My sleep pattern is wrecked. I go to bed at around 2 a.m. most days, except when my body crashes and forces me to an early sleep. I then have a very good rest, but only to recover for more 2 a.m. bedtimes. In short, it swings from one extreme to the other.
Now, my employer plans to have us back in offices in October. Undoubtedly, this will be difficult for many of us who will have to swap from-bed-to-zoom-in-10-minutes for early pre-COVID wake-up alarms and hour-long commutes to actual offices. Add the equally tedious return journeys, busy roads, and crowded public transport, and it goes from a difficult to a depressing outlook.
My colleagues and I are lucky, though. In 2019 we started the company’s new Way of Working (WOW) that allows employees to work remotely for up to three days of each week, with the condition that those days not be fixed. As software developers, my team need fewer face-to-face meetings than other client-facing teams in the company and have, therefore, been able to relax this rule. Now that almost two years of ‘COVID Way of Working’ prove that people can be productive working from home, it will be interesting to see how WOW evolves.