Bloomberg Published an Absurd Article

The headline of a Bloomberg.com article published April 23, 2020, reads: “Three Hours Longer, the Pandemic Workday Has Obliterated Work-Life Balance.” The subhead: “People are overworked, stressed, and eager to go back to the office.”

I’m here to say:

The article, written by Michelle F. Davis and Jeff Green, uses the work-from-home accounts of a JPMorgan Chase & Co. executive, a web designer, and a sales and marketing VP at Intel Corp. (among others) to paint the picture that working from home, despite inherent conveniences, isn’t worth the trouble.

“I honest to goodness am wearing the exact same outfit that I started with on Monday,” Rachel Mushahwar, the vice president and general manager of U.S. sales and marketing at Intel, told Bloomberg in an interview last Thursday. “I think I’ve showered three times.”

The piece further included a tweet from Mushahwar published on April 14, which includes a picture of herself with apparently one of her kids. Her tweet describes how frustrating it is dealing with children during the workday (#wfhwithkids #COVID19).

I’m not a parent, but I know a few. Parenting seems equal parts amazing and disastrous. It’s not at all wrong to need space from kids to take time for oneself, whether it’s to deal with obligations or breathe for a moment. But if I really wanted to be an asshole, I might ask Mushahwar: “Isn’t tweeting on the job about unrelated topics and agreeing to early morning interviews with the press a bit of self-imposed extra stress? How does this help Intel sales?”

To be fair, it doesn’t appear that Mushahwar is a big tweeter; my guess is she uses the platform a lot for work in a less public capacity. What I resent is the implication that life has suddenly become so stressful that she can barely find time to shower or change her clothes. Maybe, subconsciously, Mushahwar realizes there’s no need to shower or change clothes as much as she normally does because she’s around the same faces all the time, like most during the pandemic. But make no mistake, those are conscious choices--and they’re not even despicable ones! If Mushawar has time to tweet about her frustration and give interviews, she can find time to shower and change her clothes more often, if not doing so enough is so distressing.

Then there’s Huda Idrees, the CEO of Toronto-based tech startup Dot Health. She told Bloomberg her employees are working longer hours--12 hours per day instead of 9--since the pandemic. “We’re at our computers very early because there’s no commute time,” she said. “And because no one is going out in the evenings, we’re also always there.”

Right. The CEO of a tech company can’t figure out a way to stop 15 employees from working less than 12 hours because, as the article’s authors write, “there’s no escape.” Without morning commutes, employees can log-on earlier and stay on later because everything’s closed. Maybe they feel they have to behave this way because there was never any work-life balance to begin with? I feel like a quick note to the team saying, “Hey! Weird times, for sure. We’re going to try to make this normal. If we’re all clocking in a little earlier, obligations will stop a little earlier in the day.” My assumption is, somebody doesn't want that and is taking advantage of the situation. I've learned the hard way, nobody is going to tell you to work less.

Oh yeah, and sure, nobody checks their work email or sends any during morning and afternoon commutes. That’s exclusively a pandemic thing. Please. Consistent throughout the article is the notion that technology makes it hard to escape work. Very true. But that technology is not confined to an office. In fact, we willingly download some of these work tools to make it more convenient to work whenever, wherever.

“One JPMorgan employee,” the piece states, “interrupted his morning shower to join an impromptu meeting after seeing a message from a colleague on his Apple Watch. By the time he dried off and logged back on, he was five minutes late.” Again:

Either that employee forgot about a meeting that had already been scheduled, or there was poor communication by his team. If he actually rushed out of the shower to jump online quickly, I’m sure, “sorry, caught me in the shower, rushed as fast as I could,” would suffice. Unless this is big business stuff commoners wouldn’t understand. Again, please.

The article goes on and on with more examples. What’s clear to me is that these are people problems, not work-from-home problems. While the world has been providing the workforce with more and more tools to work remotely, the traditional structure of work has failed to adapt. Office space needs to be filled and if suddenly people decided offices are kind of useless most of the time, somebody wouldn't be getting paid. Instead, there’s what needs to be done in the office and what could be done remotely. Rather than blending the two, it feels companies (and employees) have decided to stack them. There’s always time to get more done with the right tools.

Do I think that work-from-home should be universally adopted post-pandemic? No. What I think is that we should all try to be mindful of the things we need and don’t need. To use Mushawar as an example again, her Twitter profile reads, “Probably on American Airlines.” I assume she travels a lot for work, meaning her “office” is wherever the client is and a lot of work is done remotely. She does not have a “normal” office job. For someone who spends so much time on the go for work, it’s strange to feature her story in an article that more or less suggests we need to return to the office.

The Bloomberg piece isn't about highlighting the importance of returning to normal work; it's about showcasing difficulties some are having with adjusting to a very different schedule. That is valid. But to suggest that somehow people are working their jobs more while at home is so shortsighted. People, I would suggest, are feeling like they're working harder because some of life's obligations are staring them in the face and things can't be as easily compartmentalized. Everything is happening at once and that applies to most during the pandemic. If people can't understand what that means and accept boundaries, there's a much bigger problem than working from home.