It's Not Just For Pandemics: Working From Home

"The main advantage of working at home is that you get to find out what cats really do all day."

---Lynne Truss

We don't have a cat at our house, but we have a tiny pug, Miss Penny, and she leads a pretty nice little life. Her schedule is well organized from what I can tell. She sleeps late, barks at passersby from her spot by the window for most of the morning, begs for snacks, takes a nap, and then starts the routine all over again. Pugs excel at three things: snacking, sneezing, and snoring. We've grown used to each other's habits though, and she's a pretty good work from home office mate. Sometimes.

The stay at home advisory has more people than ever all of a sudden working from home, and for some, it's been an adjustment. Not me though. Welcome to my world, won't you come on in? I'll be the one at the dining room table, wearing a lovely silk blouse, a scarf, and my Betty Boop pajama pants. That's so when the next Zoom video meeting starts, I'm camera-ready, from the neck up anyway.  I'm also barefoot most of the time, and just out of the frame is a kitchen with dirty dishes in the sink and leftover pizza in the microwave.

There is a way to make working from home efficient and productive, and the reason I know this is because I've been working at home for most of the last ten years, and I've made all the mistakes. Finally, though, I have a system down. Here's what works, for me anyway.

1)    The first word in "Work from home" is? WORK. It's not a day off, it's not a half-day, it's not playtime. Setting a schedule is helpful because otherwise, the day has no structure, and before you know it it's dinner time, and you're still staring at a half-finished Excel spreadsheet, and your project is yet another day late. People think that working from home means you can just decide what to do and when to do it, and if a chance comes up to hit the beach or have lunch with a friend, you just go. No, that's not it all, sadly. While there's more flexibility being at home, the work still has to get done and here's a pro tip: You can't work at the beach or the pool. Don't even try it, it won't happen. BTDT and all I got was sand in my hard drive. Soccer games, the carpool lane, and the parking lot at school are also not conducive to cranking out the work.

2)    Get childcare. Seriously, if you have young children around, and you're sitting there on the computer, they're going to think you're playing Minecraft and you won't have a minute's peace. You can't plop kids in front of a TV for 8 hours either, so get some help. Maybe trade kids with other work at home parents, or split the day up between work hours, and kid hours. It might have been funny on the BBC when a cute little girl came strolling in on her dad's live interview, but your clients won't think it's funny when a batch of slime or a round of Nerf gun bullets goes whizzing by your head during a video conference call.

Meme via @with_love_becca

3)    Make a land grab. Find a spot in the house that's (relatively) quiet, has room for your gear, is comfortable, and is just yours. Plant a flag, surround it with caution tape, do whatever it takes, but own your space. If you're constantly wandering around with your laptop and a notepad, with a pencil, stuck behind your ear, you're lost before you've begun. Let everyone who lives with you know where the work zone is, and that interfering with it is a felony.

Working from home just might become the new normal, even when the pandemic has passed. It's not always easy, but it has some real benefits as far as reducing commuting time, making companies more profitable because they save on office rent, and helping employees strike a better work/life balance. Good luck, and make sure to reward your family now and then for putting up with all those important, yet mostly unproductive, video team report status check-in update meetings.