Tuesday, February 7, 2017

Snow days mean working from home


While I am a big fan of snow days in general, this week in Seattle has been tough.  It snowed surprisingly hard for a while and I was unable to make it to our offices on Monday.

While this is not a terrible situation, it meant I had to work from home for the day.  I'm not personally a big fan of working from home.  There are several reasons for this and the biggest is probably that "home is where I go when I am done working."  Mentally, it is tough for me to stay focused when I am home.

Another reason is the limited hardware I have at home, specifically multiple monitors.  I'm lucky enough to have 2 monitors at my desk (three if you count my laptop) at work.  That makes debugging and testing in general much easier - run Tableau on one monitor, debug on the other.  I've written a few articles about this in the past and  I do not have this at home.  Typing on one monitor is simply frustrating for the work I do.

I also miss the interaction with my team.  Sometimes I just need a simple question answered which is pretty fast if folks are around me.  At home, I have to rely on instant messaging, email or whatever and the delay can leave me blocked for a while.

Finally, my home network is not as fast as our work building.  Frustrating.

The task I CAN do at home is paperwork.  Updating documentation, reading designs, giving feedback, etc… are the types of work I can complete at home and not feel distracted.  As luck would have it, I had about a day's worth of reading and online training to complete while snowed in, so the day went pretty well.

Now, back to the office and (real) work!

Questions, comments, concerns and criticisms always welcome,
John

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