With COVID-19 it depends on your family situation though. People without kids are probably working more, but people with kids (and who don't have a live-in nanny) are really struggling to juggle their work with child care. I imagine many people in that situation are less productive.
It doesn't depend only on your family situation. I am a PhD student working for the last 6 weeks from home without kids. And and also without a good income. I never expected my makeshift desk with the cheapest IKEA chair to become my work environment for 8+ hours per day, and I seriously worry about long-term injury resulting from this.
This isn't meant to diminish the difficulties of people who need to look after their children. But I work in a laboratory where the senior people blithely complain about how hard it is to manage shared child-raring duties in a well-equipped home office, while junior employees are more or less expected to magically have a productive home office in a shared flats, often in less-than-ideal environment (e.g. with noisy room-mates or building sites next door), with RSI staring us down.
> Right, good point there. People without kids definitely have way more time and energy to devote to work than those with.
Definitely? I have no kids and live with and fully support my father who had a brain tumor the size of a walnut in his head a couple years ago. Just because someone doesn't have kids doesn't mean they don't have responsibilities (goodness so many negatives in one sentence!).
I feel your pain, currently taking care of both parents I'm fortunate to still have around in mid 70's, one had a bad hemorrhagic stroke and is still recovering and can't walk, other has cancer and is completing chemo with a positive outlook after radiation. We have aides but with Covid-19, I am beyond paranoid they will infect my parents and send them to an early grave so I run this place like a high security compound and check temp and have a scrub in protocol I'm enforcing. I'm in my late 20's, no kids, no siblings. I feel blessed to have my parents around who had their mobility and independence snatched away from illness in the span of a year and I will never put them in a nursing home to die.
