April 15, 2025 • 35 mins
This episode begins with a great soapbox discussion about RTO mandates, and then Sarah and Laura delve into ways to try to help if you are in this situation. Sarah lists some positive aspects she's found about working in an office (in her case, a clinical setting) and then both share tips to help moving forward.
In the Q&A, a listener writes in asking for advice as to whether to look at schools when shopping for a new home/neighborhood, and the best ways to do so.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:09):
Hi. I'm Laura Vanderkamp. I'm a mother of five, an author, journalist,
and speaker.
Speaker 2 (00:15):
And I'm Sarah hart Hunger, a mother of three, practicing physician,
writer and course creator. We are two working parents who
love our careers and our families.
Speaker 1 (00:24):
Welcome to best of both worlds. Here we talk about
how real women manage work, family, and time for fun.
From figuring out childcare to mapping out long term career goals.
We want you to get the most out of life.
Welcome to best of both worlds. This is Laura. This
episode is airing in mid April of twenty twenty five.
(00:47):
We are going to be talking about RTO that is
returning to work. Five years after the pandemic began, a
number of organizations have started to get people back into
the office more frequently and if several have issued mandates
that people be there five days a week, which is
(01:07):
even different than pre pandemic, when a lot of people
had worked from home Fridays. So you know, we are
going to devote this episode to strategies that might make
life feel better, more doable, time in the office feel
more useful. If you are working somewhere that has started
requiring your presence in the office a little bit more frequently.
(01:30):
Before we begin, Sarah, are you ready for a little
soapbox moment?
Speaker 2 (01:33):
Yes, I think this is an opportune time for a
I don't know trademark Laura Vandercam soapbox rant segment.
Speaker 1 (01:41):
And you wrote it.
Speaker 2 (01:43):
It's really eloquent and I'm going to let you just
roll with it.
Speaker 1 (01:47):
Yes, So my thoughts on our too, I mean, highbred
and remote work was honestly one of the best and
probably the only good thing to come out of the pandemic.
It's kind of ridiculous that we are even doing this episode.
And I have seen this over the years as I
have studied workplace I mean, particularly in the pre COVID era,
(02:08):
when a lot of workplaces I mean people would tell
you like, oh, we just can't work from home. It
might work for other people, but it never worked for
our organization. I Mean. The truth is, some people in
power do not like remote work because they like to
feel powerful and have people acting deferential to them in
the office and being in a space where it is
very clear that you have a bigger and fancier office
(02:30):
than other people, and you have the status and there
are all these hordes of people working for you that
you are seeing presiding over them like a king over
his subjects. It has very little to do with productivity.
I mean people will listen to that and then wax
eloquent about face to face work and the wonderful things
that happen face to face. And I totally agree, Like
Sarah and I love to get together when we can.
(02:52):
This is the first episode in a while that wasn't
recorded in her closet, with us sitting two inches from
each other sharing a microphone, like it's a lot of
fun to do things to gather in person. That said,
this is not an either or matter, because forty hours
a week in the same cubicle with the exact same
people can totally be overkill. There's much to be said
for a balance of both, with people treated as an
(03:14):
adults and knowledge work judged based on outcomes, not time
in a seat. And yes, that is so much harder
to manage. I get that. I am a person who
manages people as well. But the upsides are great because
there's no reason for people to be wasting time and
money and gas if they are just going to email
and call other people on a particular day, and it's
also great for organizations to be able to hire people
(03:36):
from outside a sixty minute radius of the office. One
more part of this rant, which is that if you
are working somewhere where they have claimed that people just
can't work from home, that doesn't change after five pm
or before nine am. You still can't work from home.
So there's absolutely no reason really for people to have
cell phones or laptops or anything like that, because clearly
(03:58):
you can't work from home. There is no reason to
even try to do anything outside the office if you
cannot work from home. So all really you need is
a single like I don't know, bat signal kind of
thing that could summon you back to the office so
you could do work, as that's the only place work
can be done. I mean that means no emails after hours, right,
it's impossible for people to work from home.
Speaker 2 (04:19):
I mean that actually might be a trade off some
people would choose.
Speaker 1 (04:23):
But I'm saying I don't think those organizations are saying that.
I don't think the organization are saying our emails will
stop working at five pm. Nobody will be able to
log on before night am because you cannot work from
outside the office. Like, No, they're not saying that. They're
just saying you have to work in the office between
whatever eight thirty and four thirty, whatever the hours are,
and we might reach you outside that too. Then you
can work from home, then it's fine, but it's only
(04:46):
these set hours. I don't know. Anyway, we want to
deal with life as it is, not life as it
should be, so soapbox regardless, this episode is about how
to survive RTO, especially if that is a five day
a week RTO for you. All right, Sarah, I'm done.
Speaker 2 (05:00):
The rets of the episode will be all me, since
I have lots of positive things to say about face
to face work. No, to be fair, I mean we're
going to talk about how I do actually prefer to
do a lot of my work outside of the home.
I do my creative work from home still, although honestly,
if I had a cute little office, maybe a couple
miles away, I probably might elect to go there, especially
(05:21):
in the afternoons when certain people may be descending upon
my home, making it a little bit more difficult to concentrate.
My house is not that big and it gets very
loud very quickly. So I do my creative work from home,
and I used to do some of my graduate medical
education work from home during COVID, but then pretty much
all of my patient care work is in person. There
was a time during COVID that they really sent everybody
(05:42):
out of the clinical areas and I had to do telehealth,
and I learned that I absolutely hate telehealth with a
fiery passion. Now I don't mind doing some telehealth visits
over the course of a work day, Like sometimes a
patient lives three hours away and I can only practice
within the state of Florida, by the way, so I
have to ask, like, are you in Florida, Okay, great,
then we can have our telehealth from like Ocala or wherever.
(06:02):
So there are some patients that I see telehealth and
that's fine, But doing full days of telehealth I find ineffective, exhausting,
and like basic almost torture. I mean that might just
be a me thing, but we're going to talk about
various benefits of being in person, but for me, it's
the exhausting aspect of the communication when it's not face
to face that is probably my least favorite part. So
(06:24):
I'm somebody who kind of enjoys a little bit more
about going somewhere to do my work, and so I
was maybe a little bit more easily able to come
up with some reframings that we will provide for you
today as well as so that we can appreciate a
few of the benefits. But that said, I one hundred
percent wholeheartedly agree with Laura that, like the idea of
(06:44):
the mandate for one hundred percent seems so silly and excessive,
and I am thinking of you if that impacts you,
especially if you signed up for a situation that didn't
look like that. That feels so unfair to me. And
I do feel like hybrid or like a mostly remote
situation and can be so wonderful for many people. So
this is not to say that I'm like, yeah, get
(07:05):
your butt back in the seat.
Speaker 1 (07:09):
Yeah, I mean, I totally get that that. I mean,
especially things like patient care. It often is good to
have the picking up on things. But you know, like
your status meeting for like the project that's been going
on with for six months, I mean, it seems a
little odd that the once a week check in would
always have to be in person. You know, when you
see these people all the time. There's a good balance
(07:32):
to be had, but Okay, So the positives. One, some
people do have a split thing where it's easier to
focus in a place that is primed for work focus. Now,
I will say offices are distracting places, but if you
have structured it right, perhaps it is or possible.
Speaker 2 (07:51):
Yeah, if you've structured it right, if you have a
door that you can close. But also it depends on
your makeup, right, and some people have harder time focusing
than others in general. But there is something to be
said that if you're used to being in a particular environment,
and if you're kind of conditioned yourself to like, Okay,
I have my routine. I walk through the door, I
get my coffee at little office coffee shop, I walk upstairs,
I put my laptop down, and then I like start,
(08:12):
Like you can kind of prime yourself into a really
nice ritual. I guess that's not to say you couldn't
do something similar at home, but it might be harder
with like the everyday things kind of still around, Like
it's the same environment you're going to be in when
you're having breakfast with the kids potentially or relaxing after work.
So some people I think do benefit from having kind
of a work specific environment. I do sort of my
(08:33):
brain knows to get into gear to like start going
through patient results when I sit down at my work desk,
I mean for better or forwear. Could I cultivate that
somewhere else? Maybe? But I think for some people, I'm
probably not the only person who gets a little bit
of a priming benefit from being in a work zone.
That's number one positive.
Speaker 1 (08:50):
Yeah, what are another? Okay?
Speaker 2 (08:52):
So this one and I think this one I sort
of alluded to and as one of my biggest biggest ones,
is just that face to face communication is less tiring
and more enjoyable for most people when you're actually doing
it in person versus on a screen. There are just
all of these. I think it's actually more important when
you are explaining something that someone doesn't understand, or interacting
(09:14):
with someone that you don't know very well. Like I
don't really have a problem connecting with you on a
screen right now, but if I were pitching something or
I was like trying to get a sense of like
what you thought, it's just so much harder to sort
of tailor the discussion based on someone else's reaction when
you're not looking at them. It also is just harder
for you to see if they're understanding. So that gets
(09:35):
again like if you're in any kind of a job
where a lot of times you are explaining things to people,
it gets so weirdly tiring when you're trying to do
it with this like medium in between. So for that
in person, I think is just more pleasant, more relaxing.
And one example I'll use for my non clinical life
is that we used to do these big residency recruitment
blitzes where we'd like interview batches of twelve to fifteen
(09:57):
applicants at once for our residency program, and we did
it in person, and then we had COVID, so we
went to zoom. I found it so much more tiring
on zoom to give this speech and to smile and
to stay engaged and to even like gauge these people,
Like it was harder to really get an impression of
anybody through a screen than it was in person. Now,
was it more practical for them, absolutely, But then on
(10:19):
the downside, for them, they weren't able to actually see
the place where they might spend the next god knows
how many years of their life. So I don't know,
there's pluses and minuses but for me, that zoom fatigue
is real, and I much prefer the efficiency. I guess
it is like their efficiency is gained from face to
face communication. That sounds backwards because you're not driving somewhere,
(10:39):
but just the read on people on the way.
Speaker 1 (10:42):
That you can understand each other. All right, let's just
quick run through like other people being in the home.
Speaker 2 (10:49):
Yes, So that's another huge benefit from my perspective is
that when I'm at work seeing patients, my kids are
not at work with me seeing patients, so I am
like really can be in the zone and if I
you know, I guess I could get texted by something,
and sometimes I do, but they kind of aren't there,
so the opportunity to get interrupted, especially if there are
half days. If there are, you know, you have important
(11:10):
things to do at that four o'clock hour when kids
would otherwise be arriving home. I much prefer being somewhere
else if I'm trying to get work done, And that
also holds true for non kid related home obligations, like
you aren't going to be the default package getter a
repair person because you aren't there. You cannot talk to
the exterminator because you aren't there. Or maybe you and
(11:30):
your partner now have to negotiate instead of you always
being the default one if you happen to previously have
the more flexible job. Now, I know that can actually
be logistically problematic for some people because if you don't
have anybody at home, then it just becomes hard to
do those things in general. But if you do have
kids and you have someone at home with those kids
for at least part of the day, then sometimes that
(11:51):
person can then absorb that role that you would have
been doing if you were there. And everybody wins.
Speaker 1 (11:57):
Yeah, I would say, well, even if you are working
from home, hopefully if you have young kids, you have
somebody caring for them other than you, And one of
the things of having it be a paid caregiver is
you can like make sure they get out of the house.
That's always been one of our job descriptions with our
Nana's which there's also people I know who I've talked
to who have been trying to work from home and
their partner is staying home with their kids, and that's
a much harder one to navigate because it's a little
(12:18):
bit harder to force your partner to get out of
the house. With the kids because they're making their own
choices about what they're doing as opposed to working for you. Okay,
well we're going to take a quick ad break and
then we'll be back talking more about urto Well, we
(12:44):
are back talking all things return to office, so real quick, Sarah.
Office culture is potentially a positive for people being back
in more of a face to face environment. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (12:56):
One thing that I enjoy about going to work in
a physical location is that office culture grows naturally that way.
And I've been in my office for twelve years now
and consider lots of the people that I work with
to be real friends. So it can be fun to
celebrate a birthday, a holiday, or just even chat for.
Speaker 1 (13:10):
A few minutes.
Speaker 2 (13:11):
Plus, there's a side benefit of the casual like actual
work that might be easy to kind of fit in
on the fly. I have colleagues that will walk into
each other's office and be like, I got these set
of laughs on a patient. They don't totally make sense
to me. Let's can we talk about it? And yes,
that could happen. You could kind of like text someone
and see if they wanted to call you or FaceTime you,
but it might be less likely to happen with that
(13:32):
person not being accessible like that.
Speaker 1 (13:35):
Yeah, although I would say you're not in the office
five days a week either, right, I mean, you know,
it's just the thing you could have both. Right. There
are certain kinds of work that are best done to
gather in person that casual back and forth banter, and
then there's other kinds that casual back and forth banter
is taking you away from doing. Right, there's certain sort
(13:55):
of heads down concentration kind of work that is quite
difficult to do if people are by being like, what
do you think of this? And if that's less likely
to happen, that could be a benefit for that sorts
of work. So again, this is why hybrid work tends
to be the best option then with some guidelines around it,
but mostly be people being treated as adults. But yet,
(14:17):
those are some things to think about possibly ways to
reframe this. But we had a few sort of survival
tactics to talk about as well. One is, if you
do suddenly have a longer commute that you were having
to do more frequently, try to think of this as
me time. Like, yes, commuting is often boring, stressful, but
(14:41):
it's too much time to completely write off in your life.
So as you are planning your weeks, plan your commutes, right, actually,
think of this time. Think of what you will do
during this time. For a lot of people, that's things
like listening to audiobooks. So make sure that your audiobooks
are packed. You've chosen well for the week, you're excited
about what you're going to listen to, or maybe you've
(15:02):
chosen an album to listen.
Speaker 2 (15:03):
To Tuesday morning, so you're obviously.
Speaker 1 (15:06):
Morning well and on Monday morning you can listen to
best like Plans, And if you listen to before breakfast,
hope your commute is probably not that short. It's like
four minutes. But on Wednesdays I do an interview that's
a little closer to thirty minutes, so you could.
Speaker 2 (15:20):
Listen to So we figured out three other days already
only you've got something.
Speaker 1 (15:26):
But you know it can also be a rev up
or decompression time, right, Sarah, Oh, totally.
Speaker 2 (15:31):
For me, that's an enormous benefit. I usually do. Lately,
I've been doing music in the morning and then podcasts
in the afternoon, and I've done it actually either direction.
I kind of like to mix it up, but my
kids usually want to play various of their music in
the morning. Then I sort of pivot to my music
once I've dropped off the last kid on the way
to the office. And then I have different podcasts that
I often listen to on different days based on when
they come out, So you kind of just get a
(15:52):
routine out of it. And like, I am not someone
who would say I even hate my commute. I did
hate my commute when I drove from Miami Beach. That
was terrible, because I think what makes a commute bad
is a big unpredictability aspect, because you're like always hoping
it's going to be pretty good. But if you can
engineer a commute that's at least even if it's not
(16:12):
that short, if it's fairly predictable. Obviously people don't have
control over that, but you can just see it as like,
all right, I got thirty minutes. I'm hanging out in
the car. I can either call someone or I can
listen to something, but like, I don't really have anything
else to do. I can't really do anything else productive,
so I might as well enjoy it.
Speaker 1 (16:27):
Yeah, a commute can also be social time. I mean,
probably not every day, but carpling never really caught on
as a big hit because people value the flexibility of
having their own vehicle. But there might be some people
that you like enough to forego that flexibility just on occasion.
So commuting with a friend once every two weeks, like
(16:48):
if you work anywhere near a friend of yours, that
could be an amazing way to build in some time together.
Or maybe it's with your spouse once a week or so,
even if it's like ten minutes outside your normal drive,
it might be worth it to you extra twenty minutes
in order to spend like that extra ninety minutes there
and back with your spouse once a week. It might
be as much time as you guys get together if
(17:10):
you have young kids in a busy life. So yeah,
those are ways to think about it too.
Speaker 2 (17:15):
Yeah, it's funny when I when Josh first started working
at the same health system minded, I was like, oh, well,
go to work together. That happened zero time because he
doesn't actually work at the same hospital that I do,
so there's really no opportunity for that. But it would
have been cute if it had worked out.
Speaker 1 (17:27):
It would have been cute. Another sort of survival strategy
mentally at least, is to quote a certain Sarah Hartunger,
make it worth the commute, right, Sarah.
Speaker 2 (17:38):
Yes, well I didn't remember that I said that, but
I'm glad I did. That's a good quote.
Speaker 1 (17:42):
Yeah, because you may have to go in, but just
for your own sanity, make sure there is at least
something you are doing when you are in the office
that would have been hard to do remotely. In many cases,
that is something that is social. So try to start
a regular lunch group, maybe plug into or start your
own employee resource group. Maybe it's a mentoring program or
(18:03):
a mentoring connection that you are committing to mentor someone
once a week or so, so you know you're going
in to talk with them. But something that makes it
very clear why you are doing this, because, yeah, if
you have a day where you're just emailing and calling
people in other places, it will feel very tedious, and
we would like to avoid that if possible.
Speaker 2 (18:22):
Yes, Now the next thing would be boundaries. Kind of
as we implied in the very beginning, if you can't
work from home, then that gives you the leeway to
say you're not going to work from home. No, we're kidding,
We're being tongue in cheek about that aspect of it,
but sometimes it can kind of promote a little bit
of a natural separation. And I will say for myself,
(18:42):
I struggle much more with kind of shutting down on
days that I'm working for myself at home versus days
that I'm driving home. And I'm driving home it's like
very very obvious, like I was at work and now
I'm done with work, and I don't generally take home
clinical work unless it's a call week or something like that.
So if you are someone who struggles with the boundaries,
maybe you could reframe as like, this will help me
to set clearer boundaries, even if that does mean doing
(19:06):
very specific split shifts at certain times if work necessitates it.
Speaker 1 (19:09):
Yeah, because one of the things that I definitely found
studying people's schedules in the pre COVID era, people worry
with a long commute that if you have young kids
who go to bed relatively early, you will have very
limited time with them on weekday evenings. Now you might
have time with them on weekday mornings, you have time
with them on weekends, but the weekday evening, if you
(19:31):
have a child who goes to bed at like seven
or seven thirty and you're not home from your commute
until six six thirty. It sort of limits the evening. Again,
my children never did this. I would read about people
doing this. I'm like, oh, that sounds rough. Like my
child has never gone to bed at seven thirty pm.
No one ever, none of them babies, doesn't matter. Nobody
has ever gone to bed at seven thirty pm. But
if it is you, then you might consider working a
(19:55):
split shift, which is that you get out of your
office as soon as humanly possible. I don't know, try
to end at four thirty five max. But start the commute,
then get home, have a longer evening with your family,
and then do a little bit of work at night
after the kids went to bed. Because I'm probably believing
in a lot of these jobs, you actually can work
(20:16):
from home. It's just that you're not supposed to be.
But if you're doing it at nine o'clock at night,
people will probably be fine with it.
Speaker 2 (20:22):
Yeah, and we've talked about this before, but usually you
want that work from home to be doing a specific project,
getting a discrete thing done, versus like I'm just gonna
like go into my email and like browse around a
little brows around.
Speaker 1 (20:35):
Yeah, you are not going to get through a one
thousand email backlog from nine to ten at night, like,
so don't try like make yourself a to do list
for this split second shift saying Okay, these are the
three things I did not finish before I left the
office today and do in fact have to do before tomorrow.
So maybe preparing for a meeting, sending two responses to email,
(20:55):
and whatever something else you had to do, that's a
more reasonable thing to do. You want to be intentional
about breaks, right, Sarah, Yeah, And.
Speaker 2 (21:03):
I think this is particularly important when you're out of
work because it might require a little bit of preparation.
So maybe it means asking a friend to go out
to lunch with you once a week. Maybe that means
bringing a book so you can spend your lunch time
doing that, or bringing comfortable shoes so you can take
a walk during lunch. But most workdays are not going
to be like you doing intents work from the minute
you get there until the minute you clock out, whether
(21:25):
you actually clock out or not. But you know what
I mean, And so it makes sense to actually think
about how you might want to spend those breaks well
rather than just kind of letting them happen in default
activity probably scrolling, not just scrolling not going to be
that thrilling.
Speaker 1 (21:37):
Yeah, especially if you do need to leave early for
your commute and in winter you're somewhere that the commute
will get you home after the sun has gone down.
You probably want to arrange to see the sky in
the course of your work day. So take some sort
of break where you get outside, whether that's to grab
coffee at a local coffee shop, just to go for
a ten minute walk somewhere, if you go out for lunch,
(22:01):
just invent a reason to go outside, like you don't
actually need one.
Speaker 2 (22:04):
The gen zs are all touch grass. We're like, no,
see the sky.
Speaker 1 (22:07):
See the sky. Okay, well you could touch the grass
and see the sky. I don't know. If you're at
a skyscaper there may not be so much grass right
next to you, but the sky you might be able
to still see. So really totally, totally, And you also
want to make sure that you've planned in time for
your personal to do because these things don't stop just
because you are working in an office and you probably
(22:30):
feel a little bit you know, there's some things that
will be harder to do if you are in an
office as opposed to in a home office in terms
of managing life, administration and such that has to happen,
So you might need to strategically plan in a personal
day every so often to take care of anything that
is hard to make happen.
Speaker 2 (22:50):
Agree, I used to do a lot of that, because
there's certain things that just have to be business hours
and certain things where it has to be you, like
going to your own doctor's appointment or getting your passport renewed. Like,
you cannot outsource those things even if you'd like to.
So I would strategically have like our full day off
every couple of months or so and try to batch things,
because it's true you won't have that flexibility, especially if
(23:10):
your work is a good distance away, so you're not
going to have access to those things that are close
to your house exactly.
Speaker 1 (23:15):
Well, we're going to take one more quick ad break
and then we'll be back with a little bit more
about rto Well, we are back talking all things RT
returning to the office, especially for people who are in
(23:37):
a situation where you now need to be in your
workplace in person five days a week, which, as we
discussed earlier, is probably overkill, but we are dealing with
life as it is, not as we wish it would be.
The key thing to think about is that if you
are no longer at home during the day, you may
need to account for presence, like somebody being there at
(23:59):
various points that you may have taken for granted that
that was you at previous points, but now you're going
to have to figure out how that's going to work.
So packages that might night to be signed for, like
that's not going to work. Your dog You can't walk
the dog as a break if you are not there
meeting contractors, which again is a massive time suck. If
(24:19):
you are working from home, but you may have been
the one who did it. If like there was a
sudden leak that happened in your household or emergency childcare stuff.
If you and your partner are both working an hour
away from your kid's school, you need to figure out
who and how somebody gets there. If there's someone who
(24:40):
is like vomiting profusely, what goes on, you know?
Speaker 2 (24:44):
I mean, I feel like some schools are just going
to have to wait an hour because they're parents are
going to work. And if parents are required to work
at their workplaces like that's hard to have. Everybody have
a backup person in case their kid happened to get
sick in the middle of a day and they're too
far away school with it.
Speaker 1 (25:01):
Yeah, I know. So if you have family living beer by,
that could be yet another thing you ask them to
help with if that happens, or having a network of
babysitters or something that some people have during the day
availability again just as an option, or you know, and
kids get sick too, and if you cannot work from home,
(25:22):
that would require you to take a sick day yourself,
which seems very inefficient from the point of view of
the organization. But I'm not sure how they're dealing with that.
If they're not allowing people to work from home, I
guess you're just not allowed to have sick children. I
don't know. Oh my goodness.
Speaker 2 (25:36):
My hope is that in instances like that, or because
that's an interesting question, like let's say there is a
hurricane warning and everyone's home, but there's no hurricane yet.
Would the company rather make everyone take pl and have
nothing get accomplished that day, or would they rather, on
specific occasions let them work from home. Oh my goodness,
(25:56):
I don't know.
Speaker 1 (25:57):
Yeah, I'm pretty sure that it is posted to work
from home, like this idea that you know you can't. Yeah,
if there's a giant snowstorm like people, of course you'd
rather have people work from home than lose a week
of productivity. But yes, I think it's a very short
sighted idea. But whatever, we do feel for people who
are dealing with this situation. We do. This is hard.
Speaker 2 (26:20):
We're thinking of you, and we were trying to offer
some good We're trying to keep your spirits up and
give you some ideas, and there is always I did
mention here also that keep kicking butt at your job,
because the more awesome you are and the more valuable
you are, you never know, maybe you could start by
negotiating away some of this requirement if they really really
need you badly enough. I guess it depends on the
(26:41):
company culture, but maybe you would have some wiggle room there.
Speaker 1 (26:44):
Yeah, Or even if the company culture is the expectation
you're there, if it's not truly centrally enforced, then your
manager maybe like whatever, Like I know, she's going to
get her work done. And you can always go look
for another job, because there are still plenty of places
that treat people like adults and say, you know, you
can work in the office a certain number of days,
you can work from home as you decide is necessary,
(27:05):
and we look forward to seeing that more people want
to work there than work elsewhere.
Speaker 2 (27:11):
I can't believe we were able to record this episode remotely, Laura, I.
Speaker 1 (27:14):
Know, how is that even possible? Sarah? It's like, how
could this business exist if people can't work from home?
All right?
Speaker 2 (27:22):
Well, mega to our Q and A.
Speaker 1 (27:24):
All right, so Sarah sent me a two part question.
I think we're just going to do the second part
because that was the It's a multipart coastion, Okay, So
she says, we're looking at this is a family with
two looking at three children. We are looking at moving
closer to extended family in a couple of years, right
when our oldest child is getting close to kindergarten age.
(27:44):
I understand schools should be a major factor and where
exactly to buy a house, but how does one actually
figure out which are the good schools? I am told
the best way is to talk to parents there, but
since we currently live out of state, that seems tricky
on evaluating quality of schools. Projecting forward to see what
middle or high school options kids might have, and where
(28:06):
a school district is headed over the next fifteen years.
Am I vastly overthinking of this? But I don't want
to get stuck either moving or paying three private school tuitions.
Any tips about what to think about in general and
planning to settle in a larger metropolitan area as a
working parent, Okay, Sarah.
Speaker 2 (28:22):
Well, I think it's a good thing to think about.
I wouldn't put this under the category of overthinking or
anything like that. Although the idea that you're going to
know exactly what the schools are going to look like
in fifteen years, yeah, we probably can't help too much
with that piece, but I think it is worth asking around.
Like you can do a lot online sloothing, like find
out if there are bulletin boards for that community on
(28:44):
Facebook or whatsopp or whatever, and or on Reddit. Actually,
I've seen this kind of thing as and you can
just sort of say, I'm thinking about moving to blah
blah blah city, like what are the most awesome school districts?
Or are you really happy in one of the school districts,
And you'll start to see patterns. Most likely said, of course,
like your kid's success is probably going to have a
lot more to do with the kids and the specific
(29:05):
school that they go to. And I will give you
the disclaimer that we move to our area partly for
the school districts and are paying three private school tuitions,
partly just because the needs of our kids were a
little bit different than we had anticipated and it turned
out the fit was the best, and since we could
do it, we just went in that direction. But no regrets,
because a area that has really good school districts tends
(29:27):
to have a lot of kids and a big kind
of kid culture, which means lots of activities and playgrounds
and community events and stuff like that. So all those
things tend to track together, and I would do the
best you can to get some people to kind of
sharea A real estate agent also might know, Yeah, yeah, no,
that's true.
Speaker 1 (29:46):
Where would you suggest in this area we look if
we really value having good public schools. It's yeah, we
moved to this area. You know. I'm in the Lower
Marion township in Pennsylvania a lot because we had heard
the public schools were very good here, and I think
they are. If you went to a selective college, you've
(30:06):
probably met people from the various high schools in this area,
And so you might also look around, like do you
hear about the high schools in that area? In like
state competitions, in national competitions, do people mention the area
as being higher priced because of the schools? Right? Like
you will see that in real estate ads, Like they'll
(30:27):
say like this is in this district in the first
line in the real estate ads. Economics are funny that way.
Because she says she doesn't want to pay three private
school tuitions, you may wind up having that baked into
your house price. If you choose a very good public
school district, you are kind of paying the tuition in
the form of your granite countertops. But that's just kind
(30:48):
of the way economics works, right, But just other things
to look at. I have the teachers been there forever?
That might be something you could sleuth out, because if
very few teachers are quitting that neighborhood elementary school, that
might be something that suggests it's pretty good place to work.
(31:08):
When people love to work somewhere, that generally means it's
pretty good, all right. Well. Linking this to our earlier segment, though,
I would say, like patient care education is something that
probably doesn't work as well virtually. I've had several kids
do online classes, and it definitely can work for older kids,
especially for subjects that you wouldn't be able to get otherwise.
(31:31):
I think for things like six year olds not so
good with remote work.
Speaker 2 (31:36):
Definitely was not successful in our house. I'm telling you,
I mean we did that.
Speaker 1 (31:41):
Yeah, like adults who are doing something versus six year
olds and what they are capable of managing in terms
of their own time, attention and so forth. So you know,
there's something we shouldn't have offices that are treating people
like six year olds. But I digress. Look for places
that teachers love teaching, for places where it's mentioned in
(32:03):
the real estate ads, look for the high schools being
mentioned in competitions, and yeah, we'll just always keep an
open mind though, because even the best school district, it
might not work for your own kid for one reason
or the other.
Speaker 2 (32:16):
And it might be so much cheaper to live somewhere
the dozen of good schools that the private school payment
question is a wash. And also depending on what state
you are in, there are different vouchers and all sorts
of things we could get into, so that are a
little bit too political for this podcast, but they happen
to exist in various places no matter what we.
Speaker 1 (32:35):
Do think of them. All Right, moving on, I think
that was enough. But love of the week, all right, Sarah,
Yours is a new love. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (32:45):
I mean I've always loved it but not really used it.
So decaff coffee just so glad it exists because I'm
not fully on decaf, but like, I feel like I'm
somewhat sensitive to caffeine right now, but I can still
have coffee and I can have like a little bit
of caffeine and like modulate that on the ratio of caffeine.
So I'm just like very happy and I can go
to Starbucks and get decaf cappuccinos and stuff, and this
(33:06):
is good.
Speaker 1 (33:07):
Yeah, that it actually exists, that there are options because.
Speaker 2 (33:10):
I don't really like tea that much, so it's good
to have.
Speaker 1 (33:14):
How do they decaffeinate coffee?
Speaker 2 (33:16):
I don't know it's Swiss, but it always says Swiss process.
I'm like, I don't know what that process is, but
those Swiss have figured it out somehow.
Speaker 1 (33:24):
It takes out the caffeine, or you can have places
that just add caffeine for no real reason just to
make their their drinks. Their juice is more addictive. That's
exciting too. So I'm going to say that I am
drinking this Perrier Perie. How do you Perier Perrier? I'm
so not fancy, but the Seltzer water because I've gotten
(33:44):
to that as my evening drink of choice. It is
probably better than having a craft beer in general. And
yet you still want something that's a little special and bubbly,
not juice or coke or anything like that. So drinking
a lot of Perier right now.
Speaker 2 (34:02):
I feel like Perier is like I drink a lot
of like Lacroix, but Perie is classier.
Speaker 1 (34:06):
So I think that's cool. Some of my children have,
you know, we get the Lacroix too that you know,
I kind of think of the Perier as mine and
the Lacroix is for the kids. But then one or
two kids who see me drinking the Periy and they
want the Perier and then they take like two SIPs
in check the canon. It makes me so so unhappy.
It is sad. It is said, like why why did
(34:26):
you do that? All right, well, this has been best
of both worlds. We've been talking return to office strategies,
ways of thinking about it, strategies for making the most
of your day, for not losing your sanity over the commute.
We will be back next week with more on making
work and life fit together.
Speaker 2 (34:47):
Thanks for listening. You can find me Sarah at the
shoebox dot com or at the Underscore shoe Box on Instagram,
and you.
Speaker 1 (34:55):
Can find me Laura at Laura vandercam dot com. This
has been the best of both worlds podcasts. Please join
us next time for more on making work and life
work together.
Hi. I'm Laura Vanderkamp. I'm a mother of five, an author, journalist,
and speaker.
Speaker 2 (00:15):
And I'm Sarah hart Hunger, a mother of three, practicing physician,
writer and course creator. We are two working parents who
love our careers and our families.
Speaker 1 (00:24):
Welcome to best of both worlds. Here we talk about
how real women manage work, family, and time for fun.
From figuring out childcare to mapping out long term career goals.
We want you to get the most out of life.
Welcome to best of both worlds. This is Laura. This
episode is airing in mid April of twenty twenty five.
(00:47):
We are going to be talking about RTO that is
returning to work. Five years after the pandemic began, a
number of organizations have started to get people back into
the office more frequently and if several have issued mandates
that people be there five days a week, which is
(01:07):
even different than pre pandemic, when a lot of people
had worked from home Fridays. So you know, we are
going to devote this episode to strategies that might make
life feel better, more doable, time in the office feel
more useful. If you are working somewhere that has started
requiring your presence in the office a little bit more frequently.
(01:30):
Before we begin, Sarah, are you ready for a little
soapbox moment?
Speaker 2 (01:33):
Yes, I think this is an opportune time for a
I don't know trademark Laura Vandercam soapbox rant segment.
Speaker 1 (01:41):
And you wrote it.
Speaker 2 (01:43):
It's really eloquent and I'm going to let you just
roll with it.
Speaker 1 (01:47):
Yes, So my thoughts on our too, I mean, highbred
and remote work was honestly one of the best and
probably the only good thing to come out of the pandemic.
It's kind of ridiculous that we are even doing this episode.
And I have seen this over the years as I
have studied workplace I mean, particularly in the pre COVID era,
(02:08):
when a lot of workplaces I mean people would tell
you like, oh, we just can't work from home. It
might work for other people, but it never worked for
our organization. I Mean. The truth is, some people in
power do not like remote work because they like to
feel powerful and have people acting deferential to them in
the office and being in a space where it is
very clear that you have a bigger and fancier office
(02:30):
than other people, and you have the status and there
are all these hordes of people working for you that
you are seeing presiding over them like a king over
his subjects. It has very little to do with productivity.
I mean people will listen to that and then wax
eloquent about face to face work and the wonderful things
that happen face to face. And I totally agree, Like
Sarah and I love to get together when we can.
(02:52):
This is the first episode in a while that wasn't
recorded in her closet, with us sitting two inches from
each other sharing a microphone, like it's a lot of
fun to do things to gather in person. That said,
this is not an either or matter, because forty hours
a week in the same cubicle with the exact same
people can totally be overkill. There's much to be said
for a balance of both, with people treated as an
(03:14):
adults and knowledge work judged based on outcomes, not time
in a seat. And yes, that is so much harder
to manage. I get that. I am a person who
manages people as well. But the upsides are great because
there's no reason for people to be wasting time and
money and gas if they are just going to email
and call other people on a particular day, and it's
also great for organizations to be able to hire people
(03:36):
from outside a sixty minute radius of the office. One
more part of this rant, which is that if you
are working somewhere where they have claimed that people just
can't work from home, that doesn't change after five pm
or before nine am. You still can't work from home.
So there's absolutely no reason really for people to have
cell phones or laptops or anything like that, because clearly
(03:58):
you can't work from home. There is no reason to
even try to do anything outside the office if you
cannot work from home. So all really you need is
a single like I don't know, bat signal kind of
thing that could summon you back to the office so
you could do work, as that's the only place work
can be done. I mean that means no emails after hours, right,
it's impossible for people to work from home.
Speaker 2 (04:19):
I mean that actually might be a trade off some
people would choose.
Speaker 1 (04:23):
But I'm saying I don't think those organizations are saying that.
I don't think the organization are saying our emails will
stop working at five pm. Nobody will be able to
log on before night am because you cannot work from
outside the office. Like, No, they're not saying that. They're
just saying you have to work in the office between
whatever eight thirty and four thirty, whatever the hours are,
and we might reach you outside that too. Then you
can work from home, then it's fine, but it's only
(04:46):
these set hours. I don't know. Anyway, we want to
deal with life as it is, not life as it
should be, so soapbox regardless, this episode is about how
to survive RTO, especially if that is a five day
a week RTO for you. All right, Sarah, I'm done.
Speaker 2 (05:00):
The rets of the episode will be all me, since
I have lots of positive things to say about face
to face work. No, to be fair, I mean we're
going to talk about how I do actually prefer to
do a lot of my work outside of the home.
I do my creative work from home still, although honestly,
if I had a cute little office, maybe a couple
miles away, I probably might elect to go there, especially
(05:21):
in the afternoons when certain people may be descending upon
my home, making it a little bit more difficult to concentrate.
My house is not that big and it gets very
loud very quickly. So I do my creative work from home,
and I used to do some of my graduate medical
education work from home during COVID, but then pretty much
all of my patient care work is in person. There
was a time during COVID that they really sent everybody
(05:42):
out of the clinical areas and I had to do telehealth,
and I learned that I absolutely hate telehealth with a
fiery passion. Now I don't mind doing some telehealth visits
over the course of a work day, Like sometimes a
patient lives three hours away and I can only practice
within the state of Florida, by the way, so I
have to ask, like, are you in Florida, Okay, great,
then we can have our telehealth from like Ocala or wherever.
(06:02):
So there are some patients that I see telehealth and
that's fine, But doing full days of telehealth I find ineffective, exhausting,
and like basic almost torture. I mean that might just
be a me thing, but we're going to talk about
various benefits of being in person, but for me, it's
the exhausting aspect of the communication when it's not face
to face that is probably my least favorite part. So
(06:24):
I'm somebody who kind of enjoys a little bit more
about going somewhere to do my work, and so I
was maybe a little bit more easily able to come
up with some reframings that we will provide for you
today as well as so that we can appreciate a
few of the benefits. But that said, I one hundred
percent wholeheartedly agree with Laura that, like the idea of
(06:44):
the mandate for one hundred percent seems so silly and excessive,
and I am thinking of you if that impacts you,
especially if you signed up for a situation that didn't
look like that. That feels so unfair to me. And
I do feel like hybrid or like a mostly remote
situation and can be so wonderful for many people. So
this is not to say that I'm like, yeah, get
(07:05):
your butt back in the seat.
Speaker 1 (07:09):
Yeah, I mean, I totally get that that. I mean,
especially things like patient care. It often is good to
have the picking up on things. But you know, like
your status meeting for like the project that's been going
on with for six months, I mean, it seems a
little odd that the once a week check in would
always have to be in person. You know, when you
see these people all the time. There's a good balance
(07:32):
to be had, but Okay, So the positives. One, some
people do have a split thing where it's easier to
focus in a place that is primed for work focus. Now,
I will say offices are distracting places, but if you
have structured it right, perhaps it is or possible.
Speaker 2 (07:51):
Yeah, if you've structured it right, if you have a
door that you can close. But also it depends on
your makeup, right, and some people have harder time focusing
than others in general. But there is something to be
said that if you're used to being in a particular environment,
and if you're kind of conditioned yourself to like, Okay,
I have my routine. I walk through the door, I
get my coffee at little office coffee shop, I walk upstairs,
I put my laptop down, and then I like start,
(08:12):
Like you can kind of prime yourself into a really
nice ritual. I guess that's not to say you couldn't
do something similar at home, but it might be harder
with like the everyday things kind of still around, Like
it's the same environment you're going to be in when
you're having breakfast with the kids potentially or relaxing after work.
So some people I think do benefit from having kind
of a work specific environment. I do sort of my
(08:33):
brain knows to get into gear to like start going
through patient results when I sit down at my work desk,
I mean for better or forwear. Could I cultivate that
somewhere else? Maybe? But I think for some people, I'm
probably not the only person who gets a little bit
of a priming benefit from being in a work zone.
That's number one positive.
Speaker 1 (08:50):
Yeah, what are another? Okay?
Speaker 2 (08:52):
So this one and I think this one I sort
of alluded to and as one of my biggest biggest ones,
is just that face to face communication is less tiring
and more enjoyable for most people when you're actually doing
it in person versus on a screen. There are just
all of these. I think it's actually more important when
you are explaining something that someone doesn't understand, or interacting
(09:14):
with someone that you don't know very well. Like I
don't really have a problem connecting with you on a
screen right now, but if I were pitching something or
I was like trying to get a sense of like
what you thought, it's just so much harder to sort
of tailor the discussion based on someone else's reaction when
you're not looking at them. It also is just harder
for you to see if they're understanding. So that gets
(09:35):
again like if you're in any kind of a job
where a lot of times you are explaining things to people,
it gets so weirdly tiring when you're trying to do
it with this like medium in between. So for that
in person, I think is just more pleasant, more relaxing.
And one example I'll use for my non clinical life
is that we used to do these big residency recruitment
blitzes where we'd like interview batches of twelve to fifteen
(09:57):
applicants at once for our residency program, and we did
it in person, and then we had COVID, so we
went to zoom. I found it so much more tiring
on zoom to give this speech and to smile and
to stay engaged and to even like gauge these people,
Like it was harder to really get an impression of
anybody through a screen than it was in person. Now,
was it more practical for them, absolutely, But then on
(10:19):
the downside, for them, they weren't able to actually see
the place where they might spend the next god knows
how many years of their life. So I don't know,
there's pluses and minuses but for me, that zoom fatigue
is real, and I much prefer the efficiency. I guess
it is like their efficiency is gained from face to
face communication. That sounds backwards because you're not driving somewhere,
(10:39):
but just the read on people on the way.
Speaker 1 (10:42):
That you can understand each other. All right, let's just
quick run through like other people being in the home.
Speaker 2 (10:49):
Yes, So that's another huge benefit from my perspective is
that when I'm at work seeing patients, my kids are
not at work with me seeing patients, so I am
like really can be in the zone and if I
you know, I guess I could get texted by something,
and sometimes I do, but they kind of aren't there,
so the opportunity to get interrupted, especially if there are
half days. If there are, you know, you have important
(11:10):
things to do at that four o'clock hour when kids
would otherwise be arriving home. I much prefer being somewhere
else if I'm trying to get work done, And that
also holds true for non kid related home obligations, like
you aren't going to be the default package getter a
repair person because you aren't there. You cannot talk to
the exterminator because you aren't there. Or maybe you and
(11:30):
your partner now have to negotiate instead of you always
being the default one if you happen to previously have
the more flexible job. Now, I know that can actually
be logistically problematic for some people because if you don't
have anybody at home, then it just becomes hard to
do those things in general. But if you do have
kids and you have someone at home with those kids
for at least part of the day, then sometimes that
(11:51):
person can then absorb that role that you would have
been doing if you were there. And everybody wins.
Speaker 1 (11:57):
Yeah, I would say, well, even if you are working
from home, hopefully if you have young kids, you have
somebody caring for them other than you, And one of
the things of having it be a paid caregiver is
you can like make sure they get out of the house.
That's always been one of our job descriptions with our
Nana's which there's also people I know who I've talked
to who have been trying to work from home and
their partner is staying home with their kids, and that's
a much harder one to navigate because it's a little
(12:18):
bit harder to force your partner to get out of
the house. With the kids because they're making their own
choices about what they're doing as opposed to working for you. Okay,
well we're going to take a quick ad break and
then we'll be back talking more about urto Well, we
(12:44):
are back talking all things return to office, so real quick, Sarah.
Office culture is potentially a positive for people being back
in more of a face to face environment. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (12:56):
One thing that I enjoy about going to work in
a physical location is that office culture grows naturally that way.
And I've been in my office for twelve years now
and consider lots of the people that I work with
to be real friends. So it can be fun to
celebrate a birthday, a holiday, or just even chat for.
Speaker 1 (13:10):
A few minutes.
Speaker 2 (13:11):
Plus, there's a side benefit of the casual like actual
work that might be easy to kind of fit in
on the fly. I have colleagues that will walk into
each other's office and be like, I got these set
of laughs on a patient. They don't totally make sense
to me. Let's can we talk about it? And yes,
that could happen. You could kind of like text someone
and see if they wanted to call you or FaceTime you,
but it might be less likely to happen with that
(13:32):
person not being accessible like that.
Speaker 1 (13:35):
Yeah, although I would say you're not in the office
five days a week either, right, I mean, you know,
it's just the thing you could have both. Right. There
are certain kinds of work that are best done to
gather in person that casual back and forth banter, and
then there's other kinds that casual back and forth banter
is taking you away from doing. Right, there's certain sort
(13:55):
of heads down concentration kind of work that is quite
difficult to do if people are by being like, what
do you think of this? And if that's less likely
to happen, that could be a benefit for that sorts
of work. So again, this is why hybrid work tends
to be the best option then with some guidelines around it,
but mostly be people being treated as adults. But yet,
(14:17):
those are some things to think about possibly ways to
reframe this. But we had a few sort of survival
tactics to talk about as well. One is, if you
do suddenly have a longer commute that you were having
to do more frequently, try to think of this as
me time. Like, yes, commuting is often boring, stressful, but
(14:41):
it's too much time to completely write off in your life.
So as you are planning your weeks, plan your commutes, right, actually,
think of this time. Think of what you will do
during this time. For a lot of people, that's things
like listening to audiobooks. So make sure that your audiobooks
are packed. You've chosen well for the week, you're excited
about what you're going to listen to, or maybe you've
(15:02):
chosen an album to listen.
Speaker 2 (15:03):
To Tuesday morning, so you're obviously.
Speaker 1 (15:06):
Morning well and on Monday morning you can listen to
best like Plans, And if you listen to before breakfast,
hope your commute is probably not that short. It's like
four minutes. But on Wednesdays I do an interview that's
a little closer to thirty minutes, so you could.
Speaker 2 (15:20):
Listen to So we figured out three other days already
only you've got something.
Speaker 1 (15:26):
But you know it can also be a rev up
or decompression time, right, Sarah, Oh, totally.
Speaker 2 (15:31):
For me, that's an enormous benefit. I usually do. Lately,
I've been doing music in the morning and then podcasts
in the afternoon, and I've done it actually either direction.
I kind of like to mix it up, but my
kids usually want to play various of their music in
the morning. Then I sort of pivot to my music
once I've dropped off the last kid on the way
to the office. And then I have different podcasts that
I often listen to on different days based on when
they come out, So you kind of just get a
(15:52):
routine out of it. And like, I am not someone
who would say I even hate my commute. I did
hate my commute when I drove from Miami Beach. That
was terrible, because I think what makes a commute bad
is a big unpredictability aspect, because you're like always hoping
it's going to be pretty good. But if you can
engineer a commute that's at least even if it's not
(16:12):
that short, if it's fairly predictable. Obviously people don't have
control over that, but you can just see it as like,
all right, I got thirty minutes. I'm hanging out in
the car. I can either call someone or I can
listen to something, but like, I don't really have anything
else to do. I can't really do anything else productive,
so I might as well enjoy it.
Speaker 1 (16:27):
Yeah, a commute can also be social time. I mean,
probably not every day, but carpling never really caught on
as a big hit because people value the flexibility of
having their own vehicle. But there might be some people
that you like enough to forego that flexibility just on occasion.
So commuting with a friend once every two weeks, like
(16:48):
if you work anywhere near a friend of yours, that
could be an amazing way to build in some time together.
Or maybe it's with your spouse once a week or so,
even if it's like ten minutes outside your normal drive,
it might be worth it to you extra twenty minutes
in order to spend like that extra ninety minutes there
and back with your spouse once a week. It might
be as much time as you guys get together if
(17:10):
you have young kids in a busy life. So yeah,
those are ways to think about it too.
Speaker 2 (17:15):
Yeah, it's funny when I when Josh first started working
at the same health system minded, I was like, oh, well,
go to work together. That happened zero time because he
doesn't actually work at the same hospital that I do,
so there's really no opportunity for that. But it would
have been cute if it had worked out.
Speaker 1 (17:27):
It would have been cute. Another sort of survival strategy
mentally at least, is to quote a certain Sarah Hartunger,
make it worth the commute, right, Sarah.
Speaker 2 (17:38):
Yes, well I didn't remember that I said that, but
I'm glad I did. That's a good quote.
Speaker 1 (17:42):
Yeah, because you may have to go in, but just
for your own sanity, make sure there is at least
something you are doing when you are in the office
that would have been hard to do remotely. In many cases,
that is something that is social. So try to start
a regular lunch group, maybe plug into or start your
own employee resource group. Maybe it's a mentoring program or
(18:03):
a mentoring connection that you are committing to mentor someone
once a week or so, so you know you're going
in to talk with them. But something that makes it
very clear why you are doing this, because, yeah, if
you have a day where you're just emailing and calling
people in other places, it will feel very tedious, and
we would like to avoid that if possible.
Speaker 2 (18:22):
Yes, Now the next thing would be boundaries. Kind of
as we implied in the very beginning, if you can't
work from home, then that gives you the leeway to
say you're not going to work from home. No, we're kidding,
We're being tongue in cheek about that aspect of it,
but sometimes it can kind of promote a little bit
of a natural separation. And I will say for myself,
(18:42):
I struggle much more with kind of shutting down on
days that I'm working for myself at home versus days
that I'm driving home. And I'm driving home it's like
very very obvious, like I was at work and now
I'm done with work, and I don't generally take home
clinical work unless it's a call week or something like that.
So if you are someone who struggles with the boundaries,
maybe you could reframe as like, this will help me
to set clearer boundaries, even if that does mean doing
(19:06):
very specific split shifts at certain times if work necessitates it.
Speaker 1 (19:09):
Yeah, because one of the things that I definitely found
studying people's schedules in the pre COVID era, people worry
with a long commute that if you have young kids
who go to bed relatively early, you will have very
limited time with them on weekday evenings. Now you might
have time with them on weekday mornings, you have time
with them on weekends, but the weekday evening, if you
(19:31):
have a child who goes to bed at like seven
or seven thirty and you're not home from your commute
until six six thirty. It sort of limits the evening. Again,
my children never did this. I would read about people
doing this. I'm like, oh, that sounds rough. Like my
child has never gone to bed at seven thirty pm.
No one ever, none of them babies, doesn't matter. Nobody
has ever gone to bed at seven thirty pm. But
if it is you, then you might consider working a
(19:55):
split shift, which is that you get out of your
office as soon as humanly possible. I don't know, try
to end at four thirty five max. But start the commute,
then get home, have a longer evening with your family,
and then do a little bit of work at night
after the kids went to bed. Because I'm probably believing
in a lot of these jobs, you actually can work
(20:16):
from home. It's just that you're not supposed to be.
But if you're doing it at nine o'clock at night,
people will probably be fine with it.
Speaker 2 (20:22):
Yeah, and we've talked about this before, but usually you
want that work from home to be doing a specific project,
getting a discrete thing done, versus like I'm just gonna
like go into my email and like browse around a
little brows around.
Speaker 1 (20:35):
Yeah, you are not going to get through a one
thousand email backlog from nine to ten at night, like,
so don't try like make yourself a to do list
for this split second shift saying Okay, these are the
three things I did not finish before I left the
office today and do in fact have to do before tomorrow.
So maybe preparing for a meeting, sending two responses to email,
(20:55):
and whatever something else you had to do, that's a
more reasonable thing to do. You want to be intentional
about breaks, right, Sarah, Yeah, And.
Speaker 2 (21:03):
I think this is particularly important when you're out of
work because it might require a little bit of preparation.
So maybe it means asking a friend to go out
to lunch with you once a week. Maybe that means
bringing a book so you can spend your lunch time
doing that, or bringing comfortable shoes so you can take
a walk during lunch. But most workdays are not going
to be like you doing intents work from the minute
you get there until the minute you clock out, whether
(21:25):
you actually clock out or not. But you know what
I mean, And so it makes sense to actually think
about how you might want to spend those breaks well
rather than just kind of letting them happen in default
activity probably scrolling, not just scrolling not going to be
that thrilling.
Speaker 1 (21:37):
Yeah, especially if you do need to leave early for
your commute and in winter you're somewhere that the commute
will get you home after the sun has gone down.
You probably want to arrange to see the sky in
the course of your work day. So take some sort
of break where you get outside, whether that's to grab
coffee at a local coffee shop, just to go for
a ten minute walk somewhere, if you go out for lunch,
(22:01):
just invent a reason to go outside, like you don't
actually need one.
Speaker 2 (22:04):
The gen zs are all touch grass. We're like, no,
see the sky.
Speaker 1 (22:07):
See the sky. Okay, well you could touch the grass
and see the sky. I don't know. If you're at
a skyscaper there may not be so much grass right
next to you, but the sky you might be able
to still see. So really totally, totally, And you also
want to make sure that you've planned in time for
your personal to do because these things don't stop just
because you are working in an office and you probably
(22:30):
feel a little bit you know, there's some things that
will be harder to do if you are in an
office as opposed to in a home office in terms
of managing life, administration and such that has to happen,
So you might need to strategically plan in a personal
day every so often to take care of anything that
is hard to make happen.
Speaker 2 (22:50):
Agree, I used to do a lot of that, because
there's certain things that just have to be business hours
and certain things where it has to be you, like
going to your own doctor's appointment or getting your passport renewed. Like,
you cannot outsource those things even if you'd like to.
So I would strategically have like our full day off
every couple of months or so and try to batch things,
because it's true you won't have that flexibility, especially if
(23:10):
your work is a good distance away, so you're not
going to have access to those things that are close
to your house exactly.
Speaker 1 (23:15):
Well, we're going to take one more quick ad break
and then we'll be back with a little bit more
about rto Well, we are back talking all things RT
returning to the office, especially for people who are in
(23:37):
a situation where you now need to be in your
workplace in person five days a week, which, as we
discussed earlier, is probably overkill, but we are dealing with
life as it is, not as we wish it would be.
The key thing to think about is that if you
are no longer at home during the day, you may
need to account for presence, like somebody being there at
(23:59):
various points that you may have taken for granted that
that was you at previous points, but now you're going
to have to figure out how that's going to work.
So packages that might night to be signed for, like
that's not going to work. Your dog You can't walk
the dog as a break if you are not there
meeting contractors, which again is a massive time suck. If
(24:19):
you are working from home, but you may have been
the one who did it. If like there was a
sudden leak that happened in your household or emergency childcare stuff.
If you and your partner are both working an hour
away from your kid's school, you need to figure out
who and how somebody gets there. If there's someone who
(24:40):
is like vomiting profusely, what goes on, you know?
Speaker 2 (24:44):
I mean, I feel like some schools are just going
to have to wait an hour because they're parents are
going to work. And if parents are required to work
at their workplaces like that's hard to have. Everybody have
a backup person in case their kid happened to get
sick in the middle of a day and they're too
far away school with it.
Speaker 1 (25:01):
Yeah, I know. So if you have family living beer by,
that could be yet another thing you ask them to
help with if that happens, or having a network of
babysitters or something that some people have during the day
availability again just as an option, or you know, and
kids get sick too, and if you cannot work from home,
(25:22):
that would require you to take a sick day yourself,
which seems very inefficient from the point of view of
the organization. But I'm not sure how they're dealing with that.
If they're not allowing people to work from home, I
guess you're just not allowed to have sick children. I
don't know. Oh my goodness.
Speaker 2 (25:36):
My hope is that in instances like that, or because
that's an interesting question, like let's say there is a
hurricane warning and everyone's home, but there's no hurricane yet.
Would the company rather make everyone take pl and have
nothing get accomplished that day, or would they rather, on
specific occasions let them work from home. Oh my goodness,
(25:56):
I don't know.
Speaker 1 (25:57):
Yeah, I'm pretty sure that it is posted to work
from home, like this idea that you know you can't. Yeah,
if there's a giant snowstorm like people, of course you'd
rather have people work from home than lose a week
of productivity. But yes, I think it's a very short
sighted idea. But whatever, we do feel for people who
are dealing with this situation. We do. This is hard.
Speaker 2 (26:20):
We're thinking of you, and we were trying to offer
some good We're trying to keep your spirits up and
give you some ideas, and there is always I did
mention here also that keep kicking butt at your job,
because the more awesome you are and the more valuable
you are, you never know, maybe you could start by
negotiating away some of this requirement if they really really
need you badly enough. I guess it depends on the
(26:41):
company culture, but maybe you would have some wiggle room there.
Speaker 1 (26:44):
Yeah, Or even if the company culture is the expectation
you're there, if it's not truly centrally enforced, then your
manager maybe like whatever, Like I know, she's going to
get her work done. And you can always go look
for another job, because there are still plenty of places
that treat people like adults and say, you know, you
can work in the office a certain number of days,
you can work from home as you decide is necessary,
(27:05):
and we look forward to seeing that more people want
to work there than work elsewhere.
Speaker 2 (27:11):
I can't believe we were able to record this episode remotely, Laura, I.
Speaker 1 (27:14):
Know, how is that even possible? Sarah? It's like, how
could this business exist if people can't work from home?
All right?
Speaker 2 (27:22):
Well, mega to our Q and A.
Speaker 1 (27:24):
All right, so Sarah sent me a two part question.
I think we're just going to do the second part
because that was the It's a multipart coastion, Okay, So
she says, we're looking at this is a family with
two looking at three children. We are looking at moving
closer to extended family in a couple of years, right
when our oldest child is getting close to kindergarten age.
(27:44):
I understand schools should be a major factor and where
exactly to buy a house, but how does one actually
figure out which are the good schools? I am told
the best way is to talk to parents there, but
since we currently live out of state, that seems tricky
on evaluating quality of schools. Projecting forward to see what
middle or high school options kids might have, and where
(28:06):
a school district is headed over the next fifteen years.
Am I vastly overthinking of this? But I don't want
to get stuck either moving or paying three private school tuitions.
Any tips about what to think about in general and
planning to settle in a larger metropolitan area as a
working parent, Okay, Sarah.
Speaker 2 (28:22):
Well, I think it's a good thing to think about.
I wouldn't put this under the category of overthinking or
anything like that. Although the idea that you're going to
know exactly what the schools are going to look like
in fifteen years, yeah, we probably can't help too much
with that piece, but I think it is worth asking around.
Like you can do a lot online sloothing, like find
out if there are bulletin boards for that community on
(28:44):
Facebook or whatsopp or whatever, and or on Reddit. Actually,
I've seen this kind of thing as and you can
just sort of say, I'm thinking about moving to blah
blah blah city, like what are the most awesome school districts?
Or are you really happy in one of the school districts,
And you'll start to see patterns. Most likely said, of course,
like your kid's success is probably going to have a
lot more to do with the kids and the specific
(29:05):
school that they go to. And I will give you
the disclaimer that we move to our area partly for
the school districts and are paying three private school tuitions,
partly just because the needs of our kids were a
little bit different than we had anticipated and it turned
out the fit was the best, and since we could
do it, we just went in that direction. But no regrets,
because a area that has really good school districts tends
(29:27):
to have a lot of kids and a big kind
of kid culture, which means lots of activities and playgrounds
and community events and stuff like that. So all those
things tend to track together, and I would do the
best you can to get some people to kind of
sharea A real estate agent also might know, Yeah, yeah, no,
that's true.
Speaker 1 (29:46):
Where would you suggest in this area we look if
we really value having good public schools. It's yeah, we
moved to this area. You know. I'm in the Lower
Marion township in Pennsylvania a lot because we had heard
the public schools were very good here, and I think
they are. If you went to a selective college, you've
(30:06):
probably met people from the various high schools in this area,
And so you might also look around, like do you
hear about the high schools in that area? In like
state competitions, in national competitions, do people mention the area
as being higher priced because of the schools? Right? Like
you will see that in real estate ads, Like they'll
(30:27):
say like this is in this district in the first
line in the real estate ads. Economics are funny that way.
Because she says she doesn't want to pay three private
school tuitions, you may wind up having that baked into
your house price. If you choose a very good public
school district, you are kind of paying the tuition in
the form of your granite countertops. But that's just kind
(30:48):
of the way economics works, right, But just other things
to look at. I have the teachers been there forever?
That might be something you could sleuth out, because if
very few teachers are quitting that neighborhood elementary school, that
might be something that suggests it's pretty good place to work.
(31:08):
When people love to work somewhere, that generally means it's
pretty good, all right. Well. Linking this to our earlier segment, though,
I would say, like patient care education is something that
probably doesn't work as well virtually. I've had several kids
do online classes, and it definitely can work for older kids,
especially for subjects that you wouldn't be able to get otherwise.
(31:31):
I think for things like six year olds not so
good with remote work.
Speaker 2 (31:36):
Definitely was not successful in our house. I'm telling you,
I mean we did that.
Speaker 1 (31:41):
Yeah, like adults who are doing something versus six year
olds and what they are capable of managing in terms
of their own time, attention and so forth. So you know,
there's something we shouldn't have offices that are treating people
like six year olds. But I digress. Look for places
that teachers love teaching, for places where it's mentioned in
(32:03):
the real estate ads, look for the high schools being
mentioned in competitions, and yeah, we'll just always keep an
open mind though, because even the best school district, it
might not work for your own kid for one reason
or the other.
Speaker 2 (32:16):
And it might be so much cheaper to live somewhere
the dozen of good schools that the private school payment
question is a wash. And also depending on what state
you are in, there are different vouchers and all sorts
of things we could get into, so that are a
little bit too political for this podcast, but they happen
to exist in various places no matter what we.
Speaker 1 (32:35):
Do think of them. All Right, moving on, I think
that was enough. But love of the week, all right, Sarah,
Yours is a new love. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (32:45):
I mean I've always loved it but not really used it.
So decaff coffee just so glad it exists because I'm
not fully on decaf, but like, I feel like I'm
somewhat sensitive to caffeine right now, but I can still
have coffee and I can have like a little bit
of caffeine and like modulate that on the ratio of caffeine.
So I'm just like very happy and I can go
to Starbucks and get decaf cappuccinos and stuff, and this
(33:06):
is good.
Speaker 1 (33:07):
Yeah, that it actually exists, that there are options because.
Speaker 2 (33:10):
I don't really like tea that much, so it's good
to have.
Speaker 1 (33:14):
How do they decaffeinate coffee?
Speaker 2 (33:16):
I don't know it's Swiss, but it always says Swiss process.
I'm like, I don't know what that process is, but
those Swiss have figured it out somehow.
Speaker 1 (33:24):
It takes out the caffeine, or you can have places
that just add caffeine for no real reason just to
make their their drinks. Their juice is more addictive. That's
exciting too. So I'm going to say that I am
drinking this Perrier Perie. How do you Perier Perrier? I'm
so not fancy, but the Seltzer water because I've gotten
(33:44):
to that as my evening drink of choice. It is
probably better than having a craft beer in general. And
yet you still want something that's a little special and bubbly,
not juice or coke or anything like that. So drinking
a lot of Perier right now.
Speaker 2 (34:02):
I feel like Perier is like I drink a lot
of like Lacroix, but Perie is classier.
Speaker 1 (34:06):
So I think that's cool. Some of my children have,
you know, we get the Lacroix too that you know,
I kind of think of the Perier as mine and
the Lacroix is for the kids. But then one or
two kids who see me drinking the Periy and they
want the Perier and then they take like two SIPs
in check the canon. It makes me so so unhappy.
It is sad. It is said, like why why did
(34:26):
you do that? All right, well, this has been best
of both worlds. We've been talking return to office strategies,
ways of thinking about it, strategies for making the most
of your day, for not losing your sanity over the commute.
We will be back next week with more on making
work and life fit together.
Speaker 2 (34:47):
Thanks for listening. You can find me Sarah at the
shoebox dot com or at the Underscore shoe Box on Instagram,
and you.
Speaker 1 (34:55):
Can find me Laura at Laura vandercam dot com. This
has been the best of both worlds podcasts. Please join
us next time for more on making work and life
work together.
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