Folks wonder about dressing for remote work. Cissy Chandler was the wife of Raymond Chandler, the classic hard-boiled detective story writer. She preferred to do housework in the nude. In a letter, Chandler said she felt more comfortable doing it that way.
You don’t have to dress for work at all when you work at home. There is nothing to stop you from following Cissy’s example. Throw on a suitable top for video meetings, or turn the video off, and there you are. Try it. You might like it.
I know myself well enough never to have tried working naked. I’m decidedly not Mrs. Chandler. I wouldn’t feel comfortable at all. If I had my preference, I’d put on clothes to take a shower. But I’ve attended formal meetings minutes after jumping off a farm tractor, sweaty and dirty from hurried work that took longer than I expected. I don’t recommend that either, but I know it can be done successfully and, on occasion, I was glad that I could do it.
Dress in the way that makes you most productive. I tend to dress like a Pacific Northwest junior programmer most of the time: tee-shirt and jeans; perhaps because I hit my productivity stride when coding most of my workday. My east coast colleagues tend to be more formal: collared golf shirt and khakis. In the day, you could spot IBM techs by their white shirt, black suit, and inch-and-a-quarter black tie. I’m not sure how or when Cissy Chandler hit her stride, but she was an artist’s model in New York City before she met Chandler in Los Angeles.
If you have customers, managers, or colleagues that demand a certain style of appearance, by all means, take steps to keep them comfortable. I used to keep a pressed dress shirt, tie, and jacket handy if I needed to make a formal impression in a meeting, putting them on and removing them as needed through the day.
Distractions are the scourge of the class working from home. Offices and other formal workplaces insulate workers from some distractions and promote others. For example, when working in an office, I can’t recall ever being distracted by a passing thought that I forgot to turn on the dishwasher, but I have been frustrated for hours listening to a talkative guy from sales recount his weekend fishing for salmon off Westport while I had reports to write.
Working at home, Westport fishermen never show up at my door to chew off my ear, and Cissy Chandler died before I enter elementary school, but the dishwasher does cross my mind occasionally.
A productive response to the thought of an unrun dishwasher is to continue working to a good stopping place, dash to the kitchen, punch the button, and return to work.
An unproductive response is to call a halt to whatever you are doing, grab this morning’s office coffee mug, do a quick scan of the kitchen for other dirty dishes, put them all into the washer, brew another cup of coffee while filling the dog’s water dish, give the kitchen floor a quick sweep waiting for the coffee to get done, and, a half an hour later, fill a fresh mug, return to the office and try to figure out what you were doing when you thought of the dishwasher.
How to avoid the second response?
Some, including me, use their attire to trigger an attitude that shields them from distractions. I can assume my work attitude any time, but when I have dressed in a certain way (I must have a left-hand breast pocket for my phone and fountain pen), and I have trimmed my beard and put on computing glasses, the work attitude snaps into place almost automatically. I still might think of the unstarted dishwasher, but I won’t allow the thought to take over.
Don’t go out and buy a collection of pocket tees, grow a beard to trim, and get computing glasses to emulate me; you may be able to focus better dressed like Mrs. Chandler. Study yourself as I’m sure she studied herself. Humans love rituals. Make them work for you.
Discover what puts you into a relaxed and productive frame of mind, then do it. Turn the video off if necessary.