Blog entries tagged with "working from home"

Yes, another year has gone by which means it is four years since I started working from home. It still doesn’t feel like it has been that long, but the calendar does not lie…

There are still some things that I don’t like about working from home, but all of them are vastly outweighed by not having a daily commute. Of course I could be doing more productive things with those two hours a day, but I prefer to take it easy.

That said, over the past six months I have started crossing things off my long todo list. Many of them have been tasks around the house that I have neglected, but others are investments in things like going all electric with solar panels, heat pump hot water and air conditioners for cooling and heating.

The house projects will continue, but after another lull last year I plan on making more of an effort in getting out with my camera…

On one hand time doesn’t seem to be moving, but another year has passed which makes it three years of working from home.

This means that work has been the ongoing constant, while stuff outside of work has been gradually picking up, but in fits and spurts. The first few months of the last “year” (ie March to July) had the comedy festival (with an increase in international acts), a weekend at Phillip Island, the Kakadu trip and then I bought a new camera just before Open House Melbourne. There was a bit of a lull until the end of the calendar year where I didn’t do much apart from some photography and comedy events. So far in 2023 things have been picking up and I have managed to get out with my camera a few times (but haven’t yet processed the photos) and the demolition of the house next door (a new double storey house should be complete by the end of 2023) has prompted me to start acting on some overdue house projects such as getting the garage roof replaced.

However the biggest “return to normal” is that for the last three days I have been heading into the city for an in-person conference. After LCA ran online for two years there wasn’t one this year, instead there was Everything Open. There has been some spirited discussion about the change of name/focus, but will touch on that in a separate post which I aim to write in the next couple of days once I have had some rest…

When I am working at home from my desk I have the venetian blinds opened enough so that I can look out over my front garden and over the road. My experience is that I need to frequently rest my eyes by looking away from my monitors, and this type of break is often recommended as part of office ergonomics.

This also means that activity outside often catches my eye, not everything but a few days ago I saw a man at the front door of the house across the road. Nobody answered the door and I saw him ring the bell a few times and wait like he expected someone to be home. It was unusual that he walked out the street, looked in the window of the car parked there (which belongs to one of the people in the house) and then went back and rang the bell again. He walked off to the right which was out of my view.

About 20-30 minutes later I heard a car door slam, I looked outside and saw something very strange. There was a car parked on the footpath across the road, not on the side of the road, but right up on the footpath. How did they get there? Did they lose control and crash?

As I was trying to work out what I was seeing I saw the man from before walk around from the far (passenger) side of the car, get in and drive off. Not back onto the road, but along the footpath and out of my view. This was very weird, what did I just see? How was there enough space for a car between a letterbox and a large tree on the nature strip? It was thoroughly confusing.

Because it was so strange I made a quick note and then had to join a work meeting, forgetting about this until the next day when that neighbour came over to say they had been burgled and were asking if I had seen anything. Well yes I had, now what I saw wasn’t just weird, but also suspicious.

Unfortunately I didn’t see much, just that it was an older male person and a general description of the car, no license plate or any specific detail.

It made me think about one of the projects deep in my backlog which is to put up some cameras. But even if I had cameras my plan is to cover my own driveway and front door to get alerts if someone is approaching or to know if a parcel has been delivered, they would not capture anything across the road.

It has been another year and my sense of time is still broken.

It feels like the comedy festival was only a few weeks ago, a month at the most, but in reality it is coming up again in two weeks time. For a while things seemed to be getting to a normal and there was more realistic talk about going back into the office, but then we were back to lockdowns for most of the year.

It doesn’t even feel like almost three months since I got COVID. I’ve done some small things here and there like some LEGO MOCs, but nothing that really feels significant.

The next few months are looking at lot busier, with the comedy festival, then a camera club weekend at Philip Island and finally a delayed Kakadu trip. It will be most I have had on since 2019…

Today marks a full year from the first day that I started working from home. Like many others I have spoken to, my sense of time is broken. While I have definitely settled into a routine it still seems like it is only new and temporary, even the last six months don’t seem like they have existed.

Our office has reopened, but with reduced capacity, spaced out eating and no use of the meeting rooms or lunch area. A couple of people are going in once or twice a week, but most of us don’t see the point of the commute just to work by yourself.

The Comedy Festival starts next week and while I haven’t booked in as many shows as I would have in the past, I’ve got a lot booked. It will be strange to be working from home and then heading into the city most nights of the week…

Today is the sixteenth of September, not a particularly significant day, except that six months ago the sixteenth was a Monday, the first day of working from home.

Sure there are some benefits like not having to commute, but I miss the commute as it gave a clear separation between work and non-work time. I also miss the lunchtime conversations with people on other teams or even seeing changes around the CBD due to construction or other works.

Is it ironic that we had only moved into our shiny new office only a few weeks before it all changed?

At the start of 2019 we had to move out of our previous office, and became mostly remote workers. We got a couple of rooms at a managed office space and each team was assigned a day to come in, the other days they would work from home. However there were a few of us (myself included) that opted to come into the temporary office every day.

In my case I knew that I would find it difficult to focus on work when I was at home, unless I was able to create a separate office for work, but I don’t have the space, furniture or equipment for that. It was better for me to tolerate the cramped shared office, with the benefit of still being in contact with people not on my team.

In February our new space was complete enough for us to move in and despite areas like the kitchen and meeting rooms still being set up, we started to make it our own, and then the world changed.

While I would love to have a work office that is distinct from my home office I have gone for a compromise of being able to switch over to a work environment. I’m still sitting on the same chair at the same desk in front of the same monitors, keyboard and mouse, but when I am working that is all driven from my work laptop. Come 4pm I switch the monitor inputs (KVM built into one of them and audio over HDMI is handy) back to my own computer, put the work laptop away and I am no longer in work mode.

So far this has been good enough™ but I am yearning for the day when we can be in an office again, but who knows when that will be…