The return to the office could be the real reason for the slump in productivity

Re:The return to the office could be the real reason for the... by pcthrowaway on Friday February 17, 2023 @02:10AM (#34831746)

When I was in office, we were wasting time there too[1]. Just in different ways. Mainly socializing with coworkers, chatting by the watercooler, talking about our families/friends/social events, reading hacker news(?[2]), going for walks, fucking around with the coffee machine, going for walks with coworkers to get coffee, going to the bathroom 10 times a day to check my phone (I also have Crohn's so this isn't unheard of for me to do outside of procrastination reasons), and lots more captive meetings with little value (where I could otherwise be working during the meeting while WFH).

During a typical 8 hour day in office I might only get 2-3 hours of actual work done. It wasn't until transitioning to WFH that I realized it's actually incredibly hard to get even 6 hours of productive work done in a day.

[1]: https://xkcd.com/303/

[2]: Arguably there is still some career-related learning happening on hacker news

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Re:The return to the office could be the real reason for the... by 331c8c71 on Friday February 17, 2023 @02:48AM (#34832010)

I personally don't consider socializing with co-workers is necessarily "waste" and a negative factor on productivity. It depends...

Currently working in a place with very few formal meetings so the experience might be atypical.

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Re:The return to the office could be the real reason for the... by pcthrowaway on Friday February 17, 2023 @04:53AM (#34832791)

I mean, I agree, but when you WFH you don't really socialize the same way. A little bit of chit chat between breaks in meetings maybe, but there's no equivalent of "stand around in the kitchen talking about hobbies"

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Re:The return to the office could be the real reason for the... by nicolas_t on Friday February 17, 2023 @10:43PM (#34843648)

I've worked from home remotely most of my carrer and I have actually spent quite a bit of time talking about hobbies with my coworkers. Even with my current coworkers, one of them is a tea afficionado and we have exchanged teas we like, one has similar taste in computer games (point and clicks) and we talk about this, another's husband has similar taste in novels and we have a semi unofficial book club and, finally, we have an actual book club within the company...

So, at least in my experience, socialising like this is entirely possible.

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