With the lockdown and working from home I'm finally doing something I always thought I wanted to do, work from home. I'd always had the niggling thought I could be more efficient and it would be really good to be able to work from home. Oh my... Oh Me Oh My How wrong was I?!
The first elephant in the room, work-life-balance, I work in my home office, my home office where I write this blog and make silly videos and play and read... And... so when I've been in it 8+ hours a day, I don't want to look at it any more... I don't sit at my office desk craving to be home chomping on some private project, because I'm already at that home desk and the lines have been blurred.
Second, the family... Specifically (sorry love) the wife... She's no concept of being in the zone, as a programmer, when you're in the zone and been doing something niggly all day and everything is finally falling into place, no matter the time, you stick at it to get done... No, my wife can't comprehend this, she doesn't understand everytime she shouts "Come on now"... It's another 20 minutes because you just mentally ravaged my trail of thought... Put headphones on?... Yeah you don't know how loud my Mrs is.
Third, hours... I touched on it a little above, but there's no quantitative way to express what you're up to. I feel, quite strongly, that if you're not producing something (like code) and being seen to, you're looking absent from the work place... You're at home, not right there doing your thing. Recall, I'm quite used to sitting typing for hours on end with folks wondering quite why my keyboard is so loud. I get a lot of feedback from that presence in the moment in the office. Without that feedback, I'm feeling more than a little fraudulent, especially as when software engineering tends to do, things go awry and you're then asking for more time... I've literally had 2 weeks on a project, then a week off (yes, I had a week off at home) and then I returned and asked for another 2 weeks... and I'm pretty much about to ask for yet another... based on the original 2 week estimate I over egged this pudding... But I have been working frenetically, except I feel on the other side... they might not see it that way.
Fourth, being somewhere else, this might sound obvious, but I'd never appreciated it, rolling out of bed stretching, getting a coffee and walking a few steps into my chair always felt like bliss, when I did it of a weekend and got on with some project it always felt so right and clean. Now, it's sullied, it's forced upon me, it's the norm... and to be honest, it's doing my head in. I miss the commute, the hour to decompress either way.... I miss that moment where I get to just be in my own head, in my own space in the car on the tram or just walking.
Whether that last part of the pre-virus world ever returns, I could not say.
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