I treat working at home as if I am actually going to the work office.
05:30 wake up, breakfast for me and Jane. Prepare the lunches. Shower, shave and dress for work (yes, I wear my work clothes!).
The laptop is turned on as soon as I wake up and I start the VPN. This gives me time for SSC to push through whatever updates are needed.
07:00 to 07:30 is when I actually start working.
- Status of machine, network and personal health to the team lead
- Then I process the email. Normal morning for me is to clear about 20-30 mails that arrived after I logged off the prior workday. Normal mail load for me is a minimum 100 emails a day and on some days exceeds 200. It has exploded due to everyone working from home. Before COVID I had a series of mail rules that allows me to sort and prioritize my inbox and that does help manage what needs to be looked at first.
During the day I try to make sure that I get up and move around (my watch automatically nags me to move). It is too easy to park myself at the desk all day without a break. I take my lunch at the same time as work (11:00) and I don't look at the work machine during the 30 minutes. End of day (16:00 to 16:30) I actually logoff from work. It is way too easy to leave it up and check on it during the evenings, but, unless I am on call I try to logoff. You need the downtime to spend relaxing.
Some may think it is easy duty and doing less work, but, we do as much (or more) as if we are physically in the office.
- All normal business activities are completed in the working hours;
- Most business days we try to have at least one person is online in the evenings other than the duty (on-call) person so that if there are issues/requests they get processed that evening for those who are working off hours;
- A lot of our documentation and SOPs (Standard Operating Procedures) have been reviewed and updated (several dozen documents I created or revised so far);
- I still do the conference calls for the working groups
- Doing the agenda before the meeting;
- Sending out the various links to the participants for the documents;
- Taking attendance/notes;
- Creating the meeting notes, ROD (Record Of Decision) and action items;
- Posting the documents in the repository for the team members to review before the next meeting;
- Throughout the days we get service requests (data fixes, updates, password requests, account add/change/delete) and we process them as fast as if we were physically at work;
- When we are not 'busy' (which isn't very often) we have a number of courses to complete to keep our skills up-to-date;
- Code releases (one of my jobs is being the release coordinator)
- All of the paper work is still being done;
- Follow-up with clients, coders, testers on status of where they are;
- Answer questions about the past release or future release;
- All of the meetings are now conference calls
- Before and after to review who, what, where, when, how;
- The logistics of what is required for a release;
- Notifications of releases and system availability;
- No delays for any of our scheduled code releases. All code was released on time and without any problems.
- Communication is a key thing here. We let everyone know what is being done, when it is being done, who is doing it and when we expect to complete.
