046: Working From Home

A lot can happen in just a few weeks. Due to COVID-19 pandemic, business as usual is anything but … and Andrew and I felt like we should interrupt our regularly scheduled podcast to take some time and talk about working from home – something that we all are going to have to deal with for the foreseeable future. Since so many of the people we listen to this podcast are single or small office practitioners, we thought that instead of running our scheduled (and completed - DOH!) podcast episode – which was titled “A Culture of Design” and will be released a bit later in the year - that we should take this moment in time and talk a little bit about how the current climate is impacting our daily routines, our jobs, the basic stuff that for the vast majority of us, are the givens that help ground us. A bit of this is purely selfish on my part because I wanted to make a record of sorts of this particular moment in time - talk about what is happening to our daily lives in what is unquestionably unprecedented activities. We will also be talking about working from home – what that actually looks like – home office setups, multiple people all working from home, teaching classes remotely, thinking about what that might be like from both the teacher and the student side of things, along with some more mundane realities that we are having to deal with. I will go on record and say that I am not really a "work-from-home" fan. As an employer, I will concede that I don't think that the vast majority of people really do their best work when left completely to their own devices, a big part of that is based on my own behavior, but as an employee, I really feed off the energy and conversations that take place within the work environment. [Note: If you are reading this via email, click here to access the on-site audio player]  Traveling and Going to the Grocery Store [ 4:36 mark] Just about every part of our daily routines is being affected in ways that still don't make a great deal of sense to me. I'm not sure if it's hoarding behavior taking place, or something along the supply chain has been impacted (across the entire planet) but I don't know why it's so difficult to get your hands on some toilet paper. I was out of town for the week when most of the craziness took place where I live. I was in Northern California spending the week at a rental house in Sea Ranch (if you're not familiar with this landmark project, I've written about it in detail previously here: Sea Ranch, California) and from afar I watched more and more things close down and become unavailable. Friends were telling me about how everything in the grocery stores was gone and that by the time I get back into town all that will be left will be canned asparagus and potted meat. Luckily it wasn't that bad but there were limits put in place on the number of specific items you could purchase. Luckily, my wife and I do not exhibit hoarding personalities and most of the things on this restriction list were not an issue for us. Working from Home [ 15:12 mark] I would be interested to hear from people how their work from home situation is shaping up. Andrew and I recorded this episode on Sunday, March 22nd, and I have now spent 1 week working from home ... and my opinions on the matter have been profoundly impacted by this single week. I will say that my dogs LOVE having all of us at home all day. In the beginning, it was a bit overbearing - they wanted to be around me all the time and for them, they wanted me to pet them, throw the ball and play fetch, even a game of tug-of-war was not out of the question. On day one, I thought "Okay, I'll do some of this so you will leave me alone ..." They still aren't leaving me alone. Hopefully, they will start to tone down their neediness of my attention because I honestly don't have the time to pay attention to them. I was very surprised by just how much time I spent working last week.