Oohh look at these people with more than one room!
(Ok it's valid for those.. but I'm still feeling a bit salty.)
(Ok it's valid for those.. but I'm still feeling a bit salty.)
I feel ya.
Back when I was running a one-man startup, I had myself, my wife, and a cat in 450 square feet. Except when I was out gladhanding potential clients, I worked from my bed.
At least back then, I could decamp for Starbucks if I got the crazies. But today's studio apartment dwellers are really screwed. Especially if you live somewhere hot, somewhere cold, or a city that removed all of the public benches to "combat" homelessness.
So, like the average "family with 2 kids" size of house in most of the world :-)
The two of us now live in a 700 square foot 4 BR, where we use one BR as a walk-in closet and another as a study. Our landlord claims 13 family members lived in this unit when he was a kid.
Also a lot of 700 sq ft apartment with 3-4 bedrooms have 2 bathrooms which further reduces the total available space. It's quite common for a family of 5-6 (2 kids, parents plus grand parents) + 1 live-in helper to live in such an apartment. The live-in helper usually gets a windowless closet for her room (so around 21 sq ft) that's next to the kitchen (I have a hard time with the kind of living conditions offered to helpers but I guess it's really a shitty situation in terms of space for everyone). This is the living situation of a middle class family able to afford a 4,500 usd/month apartment and a 700 usd/month live-in helper (there's no daycare available in hk which is why a lot end up getting a live-in helper after having kids).
With covid, schools have been closed and people had to work from home making things much harder.
In the developing world (and heck, in Southern Europe and the Balkans too, as recently as the 60s-70s) farmers used to live, whole family (extended one at that) in ~ 500 sq ft houses... One typical case was that brothers e.g. would often sleep in the same bed for 1 person, one with feet in one direction, the other in the opposite.
Not lucky, in fact it is the norm for them to have a dwelling. Adobe/mud or some other local construction technique.
> In the developing world (and heck, in Southern Europe and the Balkans too, as recently as the 60s-70s) farmers used to live, whole family (extended one at that) in ~ 500 sq ft houses... One typical case was that brothers e.g. would often sleep in the same bed for 1 person, one with feet in one direction, the other in the opposite.
Thats one example, in parts of Asia they have more room.
I'm surprised that there hasn't been a real advertising push for solutions such as this during the last year. I can visualize it and probably draft up plans for it (when I do woodworking I always do my own plans). But I haven't seen this exact concept anywhere.
I thought I might go stir crazy or have elevated levels of conflict with my wife, but it worked out okay. On the other hand, I can understand why the Council of Europe deems 8 sq. m. (86 sq. ft.) the minimum prison cell size for two prisoners.
For me, quarantine was the best couple months of my recent working life. My home office is way nicer (quieter, fewer interruptions, better computer and peripherals, better chair etc) than my work office, I got to have brunch, lunch, and an afternoon snack with my kids, had no commute, played fetch with the dog or took walks in the woods for breaks, got a ton of projects done around the house and in the workshop, played with my kid in his play room, and I'm a bit of an introverted hermit so being home without a stream of social visitors was really a cherry on top.
I don't know how to properly say sorry or thank you to urbanites for whom quarantine was more like a prison experiment. I guess I'll try with "I'm sorry that your experience was so difficult. Thank you so much for caring and for going through that quarantine."
By the way, always fun to meet people from HN in HK, so shoot me an email and we could have lunch or drinks after the fourth wave is over.
Luckily, we gave the second hotel's front desk a second call at 9 a.m. to double-check they accepted quarantine guests before making our online booking. The day shift guy who came in told us that they didn't accept quarantine guests.
Now, it's a bit better organized, with an official government list of all acceptable quarantine hotels. Though, prices have gone up significantly for those few hotels. When we arrived, there was a government list, but it was just a subset of all hotels accepting quarantine guests, and of course prices shot up and vacancies vanished for those hotels on the government list.
Of course, I understand the need for such measures. Hopefully I’ll manage to continue consulting through this without losing a customer.
Using the bed as a workspace means you're bringing your work with you to bed. You completely erase any possibility of separation between workspace and sleep space.
With only one bedroom available, your only way to assign a dedicated sleeping space is to use your bed to sleep and a desk to work.
Throwing in some anecdotal opinion, I live in a studio style open apartment and have no issue sleeping well in my bed even if I can see my workspace. I however had issues sleeping back when I lived in a smaller apartment and used the bed as my main computer space.
Is it objectively better or worst? There's no study backing either theories. However, I believe that even working on a small desk next to your bed would be better than working directly from the bed. Otherwise you'd be effectively training yourself to think about work while lying down in the comfort of your sleeping area, instead of training yourself to fall asleep and relax.
As with most human behavior studies, I have yet to see a sleep study that managed to satisfactorily demonstrate causality in place of correlation when it comes to working in bed ruining your quality of sleep.
In this particular case, you could imagine that people who work from their bed tend to be on screens in their bed until just before bedtime, causing them to be more "wired" than people who have a dedicated office space and avoid screens in their bed entirely.