Work from home? Give yourself a dress code

I have never worked in an office. I have always worked for myself. I have always set my own schedule and determined the rhythm of my day.

Back in early 2020, when COVID hit, everyone’s work changed. All of a sudden, people were working from home. Almost everyone I knew was asking me for advice. How to adjust. How to deal with it. How not to lose your mind. How to stay productive. There was one thing I told everyone: Dress decently for work from home.

When no one is there to make you dress decently, will you still dress decently? When no one is there to stop you from being a slob, will you turn into a slob?

Working from home can be great. You don’t have to battle endless traffic every morning. You can work from the comfort of the nook in your kitchen. You don’t have to be on guard constantly, always trying to stealthily dodge cultural land mine after cultural land mine.

You are free to get your work done when you want to get it done. You are also free to look like a slob. You don’t need to wear a jacket or a tie. You don’t need to wear a shirt with a collar.

Honestly, you don’t even need to wear a shirt at all. You can, theoretically, just lie in your bed naked and get all your work done. You can skip the grocery store and start ordering all your food in. You can end up living your life in pajamas. Hour after hour, day after day. It’s all the same.

Slowly, ever so slowly, you become a shut-in. You leave your house less and less because everything is so easy at your house. Your work is there. Your food can be delivered there. Your bed is there. And life is so much more comfortable in pajamas. Oh, isn’t it so easy when you don’t have to put anything on?

“I’m just not in the mood to get dressed today.”

And while these details of this trajectory are extreme, this is generally how it happens. One thing leads to another, and then another, and then another. It can happen to anyone, but it happens most often to those who are thrown headfirst into WFH. For the person who is used to a certain life working at an office with expectations thrust upon him from the outside, the freedom of work from home can have disastrous consequences.

Dressing decently for WFH is a simple act that helps stop many potential problems dead in their tracks. A great deal of the degeneration that occurs when working from home hinges on being homebound. If you look like trash, you don’t want to leave your house, so you won’t leave your house. It’s a vicious cycle. While if you look nice, you want to leave your house, so you will leave your house. It’s a positive cycle.

Dressing decently for WFH helps tremendously with productivity. In theory, you might be able to get all your work done from your bed. Practically, it’s not going to happen. You are not going to be that productive in pajamas. You are not going to be that sharp in your bed, in a hoodie, unshowered and unkempt. It’s just not going to happen. All of that makes your mind dull — and if not your observable mind, then certainly your spirit. You might be doing fine on paper, but really you are operating, at best, at 75%. That just happens to be enough to make it.

You are simply less capable when you are working from your bed while looking like a street urchin. Your mind is sharper when you are dressed with intention. You might not be dressing up for anyone else; you are working from home, after all, but you are dressing up for work. You are also dressing up for yourself, and that’s important. It’s good for you.

When you work from home for an extended period of time, you run the risk of having your life blend together into one indistinguishable mass. Your personal life blends with your professional life. Your work day turns into your personal day. You lose all distinction and end up feeling like you are always working and never resting.

Or it could be that it feels like you are never working. Or maybe you are just perpetually stuck in this strange no-man’s-land. Whatever it is, you don’t feel right. You lose distinction and slink down into a worse version of what you want to be.

Dressing decently for WFH helps correct this problem. Since you are not able to segregate your personal life from your professional life in space, you need to segregate them aesthetically. With your clothing, you can make a distinction between work hours and personal hours. Dressing up for work, even when you don’t have to leave, makes work into something distinct that also, in turn, makes your life outside work into something distinct.

Wear loafers when you are working and camp mocs when you aren’t. Wear a sport coat when you are working and a sweater when you aren’t. Wear an OCBD when you are working and a polo shirt when you aren’t. Wear a tie when you are working and take it off when you aren’t. Make some distinction.

It doesn’t mean that you have to wear a suit or anything overboard. Just some addition of something that makes work feel like work. It doesn’t have to be grand, but it has to be something. That little something, when repeated over and over again, helps separate your day. It helps to prevent everything from blending together into an amorphous mass. It helps you stay sane and the best version of yourself.

WFH is about freedom. And freedom is a revealing thing. It’s a doubled-edged sword. When we are free, we are allowed to rise and we are allowed to fall. It’s up to us. No one is making us do anything. We are in control. No one is going to make you dress decently for WFH. No one is going to make you care. In a deeper way, WFH reveals who aspires to something higher and who sinks to something lower.

When no one is there to make you dress decently, will you still dress decently? When no one is there to stop you from being a slob, will you turn into a slob?

At first it might be uncomfortable to wrestle with these questions, but ultimately, it is emboldening and energizing. WFH gives us an opportunity to dress decently not because someone made us, but because we want to. In an era of ultimate freedom, choosing to dress intentionally is about choosing sanity, doing something better for ourselves because we care about ourselves. That is what dressing decently for WFH does. It keeps us sane and keeps us better.