Before the pandemic, working from home had been one of my dreams. How I wished I had read a couple of articles on working remotely then before getting besotted with the idea. I need to say I was a teacher then (I am still a teacher). However my whole dream of remote work was woven around being a freelance writer. The same old picture: Do little, earn a lot of money and travel around the world. It was perfect.
But when the lockdown was suddenly announced and effected, I was still a teacher in a private school, not a freelance writer I would like to be. So, it may be apt to say I was caught napping.
One advantage however was that, having been thinking of remote work before, it didn’t take long for me to suggest, during a staff meeting, that the school introduce online teaching. And guess what? The management, though welcomed the proposal, just left the bulk of the tasks of getting staff members trained within 48 hours at my door step.
And this was when I got the very first bruise.
At home, I had to work for about eight hours none stop, surfing the internet in search of a template for online teaching. Because it was my home, the furniture I was using was not suitable for what I was doing, so I ended up with a stiff neck and spine. Yet I didn’t instantly connect these side effects with working remotely.
The number one problem was numbness in my legs, most probably because, unlike the physical classroom I remained rooted either in a chair or stool for hours. It would be an understatement if I say this was damaging to my body. Barely three weeks into the online teaching, I realised I needed a well programmed exercise routine to combat this rather sedentary lifestyle.
Yes, the exercising came then and it really helped, but I have since discovered that the exercise routine would have been much more productive had it been combined with UK SARMS which has a high potential of helping to unlock the full capacities of the human bodies.
Another problem that really got to me was lack of physical human connection. I am super social, I am known in every office and I usually go along well with everyone at work. Knowing this part of me will help you understand if I say it was damningly too lonely working from home, even while I had my family members in the home. I worked in my bedroom and forced the children to remain either in their own rooms or the living room. Meaning while I worked, my room was out of bound for them.
I tried to mitigate this unwholesome feeling by making video calls but, though it reduced the lonely feelings, it didn’t get rid of it totally.
The timing for work from home was yet another headache. It was rather informal and easily manipulated by my superiors who fixed endless meetings which left me exhausted at the end of virtually every day. With this, working from home, unfortunately, meant working for longer hours.
First, the school had allotted longer time for every lesson for the teachers to be able to get to every student in the virtual classroom. So, instead of the traditional forty to forty five minutes, a lesson lasted for between one hour and one hour thirty minutes. To worsen the situation, I had to virtually attend, every day, an assessment management meeting to analyse and evaluate the success or otherwise of the individual teachers involved in the ongoing online teaching. It was so tiring and exhausting.
Over all, I realised that working remotely might not be the paradise it’s often projected to be unless it is consciously planned and efforts are made to take care of the likely attendant problems.