was still able to do more work than I would usually do. I felt more motivated because I was connected to someone, I would say that I had a comrade in the darkest hours of the war.

This was a quite different experience than a virtual coffee break, because it wasn’t scheduled, wasn’t time framed. We talked because we felt like talking, we stopped when it was enough. This two-person coffee break also enabled us to talk about more intimate topics, topics which you normally don’t discuss in groups or with your spouse or parents. These calls enabled us to release some pressure, some very consuming thoughts we couldn’t talk about. Sometimes we just feel bad because we need to keep things to ourselves. Now we had the opportunity to get it out.

I think I’ll try this with others too, I find it awesome that I can actually work together with someone close to me by just leaving the microphone on. It feels like that I have my own office and I can choose the person I enjoy working with regardless of project. We found a way to have some fun, to make this lockdown a bit happier. I recommend you to try it too!

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