My job isn’t one you can do from home, so while the rest of the world has spent the last few years abandoning the office, I’ve still been turning up in person like some sort of mug.
The other day I had the opportunity to spend a day working from home, and grabbed it with both hands. I had lots of project work to do and none of it required me to be in the building: I had some training videos that needed voiceovers recording, I had documentation to write and I had some development work to do on some internal web tools I wrote. So on Friday I fired up a work laptop at home and got stuck in.
Not only did I get more sleep and avoid the time and cost of about 3½ hours of commuting, I also got loads done. Here is a summary of how I spent my ten hour shift.
| Activity | Duration |
|---|---|
| Attend morning meeting for WFH staff through my phone because the laptop wasn’t logged in yet | 0h 30m |
| Struggle to get the work laptop to connect to my home wifi and talk to IT support about proxy settings | 0h 45m |
| Check emails | 0h 10m |
| Make coffee, get distracted by arrival of post | 0h 10m |
| Open training slides in Powerpoint, set up USB microphone and headphones, test setup, get distracted and read news articles on the Guardian website | 1h |
| Do Guardian Quick Crossword #16972 | 0h 15m |
| Start recording voiceover, discover time limit on Powerpoint recordings, search for alternative screen recording software, install on work laptop | 0h 25m |
| Dog arrives in room, play with dog | 0h 30m |
| See message on phone, reply to message, see notification on Reddit, scroll through Reddit | 0h 20m |
| Break for lunch | 1h |
| Unlock laptop, set Teams status to “available”; toilet break | 0h 10m |
| Start recording voiceover with new software, get lost on complex slide animation twenty minutes in, discover there is no edit feature, resign self to having to start recording again, become despondent about project, make tea, look at phone again for a bit | 1h 30m |
| Let dog out for a wee, throw ball for dog which gets dog excited, dog spends extended period of time on very wet lawn, dog runs back inside and through house with muddy paws. Clean dog’s paws. Clean kitchen, dining room and hallway floors with Dettol wipes | 0h 45m |
| See email from team leader asking how day is going, redraft reply eight times, eventually just say it’s going well thanks | 0h 15m |
| Notice office-hours staff will be leaving work in 15 minutes, write email asking complex question about SQL database backups for web app that I need to work on, send email slightly too late for it to be seen or dealt with before Monday | 0h 30m |
| Rehearse complex slide animation that tripped me up before, change animation after rehearsal, fail to rehearse new animation sequence | 0h 30m |
| Make tea, get distracted by dog, play with dog | 0h 30m |
| Start recording voiceover, get lost on changed animation sequence twenty minutes in, plough on anyway since interest in project is now waning, continue to end of recording | 0h 40m |
| Discover freeware screen recording software has recorded in some random format to some place in the cloud, attempt to download and convert this to something useful | 0h 20m |
| Send email to team leaders shared inbox about something unrelated to today’s work to prove I am still online at the end of my shift | 0h 5m |
| Log off | 0h 5m |
6 comments on “WFH”
All I can see is a man not spending over £50 on travelling to work and the British economy is worse off for it. So selfish.
Just think of that poor french ferryman who has to punt Chris across the channel every morning. Without you, he’s probably not had enough money for his daily baguettes and comedic garlic strings.
And his daughter can’t learn the violin.
Old Jean-Pierre will be OK. He has a side hustle offloading croissants. The whole pastry market in the south of England is flooded with knock-off French Viennoiserie, often slightly damp with sea water but sold at unbeatable prices. Some days I can barely get on board because the boat is stuffed with flaky confections.
You could have summed that up in one sentence but instead, much like me, you chose to waffle on in a very elegant and poetic way. I admire that about you.
You.
You might not know, but Jean-Pierre was caught and arrested for people smuggling last week. When the press asked him what was going on as he was led away, he said that the loss of his regular customers led him to try make up the money elsewhere. Probably shouldn’t have been using human-sized pain au Chocolat to do it mind.