It’s been about two and a half months since I started working from home, and I think I’d describe it as better than I expected, but still less than ideal. A tip I’ve suggested to my teammates to help maintain productivity while working from home is to establish a daily routine.
I’m aware of this in theory, but haven’t been as good at adhering to this in practice. The availability of meals in the office resulted in a natural routine: I would eat breakfast in the office before the workday started, and would normally finish most development work before dinner. I’d sometimes write documentation or polish up a test after dinner, but usually the post-dinner work would be less intense. This wasn’t true for everyone, of course (one could elect to skip breakfast and/or have dinner at home), but it was for me. I also set up my laptop to remind me at 8 pm to ask myself if I should stop for the day, and in any case an empty office was useful as a reminder that it was late, and that I perhaps should no longer be around.
Initially, I did follow this: I marked the start of the day with a short walk to the local M&S before breakfast. However, things started degrading over time. I think much of this was in relation to wanting to get as much sleep as possible before meetings or work started. I’m not sure what precipitated that; I imagine that would probably be a late night, perhaps caused by some combination of working late and getting distracted with reading, computer games or something else. I’ve been reading Puzzlecraft: How to Make Every Kind of Puzzle, and I do remember a recent evening where I started trying to craft a triple of linked Sudoku variants that weren’t independently solvable, but had a unique solution taken together at 9.30 pm or so, and finished at 1.30 am.
It’s probably related, but I noticed that I’ve recently been working longer hours – with reduced time outside of work it’s invariably tempting to push one’s sleep backwards, even if doing so may have undesirable consequences. I normally have a 2.5-3 km walking commute to the office (and interestingly this is what is currently recommended by the government), which takes me about 30 minutes at a reasonably quick pace. This is between 45 minutes and 1 hour each day (I almost always walk in the morning, but sometimes take the Tube in the evening) of time that seems to be mostly converted into development time. I guess this is a benefit of working from home if one holds one’s hours constant (that said, my commute also has exercise benefits for me).
Some of this might also be because I’ve started doing more independent development work again (there was a time where I spent <20% time on this, while it’s probably between 30 and 40 percent now). It’s now actually possible and directly relevant to my goals to make larger independent pushes. This is intellectually welcome though I do need to be careful about how far I take this.
I’ve also been getting more sleep for some reason. This may be a product of increased mental fatigue. In addition to development work, the hobbies I’ve been spending time on recently – reading, logic puzzles, learning German and some computer games – are generally quite taxing.
I normally get about 7.5 hours of sleep during the week, and maybe 8.5-9 or so on weekends. I think the amount of sleep I’ve been getting from Sunday to Thursday hasn’t really changed, but I don’t seem to feel as well-rested as normal. In terms of weekend schedules, I do remember an abnormally high frequency of 10- or 11-hour sleeps as of late.
There are definitely advantages to working from home – it can be better for focusing on specific difficult problems, and not having to do a 30 minute commute is a big win (and is possibly a bigger win for others). I’m not sure I would want to, though, given the choice, perhaps not for fault of the concept in general, but instead because I haven’t had the willpower, knowledge, or some other factor needed to thrive on it. There are also other frustrations: video-conferencing while passable still seems frictionful, and while I’m an introvert even I find the lack of human contact unsustainable.
