Merits of Remote Work from a Windowless Room

There are many downsides to remote work. The lack of camaraderie developed over small talk with coworkers, the lack of a group setting that stimulates creativity and concentration, the lack of clear division between professional and private lives...But suppose there is one consistent positive for remote work. In that case, it is the ability to get peace and quiet when necessary, for meetings, working alone on urgent tasks, or simply avoiding toxic people that ruin cordial workplace atmospheres. For those who enjoy getting things done without being interrupted, working from a home office can be a godsend at such times.

And that ability to work alone productively is enhanced even further when the home office has no windows. The outside world is a distracting place. The sounds and sights of cars driving by, children playing on the streets, or even wild animal sightings can make workers wonder what else they could be doing if they were not sitting in front of a computer compiling document after document. Such subconscious yearning for the outside world turns to mental tangents that add up to precious minutes and hours that prevent workers from being consistently concentrated on producing results.

Better yet, windowless rooms stop reminding workers of the passage of time during the day. The position of the sun in the sky and its subsequent disappearance, giving way to darkness, visually illustrate the passage of the workday, and can prompt 9-5 workers to slow down early when it is sunny and balmy outside, while hurry up to sloppy finishes when the night arrives. Without windows, workers have no constant visual reminders that time is passing. Sure, they can check the time on their laptops, smartphones, and clocks, but after a while, the cognitive dissonance between numbers representing time and visuals appears.

It is a strategy that shopping mall operators know too well. But giving indoor areas windowless walls, shopping malls ensure that artificial lights bathing rows of products give a constant sense of the "beginning of the day" to shoppers. But making sure shoppers see no darkness of the night when they are inside, mall operators give them no visual triggers to say "wow, look at the time, I have to go home now." No windows create productive shoppers who stick around longer, just as it does for workers who stick around to finish work until it is done, rather than when they see the outside as dark.

Some may scoff at the windowless room as no better than a jail cell. After all, without the basic human right of getting fresh sunlight, can workers really get to optimal mental and physical conditions to perform work productively? But such a view forget that the windowless room is meant to be temporary, for work purposes only. But making the attainment of sunlight a part of only private, and not professional lives, remote workers who work in windowless rooms can have an easier means of establishing clear-cut work-life balance than their peers with constant window access potentially can.

Come to think of it, many employers have already implemented something close to windowless rooms before COVID forced everyone to work from home. The corporate cubicle for the average worker is designed for seclusion and personal space, a poor imitation of remote working. With corner offices that have large windows looking out to the streets reserved for managers and executives, access to sunlight and visual cues outside work is supposed to be restricted to the privileged few who are rewarded for the ability to produce value even with such distractions. 

It is no wonder that some employers have come to view remote working, where everyone who can afford it pretty much has the equivalent of a corner office, as a drain on worker productivity. Not only does it signal physical equality among all employees regardless of corporate hierarchy (thus taking away an important and very public visual cue that motivates employees to work harder and move up the ranks), but remote working also gives so much more sunlight to everyone, in ways that cubicles sitting in the middle of a skyscraper, away from the windows, can never do.

Why then, do employers not encourage more workers to spend more of their time in windowless rooms? As I wonder from my own windowless room, I recall that the few business projects introducing small office cubicles (with only blurred views of the outside) in Japan have not attracted too many users while co-working spaces continue to market their physical facilities as being full of natural light. As more companies compel their employees to head back to the office with the dropping of COVID restrictions, reassessing the merits of working from windowless rooms should be considered.