What’s Been Forgotten While Working From Home?

The “New normal”, “Social distancing”, “Blursday”, if the pandemic has taught us anything it’s that it can expand our vocabulary.

Arguably the most significant to us has been WFH, Working From Home. The situation many of us have found ourselves in as our businesses and schools adapt to the ongoing challenges by bringing our work into lockdown with us.

Some people love it, some hate it, but all can agree that it “just isn’t the same”, which brings us to the latest addition to our COVID vernacular, WFB or What Falls Behind?

WFB refers to all the little jobs and daily rituals we forget about while not going into the office each day and are waiting to surprise us once we return from lockdown. 

Some common victims of WFB while WFH include:

Office Plants: 

Yep I bet you feel really guilty already, your little green friend has most likely fallen victim to WFB. While you once nurtured this little leafy employee, when the rush to close offices came office plants were all but forgotten. Some are taken care of by a skeleton crew remaining in the office, the wall street journal has reported on tales of organised plant extractions as people look to rescue their plants from dehydration, but alas others are assigned a grim fate for you to discover on your return from WFH.

Footy Tipping:

Look, we have all been there. Eleven rounds into the season and you are dominating the Office footy tipping, you have barely put a foot wrong or forgotten a round and that end of season prize is as good as yours. And then wham-o suddenly we are in stage 4 lockdown, 2 weeks have passed in the space of 2 days and the 33 games in 20 days have completely swamped you. The prize is now firmly in the hands of Josh from the warehouse and all you can do is ask yourself “where did it all go wrong?”. We’ve all been there right? No, just me?

The Fridge:

Oh yes, you know where this is going, think back, way back, to that tuna pasta you couldn’t quite finish a few days out from lockdown. You swore you’d remember to take it home or maybe you always thought cleaning the fridge was someone else’s job, like your office is maintained by an invisible workforce of elves. Well, newsflash – your office isn’t Hogwarts and that tuna pasta is still there and it is going to smell delicious by the time you get around cleaning it out. At least you can replace your office plant with the nice mould spores you’ve been unknowingly cultivating for 6 weeks.

Archiving:

Even before lockdown, archiving has always been put on the back burner leading to outdated, overcrowded and often downright dangerous archives. Organised archiving can make work more efficient and create more space to be used for other things, like that ping pong table you always wanted so you could feel like you’re working at Google HQ. It can also make your workplace a whole lot safer, reducing the risk of shelves collapsing on your staff or getting bitten by the spiders nesting in those files you haven’t touched since 1977.

While you’re WFH it’s easy to fall behind on these tasks, and while we can't help with all tasks, we can help with getting on top of your archiving! Order your archive boxes now and start taking control of those archives to avoid the big mess later this year.