Feierabend

We all have our normal routines.  For example, I wake up (probably a little earlier than I need to) every morning, take a shower, get dressed, and then sit down with a book while enjoying a small breakfast and a cup of coffee.  Once I finish that cup of coffee (and not a moment before), I leave for work.

It's amazing how much we adapt to our normal routines.  We get so used to our routines that when something changes, even if it's a minor change, it can really impact us in a bad way.  In other words, disrupt your normal routine at your peril (for a humorous story, check out one of my old posts, "Today, I was a doofus, maybe I should use a checklist?").

Just like our morning cup of coffee, the morning work commute (and the evening one as well) is also part of our normal routine.  There are a number of studies - countless, in fact - that provide fairly convincing evidence that a longer work commute adversely affects mental health.  Rush hour traffic is stressful, it's noisy, and it's absolutely no fun.  Here's the crazy part - with the shift to remote work due to COVID-19, a lot of us are actually missing the morning and evening work commutes!  As a matter of fact, we are missing the commute so much, that it has become a thing - the so-called faux or fake commute!  Look it up!

As reported today in the Wall Street Journal by Jennifer Levitz, "work-from-home employees who used to slog to the office on the train, bus, ferry or highway are forcing themselves to take short walks, drives or other excursions to re-create commuting and provide a separation between their work and nonwork lives."  It turns out that we need a separation between work life and home life, and pre-pandemic, the morning and evening commutes served that purpose perfectly.

There is even a German wor for it - feierabend which literally means "the evening celebration" but now refers to the third space between work and home.  Feierabend offers a complete separation - a clean break, if you will, between the time when we finish work and when our period of leisure and rest at home begins.  Rather than a source of stress, many of us used the time spent traveling to and from work to listen to podcasts, read the newspaper, listen to an audiobook, or just think.  

Due to COVID, many workers have had to adjust and work remotely from home.  So rather than having that important feierabend, these workers wake up, get dressed, and go immediately to work.  There's no separation between home life and work life.  There's no so-called third space.  The solution?  Many workers have started a fake commute.  As Levitz reports in the WSJ, some individuals take a short walk outside, while others actually go for a drive!

Dr. Anna Cox from the University College London and her colleagues recently published the findings of a survey of nearly 350 workers who had shifted to remote work due to the COVID-19 pandemic.  Several of the workers reported that a "fake commute" forced them to engage in physical activity and provided an ideal separation between home life and work life (in other words, feierabend).

I completely understand.  I've had to self-quarantine on a couple of occasions during the pandemic, which has forced me to work remotely.  During my most recent quarantine, my wife asked me "How was work today?"  I told her, "I don't like working virtually."  She then commented that most of my actual meetings at work are virtual anyway - in other words, what's the difference?  I now recognize that virtual work for me eliminated my feierabend.  And I now know how to adjust!