Work From Home— Wherever That Is

The pandemic has made it easier to work from a distance, but some far-flung workers have to follow special rules for taxes, health care and insurance.

- By Lisa Gerstner

Ellen Braaten, a child psychologist and associate professor at Harvard Medical School, fell in love with Prague when she spent seven months there on a sabbatical in 2018 and 2019. Following her sabbatical, she went back a few times to finish research she had done there, and she began thinking about how she might spend even more time in Prague while still keeping up with her Boston-based work responsibilities.

Then the coronavirus pandemic struck. Like many other professionals, Braaten found herself working from home—and that presented her with the perfect opportunity to try managing her job full-time from overseas. “There was no excuse for me not to go back to Prague and work there,” says Braaten. “I had a choice to be in a place that I love.” Last fall she spent more than two months in Prague, where she used videoconferencing to attend meetings with her colleagues, teach classes, meet with patients and speak at virtual conferences.

Although there are trade­offs—for one, teaching an evening class at Har­vard requires her to be on task from midnight to 3 a.m. in Prague’s time zone—Braaten has found that the situ­ation suits her, and she plans to spend the first few months of 2021 working from Prague. She’s hopeful that em­ployers will continue to accommodate remote work even after the pandemic has passed. “I have a feeling there might be more openness to it because it really works,” says Braaten.