Bài đọc 2
When my company told us last spring that our office was closing for renovation and we would all work from home for a year, I was delighted. No more crowded buses, no more forty-minute journeys each way, and no more expensive sandwiches at lunchtime. I imagined long, peaceful days in my pyjamas, finishing my work in half the time.
The first month was everything I had hoped for. I got up later, made proper breakfasts and felt more relaxed than I had for years. My manager even praised me for answering emails more quickly than before.
By the third month, however, things had started to change. Without the journey to work, there was nothing to separate my working day from the rest of my life. I would check messages at eleven o'clock at night, and my laptop stayed open on the kitchen table during dinner. I also noticed that I hardly moved. Some days I walked fewer than a thousand steps, and my back began to hurt from sitting on a hard wooden chair for hours.
The biggest surprise was how much I missed my colleagues. I had always thought of office chat as a waste of time, but I now realised that many good ideas had come from those short conversations by the coffee machine. Video calls helped, but every meeting had a fixed agenda, and nobody ever just said, "By the way, I had an idea..."
So I made some changes. I bought a proper desk and chair and moved my work into the small spare bedroom, so that I could close the door at the end of the day. I started taking a twenty-minute walk every morning at the time I used to leave for the bus, and called it my "journey to work". Twice a week, I met a friend who also worked from home, and we worked together in a local café. I also asked my team to keep the first ten minutes of our Monday call free for chatting about anything except work.
When the office reopened last month, I was surprised to find that I was not completely happy to go back. I now work in the office three days a week and at home for two, which seems to give me the best of both worlds. The year taught me that working from home is neither a dream nor a nightmare. Like most things, it depends on how you organise it.