by Serguey Shinder
When our office policy settled into two fixed days a week in 2023, my team was given Tuesday and Thursday, and for the first three months I did exactly the same thing on those days as I did at home, only with a longer journey. I arrived, put on headphones, and joined video calls, mostly with colleagues who came in on other days and occasionally with colleagues who were in the building that same day, on another floor, because the meeting had been booked as a call.
Meanwhile my home days had become where the collaborative work happened, because that was where the calendar happened to put it. Two hour design sessions on a shared screen. Pairing with a new engineer over video, which is possible and is not the same thing. And the writing I genuinely needed quiet for, a proposal and two long reviews, got squeezed into gaps on office days, in a room of eighty people, and went badly.
I only noticed because that new engineer mentioned, in her second month, that she had not yet sat next to anybody while they worked. She came in on the right days. So did the rest of us. We had simply never arranged to be in the same place to do the things that are better done in one.
I had been making two decisions separately, by two different rules. Where I was on a given day was set by the policy. What I did was set by whoever had booked my time. Neither rule knew about the other, and between them they had put my most interruptible work somewhere quiet and my deepest work somewhere loud.
So I sorted the week by the kind of attention each piece of work needs, and only then by the calendar. Office days are for things that need people physically close: pairing, design at a whiteboard, the new starter, the conversation that should not be a call. Nobody books a call with someone who is in the building that day; you walk over. Home days hold the long writing and the reviews, and the morning of each is closed to meetings entirely. The rest of the team drifted into the same pattern within a month, mainly because it was so obviously what the office was for.
The effect on my own output is hard to measure. The effect on the new engineer was not. She was pairing in person twice a week from the following month and was, by her account and her manager's, a couple of months ahead of where she would otherwise have been.
My mistake was treating a place as neutral. Every room I work in is good for some kinds of attention and poor for others, and for three months I had been choosing the room by the day of the week.
– Serguey Asael Shinder
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