Excuses for Being Away From Your Desk

Somewhere in your organisation is a person who has learned to read the little yellow dot as a productivity metric, and that person has changed the atmosphere of remote work for everyone else. The dot does not measure work. It measures mouse movement. It goes yellow when you read a long document on paper, and it stays green when you are asleep with a spreadsheet open. The good news is that almost every genuine away-from-desk moment has an unimpeachable explanation attached, because working from home involves a physical building with a door in it. A driver with a two-minute attention span is at that door. The fire alarm test in this block runs eleven minutes and you cannot hear anything through it. You were on a call on your phone, and the laptop, having nobody to talk to, drew its own conclusions. The answer that ends the conversation permanently, if you ever need it, is the proportional one: if ten minutes matters, the problem is considerably bigger than the ten minutes. Below are ten excuses for being away from your desk, plus twenty in the generator.