For those of you now “working” from home for the first time in your life, how has it changed you? Other than not driving to work every day, of course, For me, it’s breakfast. Before, I almost never ate breakfast. Now I have a nice breakfast every day. Today was butter lettuce, sliced tomatoes, sliced avocado, fresh green onions, sausage, and fried eggs. The beverage was coffee with vanilla extract and stevia.
Also, posting on the SDMB way too much.
For me it’s putting dinner on the table at pretty much the same time every day.
Before I’d get done in the office between 430 and 6 and dinner varied accordingly.
Now I’m able to slide making dinner in/during meetings and we eat pretty much at 6.
When I was going into the office every day, I’d eat a bowl of cereal then brush my teeth before heading out the door. Since working from home, I usually go grab some breakfast after I’ve already been logged in to work for a while. And it may be late morning or early afternoon before I realize “hey, you haven’t brushed your teeth yet today.”
Also, since I don’t have to be around other people, I’ve cut my daily showers down to every other day.
So yeah, personal hygiene is kind of taking a hit…
My commute’s about six minutes shorter.
More significantly, my entire morning routine is truncated - I eat my breakfasts on the clock now, so all told I start work forty-five minutes earlier than previously. I’m actually way more rushed than I was before - now I get up, shower, dress, and power on the computer in 15-20 minutes. Way less relaxed, but I do log off a bit earlier.
I eat more snacks during the day (up from none), and am eating a lunch again.
I’m reading less - I was reading during my lunch hours; now I don’t read at all.
Oh, and thanks to working at home I own a laptop now. Which is handy, what with suddenly having a reason to use a camera and microphone to talk to people in my personal life.
I get more sleep. Like an hour more a night. Basically to ride the train into work, I had to wake up earlier than if I drove my own vehicle, and now I don’t have to do either, so I can sleep in an hour, AND spend a half-hour watching cartoons with my children before work.
I find myself eating a more healthy diet on the whole; lunches are typically leftovers from the night before, so since my wife is involved, there are lots of vegetables and other healthy stuff.
I read less. I used to read on the train to and from work, as well as sometimes during my lunch hour as well, if I wasn’t in sync with my usual lunch buddies in the cafeteria. Now lunch is typically dealing with my kids’ lunches, and doing stuff like going for walks as a family.
I get about an extra hour in the evening as well where I used to walk to the train station and ride the train.
Socially, it’s less than it used to be in some ways. We used to go on regular date nights because the YMCA had a deal where they’d keep the kids for about 4 hours two times each month. We haven’t been willing to do that since February. I watch more TV somewhat than before, and my videogaming has gone way up, mostly because my gaming buddies are all more or less in the same boat of having nowhere to go either.
Our backyard garden is far better tended than ever before as well.
Virtual school is a goddamned beating. Half our effort goes into dealing with the various apps required for our kids to watch a video, do an assignment and turn it in. There’s a LOT of effort involved there. There’s also a lot of trouble keeping our boys on task- since they’re at home, and not in a classroom with 20 other kids, they’re more easily distracted, and school work seems like the worst of the options as far as stuff they could be doing, while playing educational games on the iPad instead of doing assignments seems like the best. So there’s a huge amount of redirection and keeping them focused that needs to be done.
I used to set my alarm for 5:15am. Get a shower and be to work by about 6:30. I always stayed in bed until the alarm went off.
Haven’t bothered with an alarm since march. As it turns out I’m naturally up by 3:30 - 5 am (My Wife is now on this schedule too) I have to force myself to stay in bed until 5am.
I then put on some sweat pants, a fleece and slippers and ‘commute’ to my WFH office that is the loft above our bedroom. I usually work till 10am or so, take a shower, have a meal and maybe walk the dogs. After my break, I come back to see if/what is broken at work and either deal with it or make a plan for the next day.
I booted a server this morning at 5am. Needed services restarted anyway. Right now I’m siting on my deck eating pickles and drinking a beer. I’m watching for anything important from work, but my day is done.
Some days I work 6 hours. Some days I work 10 hours. I can work weekends, or just take a day off. It’s what I’ve always wanted. Just do my job.
I’m a teacher in a boarding school. All of our students were “sent home” in March. “Home,” of course, often meant grandma’s house or a friend’s couch or the local freeway underpass or a tent in the woods. The school has transitioned to a distance learning platform in April and have been doing so ever since.
Our school was their support system. I dealt with those kids 8 hours a day, 5 days a week. If they had issues outside of those hours they took it to the dorm staff or the rec staff of their counselors or the admin staff or or or…
When we went to a distance learning platform we had to give students a way to communicate with us. Of course, we all thought todayxs tech-savvy teenagers would take to the technical aspects of DL like ducks to water… how naïve of us! Nope, none of them could figure out email or how to message in Canvas – kids are content users, not creators. So we all established Google Voice numbers so students could call or text us because that seemed to be the limits of their communication abilities.
And holy shit, did they do so. I guess before all this went down I was unaware just how helpless these students were. I’ve been fielding calls and texts 7 days a week, most hours of the day. I answer every one of them, because if a student is reaching out to me it means that 1) they need help (they arent calling just to shoot the breeze), and 2) they have nobody else to turn to. My boss suggested that I hold regular 9-5 hours M-F and everything outside of that is “me” time, but I just can’t do that. I cant ignore a kid who needs my help.
Since they have a direct line to us, we are often the only staff member they can contact outside of business hours. Se we’ve become their go-to contacts.
So the first thing I’ve noticed (or, more accurately, have been made aware of) is just how fragile and precarious my student’s lives are. When we return to F2F classes I’ll be have a much more compassionate view of some of my students, that’s for sure.
I’ve also noticed how… long, for lack of a better word, the day is. Previously everything was structured down to the minute. Now, I wake up, read a hundred emails, answer a dozen panicky texts, make phone calls, write emails, and then repeat throughout the day. The only things that are routinely scheduled are my Zoom class lectures and faculty meetings. 8 hours seems to go by much slower than it did in the classroom. But I’m far from bored.
Oh. And with 2 adults and 2 teenagers in the house 24/7, we go through food and TP like there’s no tomorrow 
.
Strangely enough, I wake up earlier than I did pre-pandemic. I think it’s because I can move at a slower pace once I am awake, so it is psychologically easier to get up.
My meals haven’t changed much, but I have lost a little weight. I’m not sure why, but I think it might be due to less snacking over the past six months. No breakroom cookies, donuts, and candy to tempt me. I also haven’t been walking as much. I used to do six miles a day (to and from work), but now I’m down to three miles. I think my appetite has gone down accordingly.
My bowel movements. I used to go in the evening after dinner. But now I always gotta go between 9-10:30 am. I like this because I feel lighter for the rest of the day, but I don’t like how urgently I have to go sometimes. It’s like I’m so used to being able to go whenever I want that my body has forgotten how to keep it in.
Went from long commute to no commute. A lot of my clothes haven’t been touched for months. And my dog is happy. He is with me almost 100 percent of the time (but he doesn’t understand why I spend all day on the computer when I could be spending time with him).
I would read my science magazines (Science and C&EN) during my commute. Those are now piling up. I was already behind back in March.
I also would listen to podcasts during the walking portions of my commute. So I’m behind on those as well.
My gf has been working from home, and will continue to do so till retirement. She’s freed up 3 hours each day that used to be spent driving.
For me, the upside is that my dinner prep can be predictable. She used to get home anywhere from 6 to 9. It’s difficult to plan having dinner hot and ready under those conditions. I’ve been cooking up a storm!
For me the challenge in working at home is all the little chores that compete for my attention. I’m more likely to realize the heat pump filter hasn’t been replaced in 6 months, so I’ll probably replace it and schedule a maintenance appointment while I’m at it.
That’s 7 minutes gone for the satisfaction of acheiving something and having the house in slightly better working order. I fight it all day long.
On the positive side, I’m learning to repair things that I’ve previously been replacing or throwing away. I like it, it feels more responsible, but there are a million projects in this house.
Heh, I wish my gf had problems like this. I get home from work and her lunch dishes are in the sink, forcing me to do dishes before I can even think about dinner.
Yeah, washing up after the kids (or getting them to wash up) is one of those chores.
I’ve been working from home for almost 6 years now. I guess that makes me a WFH hipster, I’ve been doing it since before it was cool. Like others I was reading less after not having an hour a day on the train. I also started having breakfast and better lunches. My alarm goes off at 6:30 and I’m usually logged in by 6:45. I’ll check work emails then go downstairs for a coffee and to check personal email. Breakfast is at 9:00, I shower and have lunch at 12:00 and usually finish between 15:30 and 16:30.
When I was still office based I knew I was going to start WFH so I had time to get a nice office set up in the spare room with a standing desk, nice chair, and 2 big monitors in addition to the laptop screen. The only equipment that belongs to the company is the laptop and docking station, all the rest is mine. I probably could have expensed it all, but then I’d have to give it back at some point, and finance would have thrown a fit seeing a £80 mechanical gaming keyboard turn up on the list.
My main social interaction is the pub but that went away when lockdown started in March. So instead to going to the pub I’d go out for walks in the evening. My best stretch was 5 miles/day on 11 straight days. I lost 6-7 pounds in the first couple weeks. Now that the pubs have reopened I’m going there more and doing fewer long walks.
My commute was about 30 minutes or so on the metro. That was roughly 60 minutes a day I could be alone with my thoughts, casually observing people and things, not looking at an electronic device of any kind, listening to the ambient noises of my surroundings, just appreciating a world that isn’t within arm’s reach. I miss that the most. I also miss putting on a proper suit. I rotated my summer/winter wardrobe in my closet, as one does, but I’ve never had the occasion to use it. Looks like I will rotate it back again in the fall out of habit rather than any real need.
It’s made me and my cats a much closer family.
I could take a quick nap during working hours. That was always a plus.
My commute was about 60 to 90 minutes round trip, so that’s some time I’ve reclaimed by working at home. My wife and I were able to commute together, which was nice, but now we have even more time together.
We had been renting and looking for a house to buy, but the possibility of working from home long-term changed what we were looking for. Originally, we were looking for a location that would reduce our commute… but houses that close in to downtown are more expensive and have smaller yards. The house we ended up buying (two weeks ago!) is on the outskirts of town, has a gigantic yard, a bigger floorplan, and is about $100k less than what we were expecting to spend downtown.
We bought this place with the idea that this will be our respective offices for the time being. Hopefully when things start opening up again, our employers will realize that working from home is viable in the long run.
I never set an alarm anymore. I’m up between 5:30-7am naturally, and the lack of pressure to get up and get ready and out the door by 7:30-7:45am has made waking up a much more pleasant thing. I get up and feed the animals, but rather than sprinting into “get ready” mode, I can go out and fill the bird feeders and birdbath, potter around the garden, make coffee, sit and enjoy that coffee while I watch a daily gardening YouTube channel. I then roll into my home office between 8-8:30 and start my work day.
During the day I can throw in a load of laundry, or have kitty snuggles, or do some weeding, if I need a break. I usually sit down to a nice lunch, rather than scarfing down some crap at my desk like I used to.
There’s not a lot I miss, honestly. I’d be happy to do this for the rest of my working days.