On the remote-work controversy, I can't help but think that people who do actual work are more likely to enjoy remote work, where it's easier to concentrate, & managers, whose work is meetings, want to return to physical offices, where meetings aren't so obviously useless/dreary.
Still useless, just not as dreary!
One thing discussions around this topic always reveal is that I'm an extreme outlier. My appetite for solitude, and solitary work, is basically bottomless. This need or appetite people have for workaday interactions with co-workers ... I just don't have it. At all.
To be clear, I'm not *averse* to those interactions. I have liked & enjoyed many co-workers over the years & still count many as friends! Being social is fun for all the normal human reasons! I've just never found it important for my work, much less necessary.
All I've ever wanted, from the time I was a little tot, is to go off by myself, do my thing, & then turn it in. I never understood collaboration, never wanted it, was always terrible at it. Same for instruction & guidance. No thanks. Just leave me alone to do my thing.
As you can imagine I was a nightmare employee and might as well have been built in a lab for Substack. At last, pure solitude, all work, no meetings!
Didn't intend to make this thread eternal, but I just remembered another way to describe a difference in the way people work. Some people have extremely high intellectual/social metabolism. They jump into a task, get fried quickly, need a different task, need novelty & change ...
... just flit from thing to think & need regular/frequent input to stay energized. They are like ... supercapacitors. Capable of rapid absorption, rapid discharge, but not much *depth* of charge. They run out quickly. On the other hand ...
... there are people like me, more like a giant flywheel. If I try to flit about from thing to thing, I get *nothing* done. I need deep concentration, and it takes a long time & a lot of steady input/concentration to get me in that productive state. But ...
... once I'm going, once the flywheel is spinning, I can go *forever*. If freed from distractions & breaks & interruptions, I can sit alone at my computer, in deep concentration, for hours & hours & hours & hours.
As you can imagine, for someone like me, working in an office just means constant breaks & interruptions, which means I can never really get the flywheel spinning, which means I get nothing done. This is why 98% of my actual writing work, for years, has been done at night.
Gimme those five hours from 8pm to 1am. Fewer emails, fewer tweets, fewer interruptions, just me slowly spinning up the wheel until it is running full speed, and letting it hum along in that state for hours on end. I can be SO productive then. But only then, really.
Anyway, I don't know if "flywheel" is a category in, like, management literature or whatever, but is should be. Flywheels work better at home.
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