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elfsI’ve read a lot of advice recently about working from home, about how the line blurs between “home time” and “work time” since we no longer have dress codes, commutes, or offices to herald that transition. But there is a reverse danger for nerds like me; homing from work.
I am a nerd. I like writing programs. And while I have two different laptops, one from the office, and one personal, both share the same keyboard and monitor. It looks like I’m “working” all the time, even when I’m definitely in my fun coding mode.
So it can be tempting, while technically “at work,” to say, “Oh, wait, that python program I wrote has a small bug. I can fix it!” And it still feels like “work,” because, hey, they’re paying me to write in Python, right?
The correct response is, of course, to leave the “fun” machine off, but even that’s hard. It’s my alternate channel, the way I get thoughts out of my head even while I’m actually doing what I get paid to do.
So far the “best” thing I’ve found is to simply close the lid on my personal computer for two hours, start the video conference software to the “general” room, and try to maintain some semblance of office chatter.
Which we’ve actually done! And it’s been good; I’ve been contributing to the effort at the office. But overall, it’s still hard to separate work from “programming,” since work involves programming. The problems just aren’t as much fun.
Like a lot of tech employees I’ve been working from home. The company I work for saw the writing on the wall and ordered us to work from home on March 6th, five days before Washington State Governor Jay Inslee’s orders came down. In that time, I’ve managed to maintain a regular habit of waking up at 6:00am on weekdays, and held onto my habits of making breakfast and writing out my days’ plans before heading downstairs to the house office for work. It’s a nice, short commute, naturally.
A lot of advice recently has been about how to “maintain that work/life balance,” which involves mostly remembering to unplug at the end of the day and go do fun stuff. The reminders are valid: if you’re working from home, you should have distinct phases of “work life” and “home life.”
But there’s a reverse problem when you’re a computer geek like me: homing from work.
I like to write code for fun, so my “fun stuff” often looks not just like work, but even more like what people expect work to look. Because when I’m working I’m negotiating with people, looking at JIRA and Github, and only working on “code” about 50% of the time. When I’m having fun, it’s mostly code on the screen about 90% of the time.
It used to be that when I got to the office I’d unpack my personal laptop and put it on my desk, then wake up the work machine. My desk was pretty big, and the laptop was far enough away that I’d sometimes tun to it if I needed to look something up, since it’s basically a terabyte record of my entire career. The desk at home is small and a bit crowded in comparison, and the routine is different: every morning now I take the work machine out of my bag, unplug my personal one from the hub and plug in the work machine, and the personal one moves to a nook at the right side of the desk. The hub does a very nice job of working with both laptops, so I can mouse from one to the other, and the keyboard follows suit.
Which means it’s really easy, while I’m working on something for the office, to get one of those annoying “time snacks” where I have to wait for the build to finish, and I’ll mouse over to the other machine and, since I currently have Python (or Typescript, or React, or whatever) currently loaded into my attention, to pull up some small personal program with a bug that’s been annoying me, and get lost in it until I realize the build is finished.
The “best” thing I’ve found is to just close the personal laptop during the office hours where I’m supposed to be working, call one of my peers to be an accountability buddy over a video conference, and work for an hour at a time, making sure to get up and move around.
Having the accountability buddy has also been good because we can remind each other, “It’s after hours. Time to knock off,” and we will! I miss the camaraderie of in-house, face-to-face communications. It’s hard to be a mentor and teacher when you’re not doing that, and that is one of my several hats at this job.
I am a nerd. I like writing programs. And while I have two different laptops, one from the office, and one personal, both share the same keyboard and monitor. It looks like I’m “working” all the time, even when I’m definitely in my fun coding mode.
So it can be tempting, while technically “at work,” to say, “Oh, wait, that python program I wrote has a small bug. I can fix it!” And it still feels like “work,” because, hey, they’re paying me to write in Python, right?
The correct response is, of course, to leave the “fun” machine off, but even that’s hard. It’s my alternate channel, the way I get thoughts out of my head even while I’m actually doing what I get paid to do.
So far the “best” thing I’ve found is to simply close the lid on my personal computer for two hours, start the video conference software to the “general” room, and try to maintain some semblance of office chatter.
Which we’ve actually done! And it’s been good; I’ve been contributing to the effort at the office. But overall, it’s still hard to separate work from “programming,” since work involves programming. The problems just aren’t as much fun.
Like a lot of tech employees I’ve been working from home. The company I work for saw the writing on the wall and ordered us to work from home on March 6th, five days before Washington State Governor Jay Inslee’s orders came down. In that time, I’ve managed to maintain a regular habit of waking up at 6:00am on weekdays, and held onto my habits of making breakfast and writing out my days’ plans before heading downstairs to the house office for work. It’s a nice, short commute, naturally.
A lot of advice recently has been about how to “maintain that work/life balance,” which involves mostly remembering to unplug at the end of the day and go do fun stuff. The reminders are valid: if you’re working from home, you should have distinct phases of “work life” and “home life.”
But there’s a reverse problem when you’re a computer geek like me: homing from work.
I like to write code for fun, so my “fun stuff” often looks not just like work, but even more like what people expect work to look. Because when I’m working I’m negotiating with people, looking at JIRA and Github, and only working on “code” about 50% of the time. When I’m having fun, it’s mostly code on the screen about 90% of the time.
It used to be that when I got to the office I’d unpack my personal laptop and put it on my desk, then wake up the work machine. My desk was pretty big, and the laptop was far enough away that I’d sometimes tun to it if I needed to look something up, since it’s basically a terabyte record of my entire career. The desk at home is small and a bit crowded in comparison, and the routine is different: every morning now I take the work machine out of my bag, unplug my personal one from the hub and plug in the work machine, and the personal one moves to a nook at the right side of the desk. The hub does a very nice job of working with both laptops, so I can mouse from one to the other, and the keyboard follows suit.
Which means it’s really easy, while I’m working on something for the office, to get one of those annoying “time snacks” where I have to wait for the build to finish, and I’ll mouse over to the other machine and, since I currently have Python (or Typescript, or React, or whatever) currently loaded into my attention, to pull up some small personal program with a bug that’s been annoying me, and get lost in it until I realize the build is finished.
The “best” thing I’ve found is to just close the personal laptop during the office hours where I’m supposed to be working, call one of my peers to be an accountability buddy over a video conference, and work for an hour at a time, making sure to get up and move around.
Having the accountability buddy has also been good because we can remind each other, “It’s after hours. Time to knock off,” and we will! I miss the camaraderie of in-house, face-to-face communications. It’s hard to be a mentor and teacher when you’re not doing that, and that is one of my several hats at this job.
