Welcome to Future of Work, Future of You. A day in the life of a working parent is tough. No matter whether you are a dad or a mom, you don’t have it easy. To get through a work day at home can be extremely challenging but an equally amusing experience. In this issue, I recount my personal humor & horror stories of what it takes to accomplish a day in home office. If you like what you read, don’t forget to hit subscribe. Hope you enjoy reading!
Image by author tomwang
We all grew unabashedly excited when pandemic conspired to put our work life right inside our personal life. With the tantalizing prospect of working from home with an arm resting on the couch, TV remote in reach & keyboard clanking in our laps, this newfound work style was the stuff of dreams none of us knew existed.
We merrily ditched our train passes, downgraded miles on auto insurance while upgrading WiFi packs, buying ergonomic chairs & creating a DoorDash shortcut on mobile. Our work life was on an upswing as commute costs dropped to zero & peddling kids to daycare happened harmoniously with joining zoom calls.
Fast forward two full years of unending pandemic - we all are jostling for calm subscriptions, fastrak passes & silly reasons as below to be outside home.
Me - Honey, are we having just 5 tomatoes in the grocery tray? Let me go get some more so you don’t run short next week
Wife - Whaaaattttt????
7:00AM: Tring tring tring tring (I know my alarm sounds like a table clock because it actually is!)
I jump out of my bed but can hardly move. I eerily notice that my 18 month old has stuffed his head into my neck & torso onto my belly. I cautiously unload him off my chest so as not to wake the sleeping baby dragon.
7:30AM: I have half an airpod up my ear with the other ear sensing my electric toothbrush for guided movements inside my teeth. I alternate the basin tap & mute button so as not to ruin the alternate realities of my morning existence.
8:00AM: My wife…
So my wife is incredibly well organized & spectacularly sorted though I am still gathering evidence to disprove it. I guess at some point I have accepted it along with Newton's laws till some brave soul comes along to say otherwise.
…makes breakfast & morning banter to get us off inertia. While I witness the usual morning chaos, I hear a distant familiar voice.
Wait, that’s the fourth roll call from my boss on my innocuous airpod! I hurriedly unmute, mute & unmute to finally speak up on some random point not knowing the full context of the discussion.
My boss says - “Teja, we were actually discussing…”
Tsssss…..shuckssss….
Down the drain goes this year's promotion & pay raise! Work from home feels more like woke from home.
9:00AM: I get ready to drop off my kid to daycare. It is at this precise moment I feel as if humans could have more dexterity. I lift my child in one arm, his backpack twirled around my back & my AirPod clutched in my two forefingers. Yet my wife is gruesome enough to hand me a pair of socks & his cubby box to be held by the last few remaining fingers. I look like a twisted man who is obtuse yet somehow balanced. And then the steep stairs down to my garage test me to see if I take the fall anyways.
10:00AM: With the morning hustle & kid stuff behind me, I am back in my house ready to conquer the work day. As I open the laptop, I see carnage and all of my browser & app tabs blow up in my face.
I settle myself & begin with emails scanning for the easiest targets to kill. I find a few & get into my flow but suddenly my teams chat pops up.
“Hi Teja…Can we speak briefly?”
These are the worst as they tease you enough & seduce into submission. I oblige & the brief chat lasts exactly 45 minutes. So much for morning productivity. I gather the remains of my pre-noon time & trudge along.
But hang on. I have three back to back meetings with exactly zero minutes for lunch. A lunch that will unlikely create itself without some intervention from yours truly.
And I just got a WhatsApp from my wife downstairs to switch clothes from washer to dryer. In a state of panic, I clank away vigorously at my keyboard to knock off some work & avoid the dreaded blue ticks for as long as I can.
And then the meeting notification interrupts.
A work meeting is like an Indian wedding. There is a lot of buildup & preparation leading to it. An entire village is invited & few close relatives (aka team members) self invite themselves. And the aftermath is days (read: hours) of unbundling & wrap up. And at the end of it, you wonder who & why was it set up in the first place.
I finish multiple wedding-style meetings which throws me to the other side of lunch with very little progress on my actual work.
1:00PM: I am tossing salads, stuffing bowls into the microwave & creating a ruckus inside the crockery cupboard. Wife & I eat lunch with laptops & phones giving us company & commotion.
In a moment of naivety & big heartedness,
I blurt out - “So honey, how is your day going?”.
She instantly screeches - “Shut up! I am on a call unmuted. Can’t you see???”
Ooops..I try to chew as silently as I can for the next 15 minutes. Even the dishes in the sink get dropped with minimal fuss & taps are turned on gradually to a trickle. I slide out of the dining & climb back to my work office/home office/work home…mmmm…lets just call it zero workplace.
3:00PM: I start behaving drowsy. Let me be honest. I sleep in the afternoon. Pandemic did this to me. It never gave me the virus (knock on the woods). Damn I could have fought that tooth & nail. But afternoon nap is the biggest symptom & terminal disease that Covid has given me. I have tried every trick in the book & it doesn’t go away. Now don’t ask how long a nap is. Let's not even go there.
Unknown time: I wake up fresh from guilt & desire to reclaim my work day. This really got out of my hand. Didn’t it? But there is still something to salvage. I fire off a few emails, excels, decks for the next few hours.
5:00PM: My beloved wife begins the countdown for the minutes left to pick up the kid. If ever there was a product feature I could suggest to WhatsApp folks - it would be to add a time scheduling plugin through keywords. Pickup & drop off at x:yy am should get pinned to the top!
6:00PM: Kid gets picked up from daycare & wife reaches home. We have now officially reunited the boisterous gang - Direstrait dad, baby dragon & beloved mom under the same roof. Next few hours are supposed to be no-phone, no-TV, no-distraction zones but it rarely pans out.
I have a confession to make. My phone is addicted to me. Even when I shrug it off & drop it somewhere in the corner, it has a way to jump back into my hands without my knowledge. It forces my fingers to tap, swipe & click as if it were levitating on the screen. I mean it seriously has a problem that I am trying to solve without luck thus far. Just to be clear - I am not addicted to it.
Wife - “Are you going to put that thing down or not ???”
Me - Of course, honey! I was just……paying bills, messaging mom, ordering food and on and on……while quietly checking emails & chats to respond to tired souls in the US & fresh waking souls in India. I am also harboring writing topics & typing vigorous notes.
And having shaken myself enough into reality, I get back to my contributions to dinner, dishes & diaper changes.
7:00PM: Dinner time! The dragon gets into his seat (high chair) waiting for an apt prey. Mommy cooks the tastiest of the recipes only to find it strewn on the floor most of the time. Hunger games begin!
Raaaaaayaaaaaaanshhhhhhh, I am going to beat the shit out of you if you don’t eat this. Temper tantrums fly across the house in all directions. I am watching the clock for my Work: Part 2 to begin at 9pm. I need to see through this wartime crisis & end up with a fed baby & satisfied mommy. Both seem impossible outcomes. I broker a barter deal with TV for yogurt, mango & bread to douse the fire on both sides.
9:00PM: Work part 2 is here. For context, I work for an Indian company headquartered in the Bay Area so half of my team is in the US with the other half back in India. I sincerely hope the second time will be the charm. My meeting participation is interspersed with wailing cries. Worried peers urge me to look after my kid. What I see is a Tarzan climbing on me to pluck the AirPods and blabber nonstop into it. Surely I am the only one with a villainous perspective here.
10:00PM: Another hour of work guilt accumulates as the day nears an inevitable end. Few closing calls happen to pass on the guilt to my eager & fantastic team who can pick up my slack just one more time. It won’t be the last.
11:00PM: Lights off & BTB on. I scribble out fast fading ideas for work & writing. I do one last check on work errands & confirm the alarm. RIP work day. Another one takes birth tomorrow.
Work from home is the perfect antidote to system, structure & schedule. Most friends I speak with struggle with it on a daily basis but do so quietly in private while extolling the full suite of virtues in public. It also draws immense mental fortitude & physical faculties to pull off an efficient work day. A big round of applause & laughter for each one of you doing this every day.
Let me know what like & hate the most about working from home. Few guiding questions below to get you thinking. Would love to hear back.
Do you mute your calls & do household chores? You read my answer :)
What do you love the most about working from home?
What is your biggest struggle when working from home?
If given an option, would you prefer to work from office once in a while?
If you have a co-worker, manager, founder or even an entrepreneurial dreamer who needs to see this, please share. You may be helping them more than you realize.
Reach me at Tejaswi Gautam and let me know what you think about this issue. Are you ready for the future of work? See you next week!