浙江省的中小学已经在分批开学了，很多老师居家办公的日子已经/要结束啦。正好看到一篇关于 working from home 的文章，来自 The New York Times, 节选翻译一下。
题目：Sorry, but Working from Home is Overrated. （对不起，我们都高估了居家办公。）
作者也由于疫情影响，在家上班，但是他觉得 working from home 的好处被吹过了头，已经等不及回办公室了。为什么这么说呢？
Don’t get me wrong: Working from home is a good option for new parents, people with disabilities and others who aren’t well served by a traditional office setup. I don’t think we should ignore health guidelines and force people to work in an office during a pandemic. And I’m sympathetic to the millions of teachers, restaurant workers and other professionals for whom working from home has never been a viable option.
别误会：居家办公对于有些人来是很好的选择，比如新手父母、残障人士、以及其他无法在传统办公室得到足够支持的人群。我也不是在说，大家应该无视疫情强行回办公室。同时我非常同情那些平时基本无法居家办公的人，包括教师和餐厅工作人员等。
Fans of remote work often cite studies showing that people who work from home are more productive, like a 2014 study led by the Stanford professor Nicholas Bloom. The study examined remote workers at a Chinese travel agency and found that they were 13 percent more efficient than their office-based peers.
远程办公的支持者认为居家办公可以提高效率。一项2014年的研究调查了一家中国旅行社的居家办公员工，结果发现，他们的效率要比在办公室的同事高13%。
But research also shows that what remote workers gain in productivity, they often miss in harder-to-measure benefits like creativity and innovative thinking. Studies have found that people working together in the same room tend to solve problems more quickly than remote collaborators, and that team cohesion suffers in remote work arrangements.
但是也有研究表明，虽然远程办公效率更高了，但是一些难以衡量的方面却遭受了损失，比如创造力和创新思维。一起办公的人群能更快地解决问题。在远程办公中，团队凝聚力也会降低。
Remote workers also tend to take shorter breaks and fewer sick days than office-based ones, and in studies, many report finding it hard to separate their work from their home lives. That’s a good thing if you’re a boss looking to squeeze extra efficiency out of your employees, but less ideal if you’re someone trying to achieve some work-life balance.
比起通勤客，远程办公人士休息时间更短，而且请病假的天数也更少。很多人无法把工作和家庭生活区隔开。如果你是想“压榨“员工的老板，这是好事。但是对于想要工作生活两不误的人来说，这肯定是坏事。
Working in isolation can be lonely, which explains the popularity of co-working spaces like WeWork and The Wing. Even in Silicon Valley, where the tools that allow for remote work are being built, many companies are strict about requiring their workers to come into the office.
单独办公也会带来孤独感，这就是那些众创空间如此受青睐的原因。即使是在硅谷，已经有现成的工具支持远程办公，但是很多公司还是有严格的规定，要求员工来公司办公。
Steve Jobs, for one, was a famous opponent of remote work, believing that Apple employees’ best work came from accidentally bumping into other people, not sitting at home in front of an email inbox.
乔布斯就非常反对远程办公。他认为苹果最好的产品都来自于大家彼此之间的碰撞，而不是坐在家里守着电子邮件。
“Creativity comes from spontaneous meetings, from random discussions,” Mr. Jobs said. “You run into someone, you ask what they’re doing, you say ‘Wow,’ and soon you’re cooking up all sorts of ideas.”
“创造力来自自发的会议和随机的讨论，”乔布斯说：“你碰到某个人，你问对方在干嘛，你惊呼‘哇’，然后迸发出各种各样的创意。”
I’ll grant that office work has its downsides, even in healthy times. Commuting has been shown to make us less happy, and the open-plan office, a truly cursed workplace design trend that emphasizes airy spaces with rows of desks and little privacy, has made distraction-free focus nearly impossible.
办公室办公当然也有美中不足。通勤降低了大家的幸福感；大开间的办公室注重通风，但是一排排的桌椅堆在一起，根本谈不上隐私空间，想要不被打扰也近乎不可能。
But being near other people also allows us to express our most human qualities, like empathy and collaboration. Those are the skills that can’t be automated. And they’re what produces the kind of meaningful interpersonal contact we miss out on when we’re stuck at home.
不过互相靠近也使得我们可以表达最人性的部分，比如同理心和协作。这些技能都需要训练。当我们被困在家时，我们就失去了这些有意义的人际交往，而这些交往产生于这些因素。
Mr. Bock, who was previously Google’s top human resources officer, said that for most people, balancing office work with remote work is ideal. His company’s research has found that the ideal amount of work-from-home time is one and a half days per week — enough to participate in office culture, with some time reserved for deep, focused work.
前谷歌首席人力资源官指出，对于大部分来说，最理想的是能平衡办公室时间和远程工作时间。他的研究发现，这个最佳的居家办公时间为每周一天半。这样人们既能参与办公室文化，也有时间进行深度专注的工作。
“The reason tech companies have micro-kitchens and free snacks is not because they think people are going to starve between 9 a.m. and noon,” he said. “It’s because that’s where you get those moments of serendipity.”
他还说：“科技公司有小型厨房和免费零食，并不是因为它们的员工午餐之前会饿。而是因为在这些地方，你会得到一些意外之喜。”
In recent years, some companies with sizable remote workforces have experimented with ways to create office culture over a distance.
有些公司拥有大量的远程办公员工，近年来，他们实验了很多方式，想要远程打造办公文化。
Automattic, Mr. Mullenweg’s all-remote company, holds an annual weeklong staff retreat called the “grand meetup,” at which workers gather in the same place to socialize and work on group projects. At GitLab, an open-source collaboration platform, remote workers are encouraged to schedule “virtual coffee breaks” — purely social video conferences — with colleagues they don’t know well.
比如，有公司会举办年度的休整会，为期一周，被称为“大聚会”，不同项目的团队成员会聚在一起。有的公司鼓励远程员工参加“虚拟咖啡时间“，其实就是和不太熟悉的同事们进行社交视频会议。
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