Hi Guys,

I thought it would be interesting to share our experiences with working from home, given there's likely a great increase in the number of people doing it. I'm interested to know if people
a) are working from home (a kind of survery)
b) are initially happier, sadder, more apprehensive, anything you're feeling on this subject.
c) how we are coping over time
d) your profession (optional, as is everything)

Please - Covid 19 discussions keep to https://www.gog.com/forum/general/the_covid19_thread . This thread is about the side effect of it, that we're working from home.

I'll start - As a programmer, I was initially very enthusiastic, no travel, same basic work to do. It sounds like a great idea. I am generally still positive about this, it's nice to get the extra time, and remote working isn't impacting me to much. I am beginning to see my curtains a little too much, which is making me think I need to make sure I get out during lunch breaks (I am still working to my office break periods, are you?). So far it's good, but by the end of the day I really find it hard to push on to finishing time, given I know that to end is simply to switch off the connection.

Would be interested to know how everyone is getting on.

I work from home full time anyways, so no change. You just need to be mentally stoned and regimented. I.e. go for a walk at lunchtime (if you have somewhere nice nearby of course). Always stop at correct hour. Don’t feel the need to work longer as your home. Have lots of tea breaks etc. It’s not for everyone though.

I'm a programmer as well, working as an IT consultant. My work is usually done on servers that I log into remotely anyway, whether they are customer servers or our own. As such, on a purely technical level, it makes no real difference where I work. This is also the reason why my company told all of us to work from home if possible as soon as our government recommended it last wednesday.

From a transportation standpoint, it doesn't make a lot of difference to me. I live so close to my office that I can walk there in 20 minutes, or take a bus there in 7.

I usually don't mind working from home from time to time, but I miss the facilities at the office. There I have 2 additional hi-res monitors, a docking station, a proper keyboard, etc. When I work from home, I just have my laptop and mouse. We've been told that if we want, we can go by the office and bring home any of our equipment that we want for the duration of the situation, but I don't really have room physically for any of my office stuff here. Not unless I remove my own computer at least, and that's not going to happen.

But then there are also other factors at work here. I have just been on sick leave from stress since christmas. I had just started up again at reduced hours when this happened. So I only managed to go to the office for 5 days before being sent right back home again. As a result, I am somewhat further along the road to cabin fever than most others, because I had already been cooped up at home for a long time before this.

Also, I miss my coworkers. We have a great "community" (not really the word I was looking for, but the best I could come up with) at my place of work. And on a purely professional level, it is good to be easily able to ask someone for an opinion on a technical matter, or to weigh in if a colleague has a problem.

Maybe I started this thread too early, or perhaps few of us work from home. I personally am finding it a struggle.

Everyone's saying I should keep fit, but I've not done that for years. If anything the home working advice for someone as reculsive as myself is more condesending than anything else.

The thing I'm finding a struggle is separating my life from my work. It was easy before, I got home and there was my PC purely for games. Now it's a matter that I reach my "end time" at work, and the same PC is suddenly my game PC.

Anyone else finding this? Is it just me and Wishbone working from home?

I've been working from home for the past two weeks. I've worked from home before, but not for such a long period (and I will until the quarantine is over). Staying in the same room for so many hours is taxing, especially now that I can't go out and take a walk after work is done. Luckily I have managed to designate a desk only for work, where I have placed my company laptop (we are not allowed to work with our own computers).

I strictly maintain the same times (however, because I don't have to drive to and from the office anymore, that means more sleep and free time). Contrary to what most people expect, when you are already at home it's easy to take some extra time to finish some tasks, because you don't need to drive home. Unless there is some urgent matter (which, with the reduced activity, is unlikely to happen), I try to avoid that.

I stay in contact with my co-workers via WhatsApp and, if work issues arise, with eventual phone calls. That makes up for being alone in a small room. Like it or not, coworkers are a big part of your social interactions. I have even had a dream where we were all back at the office, celebrating that the pandemic was over.

I generally work from home, though I do quite a bit of traveling out of state for my job (depends on what projects we have). Honestly I'm kind of glad that there is no work for me right now, as I haven't really had a full weekend off since sometime at the beginning of last year. Now when I do have quiet time from work, I do my own travelling. Since I take care of one of my parents who is over 70, I don't go out unless it's to do shopping.

As far as coping, it's business as usual for me... though there's more alcohol involved and VR gaming. I have slipped back to my odd hours, which means I rotate from a day-to-night person, then back to day again after about a week. 24 hours always seemed too short of a rotation for me.

Work-wise, I have an odd position that doesn't even have a title in the company. Most people I interact with, it's as a trainer for CAD.

I think I quite understand what you mean.

I've started working from home because of the pandemic government/employer's decisions/restrictions. I live in suburbs and spent 2 hours a day on public transport. I was also very enthusiastic – I had some experience in working from home, because I had full VPN access and I was taking my job home during high workload. And I'm also a bit disappointed and surprised, that there are also some problems and challenges I didn't expected, which are:
a) it's sometime hard to concentrate – I thought that it would be much easier without all the open-space office atmosphere, but it seems to cause some different problems to focus for me now,
b) I miss my morning and afternoon long walks – I was making ~4km of walk every day and now I started to feel my body lacks this effort,
c) I'm a data analyst, so sometimes working alone from home helps a lot, but I'm also often involved in projects, which require a lot of interaction with people, and I don't like bad quality of teleconferences, I hate chating on messengers, because they are sooo slooow in exchanging information etc.,
d) I also noticed I spend much more time working now,
e) I have a problem finding time for reading/learning/listening books as I've lost my very productive 2 full hours in commute,
f) I was facing some performance issues with my VPN; I guess my company needs a while to build a better infrastructure / scale some channels capacity for this situation,
g) I expected myself to be much more productive at home (as productive as I was when I was taking my job home for late evening to help myself to focus) – and it seems not as I expected.

After a 2-3 weeks I've started to understand that it's just a matter of building habits. I had a lot of life-hacks and small habits, which made my previous day schedule perfect – getting up early, walking 4+km mentioned before, listening audiobooks during walk, e-learning and reading in public transport, sending my wife short messages to show her love, controling my life-work time, being 100% for family when I was back home. It's all a complicated construction build for years and now it's just need to be build from scratch. I really think it's a matter of time to get used to the new situation and I believe it's worth to try.

What I love:
a) I can get up early and all the morning time is mine! I do not need to hurry
b) and I still sleep much more then before!
c) I eat meals with my family – I love meeting my wife and kids many times a day!
d) I have 2 laptops – one for work and my private one, which I think is great, because I can close the first one and I know the work is over,
e) I can finally run in the morning which was impossible before (I'm sorry, I just wasn't able to get up at 4:45)
f) I love open window, fresh air, birds singing outside the window, being able to go out for a few minutes on the swing.

+
- No commute
- More sleep / free time
- No physical colleagues
- Food is cheaper
- I can spend some downtime at housework.

- (neg.)
- I actually liked the (shortest) part of my commute that involved a 15 minute walk through an empty small town.
- Virtual communication (about work) with colleagues can be a lot less efficient.
- I have to make my own lunch.

I've been working from home for one day a week for a couple of years now, so it's nothing new. At the end of the (working day) I break the connection to the remote computer, I don't consider it any different than leaving the office.
Sometimes I use my work laptop, sometimes my own PC... it doesn't matter to me - I'm a master at mental compartmentalising.

My work was never part of my social life, so no loss there.

This lock down changes little in my life and I can't really relate to people suffering from cabin fever. Sure, sometimes I like an outside activity (meeting friends, concerts, restaurants, the occasional travel), but those things didn't even happen weekly. Supermarket visits are more stressful than usual - but not by much (small city supermarkets).

Currently I work mostly from home, visiting the office once or twice a week. We have agreed with my colleagues that only one person at a time goes to the office (most of the work can be performed remotely, but we feel one should be there in case something really needs to be done on-site to the servers etc.), just so that if one of us becomes sick, others don't get infected at the same time.

My current job is system administration, jack of all trades doing all kinds of admin stuff (Linux admin, DNS, load balancers, some scripting, Ansible...).

Working from home is nothing new because me and my colleagues tend to do that every now and then anyway, like 1-2 days per week. I guess this is because we all live quite far from the office, I have to drive 56 km to get there (takes me about 35-40 minutes to drive to work), and for my colleagues the distance is even longer, like 70-80 km or so.

We don't have any regular weekly or daily meetings (with each other or customers) so that doesn't really require any presence in the office either. No daily scrum meetings or something, having to explain team leader what have you done yesterday and are going to do today blaa blaa blaa (I hate stuff like that).

Yeah I save quite a bit in gas prices as gasoline costs A LOT here. Also I can sleep like 50 minutes longer if I don't have to go to the office (as I eat my breakfast while I work at home etc.).

I can work fine from home, but there are two reasons I still like to go to the office most days:

- Easier to ask questions from my more experienced colleagues, not having to call them or email or skype. Or if a new customer ticket comes, sometimes it is not clear right away who should take it, maybe it is so complicated that two of us have to work together with it (e.g. if something beyond basic needs to be done on the firewall or set up some IPSec tunnel etc., I rather leave that to my colleague; similarly my colleagues rather not touch load balancers but let me take care of it as it can sometimes get quite complicated...).

- The time between work and leisure time seems to blur at home. I might do something else during working hours, and then work till late evening or night. Dunno how I feel about that, is it positive or negative... When I go to the office, then it is more about that I don't think about the work stuff after I get home.

Curious! (Whatever computer I use for work,) I close Citrix (remote desktop) and work is over.

I was the same, but now I luckily have even a bigger monitor at home. The only thing missing is that I have to do with one monitor here, but it is doable, even though two monitors does make some things easier.

Aren't you reimbursed for your work-related transport costs?
I get more monthly money for that than what it actually costs (public transport in my case).
My employer now continues to pay for transport... I guess they now consider the home office expenses (heating and whatever).

Ive worked from home for a long time. Even given my medical situation, excercise aint easy. Force yourself to walk around the block at least if you can. Does your work require you to use a certain OS? - Do your gaming preferences? Might be worth putting a different OS partition to... partition work and play?

Alas, I am a .NET dev, it's all windows based (we are moving to linux on some accounts), And may gaming is also on windows toys, so it is all on the same machine.

I'm not sure that would help tbh, it's not the logical separation, it's the physical.

then i have no suggestions other than wearing a loincloth and warpaint at work (and not "at home")

Edit: go full hermit in other words