We all do certain things when we’re at home in our comfort zone, but can you imagine having the whole workday to let all your weird hang out? Being an entirely remote company, we at InVision have a blast sharing the funny, frustrating, and often bizarre things that we do and encounter as remote workers.
So we asked the entire InVision team to contribute to a list of things only remote workers can truly understand
. We won’t name names (for reasons that will become obvious), but we promise—it’s a weird, beautiful life.
1. Taking your first 2 calls of the day wearing a robe
2. Making coffee in the middle of meetings while on mute
3. Taking The Lunchtime Shower because you started the day working from your bed
4. Envying all your office worker friends for being around people all day
5. Realizing the only friends you see regularly are Ross, Joey, Chandler, Monica, Phoebe, and Rachel
“Having to convince everybody that you do, in fact, have a real job.”
6. Doing your laundry (in the middle of the workday, of course) and realizing how infrequently you change your clothes—and that most of your laundry consists of pajamas
7. Having your kids type your Slack responses while you shuttle them between activities
Related: Remote workers share how they manage their work-life balance
8. Going clothes shopping, then exclusively buying pajama sets
9. Announcing to your coworkers that you put on real pants today
10. Making friends with the Amazon Prime and Instacart delivery people. Every delivery person, really
11. Rushing to put on a shirt when you realize everyone else is on video during a call. Pants, of course, are optional. Business on top, party on the bottom!
12. Being asked to do stuff for friends and neighbors in the middle of the day, because working from home to them means not having a “real” job
13. Having to convince everybody that you do, in fact, have a real job
14. Realizing you’ve never actually met most of the people you work with in real life
15. Using your lunch break to do chores around the house
16. Realizing that your workday at home was far more productive than any you’ve had in an office
17. Seeing the look on people’s faces when you tell them you can work from anywhere you want
18. Initially thinking you’ll work from all kinds of fun and exotic places, but the farthest you ever travel to work is your dining room table
19. Setting your open laptop on the kitchen counter while you prepare a meal
20. Getting excited at the culinary possibilities with all-day access to a kitchen, only to end up eating cereal for every meal
21. Telling your team that you’re going to lunch, but you never actually walk away from your computer
22. Sitting up while working was your greatest non-work accomplishment today
23. Getting exasperated responses from friends when you say you’re exhausted— “…But you work from home.”
24. Feeling horrified by how quickly you can house a case of LaCroix
25. Talking to your pets more than you talk to people. And bouncing ideas off of your pets
Related: Meet the pets of InVision
26. Putting on The Price is Right just to be able to say you had some human interaction today
27. Noticing your roommate stopped doing the dishes because you’ve got “all day” to do them while they’re at work
28. Constantly having to apologize for your cat meowing in the background during meetings
29. Being able to fart as much and as loud as you want
30. Laughing at the computer screen when people say funny things in Slack
31. Realizing at 10pm that you never went outside today
32. Feeling really proud of how much your skin has improved now that you don’t wear makeup everyday
33. Walking to the mailbox a second time when you have a great hair day
34. Assuming your coworkers are actually much shorter than they are
35. Having a difficult time speaking to people in real life without the ability to respond with emojis and GIFs
36. Feeling the dread and shame during a video call because no one cared about your idea, and then realizing you were muted the whole time
37. Being unbelievably nervous when you meet coworkers in person for the first time. It feels like a blind date!
38. Taking a lunch break longer than 15 minutes, then feeling guilty because you’re not at your desk
“Walking to the mailbox a second time when you have a great hair day.”
39. Working somewhere else just so that you can feel like you’re coming home at the end of the workday
40. Feeling like you could never have a job in an office ever again
41. Joking about your “long commute down the hall” while your friends complain about their actual long commute ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
42. Checking yourself out in the Google Hangouts preview screen before joining a call—then realizing you should probably comb your hair
43. Noticing that car-related errands have become especially annoying because you never drive. Are you sure you even know how to drive anymore?
Related: How InVision uses Slack to power culture and communication
44. Forgetting on a daily basis that sustaining life requires breaking for food and then being annoyed on a daily basis that sustaining life requires breaking for food
45. Finding it’s a constant battle to actually stop working, both before and after the “workday” is done
46. Speaking fluent emoji
47. Telling your work friends how excited you are to be eating lunch with “human friends in real life” today
48. Realizing all the time you spent in chat rooms in the 90s actually paid off
49. Knowing you’ve totally found your people—and loving being an introvert among introverts
50. Having closer friendships with your remote team than you’ve ever had at an office before
Many thanks to the InVision team for collaborating on this list! Oh, and hey—if you’d like to work remotely with us, we’re hiring.
Do you work remotely?
Tell us your own remote worker truths on Twitter: @InVisionApp.
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Shakti is the Head of Content at Blueprint Registry. Before Blueprint Registry, she led social media marketing at InVision and is a trained chef. She loves space stuff, dogs, memes, chicken nuggets, and words.
