Readjusting to the Office

You would think that going back to the office would be a simple process. Memory would serve you and would show you how to adapt to the new working conditions. The joys of collaborating with colleagues would quickly tamp down your nostalgia for the time you spent at home, working in your pajamas.

Apparently, such is not the case. Once you have lost the habit of working in the office, you will have a devilishly difficult time recovering it. You cannot just re-establish old routines or recover old habits by waving your magic wand. It takes time and effort to recover it all. It's like what happens when you do not use your muscles for an extended period of time, and then call upon them to do some work.

The Wall Street Journal reports:

Some workers have lost the muscle memory in their minds required to get jobs done in an open-office setting and, like flabby biceps, that muscle has to be exercised to strengthen, says S. Thomas Carmichael, professor and chair of the neurology department at UCLA’s David Geffen School of Medicine.

After years of remote work, our brains’ selective attention skills and ability to block out distractions is weakened, Carmichael says. Those who prefer to work from home might not like one of his remedies: Make yourself work from the office more often.

“The brain is really good at understanding contingencies, so if we just say ‘I’ll just get this done when I’m at home,’ we don’t learn it as well,” he says.

Analogies are rarely useful, but I find this one apposite. When you lose the habits, of thought and even of movement, that you developed while working in an office, they do not just come back once you sit down at your old desk.

That means, if you want to recover your good work habits you should force yourself to go to the office more often. The important word is, to force, because an activity that once felt perfectly normal will now feel abnormal.

And, the researchers say, do not overthink the situation. If the office seems strange and alienating, if co-workers seem like a distraction, suck it up and understand that it is not going to feel normal right away. For a time it will not feel as it felt.

When people start to ponder what life would be like if their circumstances were different, they can rapidly end up drowning in a sea of “what ifs,” a psychological concept known as counterfactual thinking.

And naturally, when the office starts feeling like an alien environment, you will be thinking of how wonderful it was to work from home:

It’s hard to un-remember how nice it was to take the dog for a walk midday, or how helpful it was to log out at 4 p.m. to get dinner started and log back in later. Running through scenarios of how time could be better spent takes up precious brainpower, distracting us from the real work at hand, psychologists say. 

It’s all about making new habits. And that is the key concept-- habit. It is not about discovering the meaning, but about getting back in the rhythm of office work.

 “We have to habituate ourselves to all those distractions all over again in order to get any good work done,” says Vanessa Bohns, a professor of organizational behavior at Cornell University. She points to research that shows it takes 20 minutes to get used to background noise, but five minutes of silence before bringing back the noise forces the brain’s process to start over again. 

If that is useful information, try making use of it. At the least, use it to derive some perspective about why you are having trouble acclimating to the office.

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