Stress and Productivity at the Junction of Remote Work and Parenting - Data Stories and Dreamy Designs

Few categories of people are thought to have gained more from remote work than parents of pre-adolescent children. We put this notion to the test by performing naturalistic monitoring for four days of a hybrid health professional with children and an onsite health professional with no children (control). The monitoring results, which are also visualized as comic strips, suggest that simultaneous performance of remote work and parenting tasks leads to increased stress and reduced productivity. These negative outcomes appear to be driven by the discordance between the parent’s work tasks and children’s activities at home. We theorize that the parent’s work
tasks and children’s activities can become concordant in the mold of family farming practices of old, where children were incorporated into the parents’ activities in the field. In the context of modern white-collar work, such concordance can be achieved by designing imaginative extensions to the parent’s professional work software.