Work Remotely to Stay Healthy
Tell me it hasn’t crossed your mind once or twice that you’d rather work remotely to stay healthy. Especially when half the office is hacking and coughing and you’re practically bathing in hand sanitizer. All the while knowing that no matter how careful you are, there’s no way you can avoid the surplus of germs floating around the office.
It’s a stressful situation. And it’s one that is guaranteed to repeat itself multiple times throughout the year. As if you didn’t have enough to worry about with wrangling code and balancing a host of other responsibilities while working in the Enterprise.
The Coronavirus
The recent outbreak of the novel coronavirus is extremely alarming. Hundreds of millions of people in China have been essentially quarantined and countless airlines are cancelling flights to the country. In short, this is serious business.
The reality of our increasingly connected world is there are weaker boundaries than there used to be. A pestilence such as the coronavirus can travel to all corners of the globe before we even realize there’s a problem.
Joseph Norman, Yaneer Bar-Yam, and Nassim Nicholas Taleb wrote a highly insightful paper entitled Systemic Risk of Pandemic via Novel Pathogens – Coronavirus: A Note. I highly recommend reading it, it’s brief. It highlights our increasing vulnerability to pandemics and suggests we strengthen our ability to decouple at the community level as one example in order to mitigate risk.
The Office Crud
A much more common plight is the office crud. It may be less terrifying than the coronavirus, but you deal with this one every year while working in-office. Working in-office is already inferior in many respects. And when you add in the health implications, it’s a wonder it’s still the norm.
It’s almost like clockwork when Fall rolls around. The office crud starts rearing its ugly head and before you know it, half your coworkers are filling the office with viruses and bacteria. There’s no way to protect yourself when you are forced to cohabit the same working space.
There is a solution, though. And it’s already common practice even within in-office work cultures. You just work from home when the crud catches up to you! Of course usually by then it’s too late and then the crud has already spread to you and many others in the office.
If only there were a better way to avoid the crud in the first place…
Work From Home
We should just work from home, of course! Maybe then we wouldn’t catch the crud in the first place. We’re always going to pick up some nasty bugs here and there, but we don’t need to put ourselves in an in-office petri dish to make things worse.
This is yet another great reason to work remotely on top of the many already covered here in this blog. If I had to sum up in a few words why I’m such a strong advocate for remote work it would be health and productivity. This includes both mental and physical health.
It’s not surprising that one of the responses to the coronavirus outbreak is the following, Coronavirus Forces World’s Largest Work-From-Home Experiment. Imagine if the coronavirus was rampant in your community, assuming it isn’t already. Would you dare go into an office with 100 or 1000 other people? No way!
If there is any silver lining to this horrible pandemic it may be that it will help us avoid such a widespread outbreak in the future. We are more connected now than ever before so it is vital that we also consider our increased risks as a result of this.
Working remotely is one way we can effectively decouple. We can and should be fully involved within the communities in which we live, but there is no longer any good reason for us to commute long distances for our work.
As Java Developers and Consultants, we can do our work better from a location of our choosing. One where we can work remotely to stay healthy and be more productive too.
Summary
We are more susceptible to illness when working in-office. There are the regular, annual illnesses that make the rounds and then there are black swan illnesses. Coronavirus is just such a black swan event.
Our world is more connected now than ever before. Therefore it is important for us to be mindful of the added risks that accompany this new reality.
Decreasing our exposure surface area by working remotely is protectant. While it’s not complete protection, it does allow us to mitigate risks to our health.