Two weeks ago I went “back to school,” attending a weeklong mid-level training focused on strategic decision-making at the Foreign Service Institute (FSI). I hadn’t been on campus since March 2020, four months before we ultimately left for my third tour in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. An FSI leadership training had been the last scheduled course I’d managed to attend before Foreign Affairs Counterthreat Training (FACT) was cancelled due to COVID and we went into lockdown in our PCS Lodging apartment.
Four years later, in spring 2024, FSI looks both the same and somehow changed to me. Since I’ve been gone, construction has started – and finished – on the new B Building. The resultant space is modern and light-filled. Flowering trees and daffodils dot the landscape in pinks and yellows. Green grass lawns stretch like taut carpets, connecting the cafeteria to its adjacent counterpart structures and hosting the perfect place for jeans-clad students to read, eat, or throw a frisbee around.
But as I came back to FSI, I couldn’t help but think the bucolic scenery seemingly belied the terrible reality the world – and our workplace – have seen since 2020. However much things have changed and are now attempting to boomerang back, they can’t truly return to what they once were. Not for me. And yet here we are. Like all successful creatures, we adapt and keep going. This trial run going to FSI for a week was as much a test for me of my current logistical and life skills (and how ready I am for a year of a slow roller coaster that builds and builds) as it was the core skills the Department sought to impart through PN250.
Being at FSI this month meant I went to work in-person five days in a row for the first time since I left Ciudad Juárez in January 2022.
During my fourth tour in the Office of Children’s Issues (CI) working on Hague Abduction Convention cases, I’ve largely managed my work according to my own schedule and routine. I work three days a week from home and can set my own schedule within our core office hours.
I’ve had to go into my DC-based office on Wednesdays since mid-2022. In early 2024, we were asked to add a second in-person day and as a team we selected Thursday.
On those two days, I deal with a 45-60 minute commute each way. I also pay daily commercial parking rates of around $22 because employees in my building at my level have no available parking, assigned or otherwise. If I don’t bring my lunch, I may spend another $20 eating out. Fortunately, the area of DC where I work – near the White House, a major university, and the downtown business district along K Street NW – has abundant and healthy food choices.
But still, I’ve struggled with how useful I’ve found it to go back to the office in-person. I have to lug in my laptop because we no longer have workstations at our desks, and there are very few elements of my job that ever require an in-person presence.
So much so, that two of my colleagues who are in the same role as I am are permanently assigned to perform the work from locations far from DC. One of them isn’t even in the United States. They only come to the office once or twice a year.
I don’t envy them those work flexibilities. For me, part of serving in a Washington tour is… being in Washington and having that exposure. I expected to be here and knew it would cost a mint in rent. But I wasn’t expecting to have to go in twice a week. There have been times I have started to resent the financial implications and time drains for me, particularly around the notion that coming to work in-person means we are “back to work” vs. just “back to the office.” I was certainly working regardless. The taxpayer isn’t missing any services from me.
I mentally add up all the time I spend just getting to the part of my day where I can perform work – the getting ready, the fighting traffic. I think how it adds up to more time I could have spent being effective – either for my employer or for myself. It makes me honestly wonder how I did this life for so many years before the pandemic, even before the Department. I think I was chronically exhausted and calling in sick? Mostly because other people constantly came to work sick and I was ending up with pneumonia, pink eye, infections. It always felt like my fault. In retrospect, it makes me angry. I’m healthier than I’ve ever been, mostly still away from other people’s germs now. And this will be a real challenge for me again that isn’t going anywhere in the future.
These days, trying to balance the distractions of co-workers’ chatter and phone calls in cubicle land with the opportunities to capitalize on in-person collaboration and morale-boosting is an ongoing recalibration for everyone. If I request and receive situational telework for one day that I should’ve gone in, I might do three hours more work. I might have three hours more rest. I might clean my house for three hours, go to the gym, go to the store, go to the woods. I might stare at the wall and think about my mental health for three hours. Or think about the $50 I didn’t spend on lunch and gas and parking that one day alone just so I could earn a living.
I wish after everything we’ve been through in the pandemic, we could be more strategic about how we work, in addition to where, with more focus being placed on deliverables than worksite. Luckily, I still get to telework 60% of the time; before the pandemic, for me, that would have been a pipe dream. So overall I’m grateful and don’t want to overlook the broader context of what this flexibility has afforded me on this tour.
I also saw time this month at FSI as a preview of my future; my opportunity to work remotely is going to continue to shift again in the coming summer months, radically. In June I will finish my fourth tour in CI. In July and August, I will be in tradecraft – some remote, and some in-person at FSI.
And beginning this September, I will start 10 months of Burmese language class. Language training will be full-time, in-person, five days a week. And of course, after we arrive at post for our fifth tour in July 2025, I will always be in-person, like with all overseas tours.
So as we focused in PN250 on strategic analysis, negotiation, writing and briefing skills, decision-making, identifying stakeholders, and reaching consensus, I was running through another internal checklist of skills.
Did I leave home early enough today? It seems like it took me 55 minutes to get to FSI today, whereas yesterday it only took 35. That was disconcerting.
I haven’t made time to take my vitamins and supplements for three days in a row. Crap.
I’m not getting any exercise. Gah! I’ve got to get more organized and catch up with myself. At least I ate a salad for lunch three out of five days this week.
How’s my energy? Am I going to be mentally ready to do this every week, for 10 months?! In another language? When will I study? How will I open my mind to absorb all this new information? How will I manage the rest of my life?
I felt like I did a good job learning and participating in the training, but a worrying tendency re-emerged from my past: workaholism. I went all out. In other words, I sprinted instead of preparing for a marathon.
To be fair, we had houseguests for half the time I was in the training – something that was not ideal, but there were special circumstances for my husband.
Then on top of that, I was recovering from a third eye surgery in four months and my left eye was incredibly blurry, which caused additional stress and mitigation to avoid an infection.
And finally, my annual performance evaluation (EER) was due and our office was still involved in providing assistance to U.S. citizens evacuating from Haiti. Therefore, instead of asking for coverage for my portfolio, I covered my own portfolio during work hours, peeking at emails on my phone during training breaks. I don’t necessarily recommend doing this as a best practice, but I was lucky nothing arose to detract from the training for me. At a certain point, more does not get done with less, and I think not having a backup was my way of not pretending our team could continue stretching thinner and thinner to “do more with less” – one of my chief workplace cultural irritants.
So on top of a two-hour commute, an eight-hour work day, and having houseguests and the accompanying cooking and visiting and tidying up (which is a very high bar at our house), I would come home and spend three additional hours a night working on my day job and trying to stay caught up with casework and projects. Then I would wake up super early and do it all over again.
Clearly not sustainable behavior for the upcoming year of training that I’m getting ready to embark upon. True, I’ll only be doing one job then. But still. I give myself a yellow card for my training week in which I kind of reverted to that old familiar pattern of putting work first, a bunch of things I “have” to do second, and me last.
All in all, I’m lucky I didn’t catch a cold. The PN250 training and facilitators were excellent, by the way – highly recommended to all my colleagues. Before I know it, it will be all FSI again, all the time.
Collecting Postcards 