I’ve worked from home for 13 years, exclusively for the last 7. By now I have a sweet setup that meets all my needs. My office (yes, an actual office) goes way beyond the 10-step listicles that most blogs are posting these days amid the Covid-19 pandemic, but it’s hard to remember how it was in the beginning. I am trying to remember how my office started and I am envisioning the latest crop of forced work-from-home office workers learning the same things I learned years ago. My memory isn’t perfect, but here are some of the things I recall learning about working from home that I am betting most office workers haven’t even considered.
Ergonomics - If it looks good, it’s not.
There are many threads on Twitter and the Fediverse where people are posting their home offices. Honestly? Most of those pictures horrify me and bring me back to a time when I was just getting started and was equally clueless.
Photo by Izabelle Acheson on Unsplash
See that desk above? Sure it looks all feng shui and it’s clean and unobtrusive. But you’re going to need it 40+ hours a week - unobtrusive isn’t what you’re going for when you’re dealing with something that takes up a third or more of your waking hours.
I understand that most of the people forced into working from home now aren’t into it for the long haul. There’s not a lot of budget floating around for surprise pandemics, I get that. But if this is what you’re planning on using, you’re going to regret this at about 2:30 this afternoon.
I wrote an article with tips on how to combat ergonomic and repetitive stress injuries when working from home. It deals with real-life solutions to the aches and pains my body gets from being the world’s best sysadmin all day. Some of my articles are for paying subscribers only, and that article is one of them. But, because I’m a nice guy and you’re stuck at home, you can subscribe for 1/2 price using the button below to unlock all past and future paying articles.
The bottom line is that you’re going to need to get a better set up or make sure you take that laptop and move around to different areas such as the couch and the kitchen table during the day if you want to stay upright.
Your work laptop sucks
I have learned more about the state of consumer hardware than I ever wanted to know at this point. Specifically, how cheaply laptops are made, including that beloved Macbook Pro we all drool over.
Your office has probably issued you a laptop and kicked you out of the door. Much like that sad, sad home workstation pictured above, that laptop is not going to make it very long if it is your sole computer.
Laptops are kind of like health benefit plans. Many crappy health plans sound good because they’re filled with useless stuff that nobody is going to use. Instead of giving you $2000/year for dental work which you WILL use, they’ll give you $300 in dental work and $1000 in massages and acupuncture that nobody will use. Laptops do the same thing: manufacturers will give you tons of RAM and disk space, much more than you’ll ever need for compiling that TPS report, but they’ll scrimp on the screen, the keyboard, and the hinges. The things you actually need.
I highly recommend obtaining a standalone keyboard and a second monitor if you can. Both of those items will help a lot because you won’t wreck your laptop keyboard inside of a month, and you will have a nice bright screen with good resolution to stare at all day.
Just for reference, I am on my second work provided Macbook Pro because of the dreaded keyboard issue. In addition, our Slack rooms are filled with people returning or servicing their Macbooks constantly. It doesn’t really matter how much your work spends on your laptop, it won’t be good enough for your daily driver without some help.
Evolving expectations and calming chaos
One of the challenges that took me the longest to resolve was that of setting reasonable expectations for myself. Many work from home articles talk about the necessity of developing enough discipline to do actual work while at home. I have never had that problem. I have always had the opposite problem; I found it hard to disconnect from work because there was no solid social signal that I was done, such as leaving the office.
It is one thing to deal with that personally, but it can be complicated by the level of work-from-homeiness of your colleagues. When I first started working from home I was a lone-gun contractor and all my clients were solo entrepreneurs. Needless to say, we all worked far too much in those years. Once I became a remote employee, it became easier to manage my time because there was a more natural rhythm to it. As my office colleagues left the office, the day naturally ended. And when I finally became a remote employee in a fully remote company, it all came together nicely. Everyone had been through what I was going through, and I had lots of examples to follow of fellow employees shutting down Slack and email at the end of the day to disconnect.
The current situation has a lot of people that are unfamiliar with working from home all thrust into that situation. When you’re struggling and your boss is struggling and your boss’ boss is struggling, things can get pretty frustrating really quickly. I am envisioning entire organizations with no clue about operational cadence outside the construct of an office and wondering how much chaos that is introducing into people’s lives.
My country’s government medical officials are stating that the pandemic-mandated social distancing will go on for months at least. That means you need to get a grip on any chaos in your life that working from home is causing because you likely won’t be able to just ride it out and be back in the office before you lose it. I’ll stop short of giving advice on how to deal with this because that would turn this article into a listicle that I abhor.
Tell me stuff
It is hard for me to go back to the first days when I started working from home. I just don’t remember all the challenges I faced. If you’re one of the people who has had working from home forced upon them, tell me what it is like. What didn’t you know? What surprised you? How easy is to? You can leave comments at the bottom of this article.
The Evolving Chaos of Working From Home.