How do you Work from Home?

Not to nitpick but I actually have no idea how your mom works from home. That video might as well have been shot in an office ;)

I'll be giving working from home a go tomorrow now my company has finally decided they kind of have to make it look like they actually care. Will be taking my laptop home from work and got a bunch of VM's set up locally connected to all the hardware I need to be able to access. Should work.

Not sure how much I'll be able to concentrate at home though.
 
^^

as long as you got no cat disturbing you, you should be golden :p
Your company really take their sweet time for conducting work from home. Is it essential services? My Lil bro work in a hospital and need to work as usual every day.
hopefully everything will be good for you.

Btw a bunch of VM in a laptop? Now im curious your laptop spec, i imagine it would be quite jaw dropping.
 
I got crows and wild boars :p

Nah, a NUC with an i3 and a laptop with an i5. I'm just running some basic Windows and Linux VM's, nothing heavy. Actually I'd say memory limitations are a bigger issue than the CPU. Both only have 8GB which isn't great when you run Windows VM's. I assign them 2GB which works for what I need them for, but it isn't great.
 
Serious question but how difficult is it to keep your kids from bothering you? We don't have any kids but the other day we were watching some program about how people had difficulties working from home because of kids etc. and we were like well this guy is sitting in the kitchen, the kids' bedroom, isn't telling Satan's spawn his kids to leave him alone etc. and we were like well why isn't he telling them to keep away? Looked like his kids were about the same age.
 
For me its not very different to being at work.
Its all remote anyway, I just have to ask for help from my colleagues via Teams when I need it instead of directly asking & fairly often I was doing that anyway for local techs, bit more taking number & calling back when fixed rather than fixing live.

No kids & I'm far enough from flatmate swearing at their PC that it (probably) doesn't pick up on mic.

2, 3, among the main issues I've run into:
I'm on my personal PC so to keep things properly separate it became immediately clear its best to use a separate login for work stuff.

I type Dvorak but servers/end-devices are Qwerty so I've been using my Kinesis keyboard at work because its got a hardware switch (I type Dvorak, it outputs Qwerty to the PC) but I don't like that keyboard for day-to-day so I'm now physically swapping them off desk between work mode & home mode.
Learning new respect for Windows ability to seamlessly switch input language :yes:
I think its actually good in that it helps keep a mental disconnect between work & home (also the separate login).

I normally shower, brush teeth then go to work & make a coffee when I arrive, doesn't work so good when its only single digit seconds between bathroom & work, ugh toothpaste coffee :runaway:
(the fix is having coffee before shower/teeth)
 
Serious question but how difficult is it to keep your kids from bothering you? We don't have any kids but the other day we were watching some program about how people had difficulties working from home because of kids etc. and we were like well this guy is sitting in the kitchen, the kids' bedroom, isn't telling Satan's spawn his kids to leave him alone etc. and we were like well why isn't he telling them to keep away? Looked like his kids were about the same age.

from my experience interacting with kids, its impossible to tell them anything. You need to trick them, so they think they are doing things that they want. Doing that for a day or two, okay, sometimes even funny. But for years? dunno.. i didnt have kids, heck i have not had any girlfriend.
 
Serious question but how difficult is it to keep your kids from bothering you
They don't generally bother me, it's when they are completely silent I have to be vigilant :)

It's the daily tasks that's time consuming:
1. Do homework with the oldest.
2. Make sure they don't spend all their time on their tablets/kick them out of the house to play/bike/roller skate.
3. Prepare snack at 10.
4. Prepare lunch at 12.
5. Prepare a second snack at 14.30
6. Look what they are doing when there is complete silence.
7. Look what they are doing when they scream/try to murder each other.

All in all 3-4 hours is taken out of an 8-17 working day.

Cheers
 
I log in to whatever local resource I have to be able to VPN into the work network, then I RDP into several different developer systems, one is used for Visusl Studio and PowerShell and the other has Outlook and Teams running with any Office App or file explorer to look at documentation, but I could run email and teams from my local tablet.
 
Me and the wife are both working from home, while at the same time caring for both a hyper energetic 4 year-old and a 8-month baby.
Let's just say it's not been easy.

Back in December we had figured out we'd desperately need something like a week-long vacation with just the two of us (i.e. away from constantly paying attention to diapers + feeding + sleep patterns + education + behavior + etc). We wanted to do this as soon as humanely possible for leaving the little one with the grandparents, and at the time we thought this opportunity would arise around April or May.

Guess who's not going on a childless vacation anytime soon, and has to spend 24/7 locked up in a house with their children.
We came to a family house in a very secluded beach town to reduce the probability of contagion (this is a ghost town all year around except Summer), and also for the older one to be able to leave the house and ride the bike for half an hour otherwise she'll overload our brains with constant loud attention-seeking tricks around the house. So I guess there's that.


Oh but we were talking about how we do the actual work. Right..
I'm doing project management right now so all I really need is my company laptop and the internet. Of course being the overkill moron enthusiast that I am, within the last 5 weeks I also ordered a 2nd-hand eGPU and a cheap though pretty decent 22" monitor. I did justify the monitor as it being for productivity, but the eGPU is here so I can erm.. simulate stuff.



Serious question but how difficult is it to keep your kids from bothering you? We don't have any kids but the other day we were watching some program about how people had difficulties working from home because of kids etc. and we were like well this guy is sitting in the kitchen, the kids' bedroom, isn't telling Satan's spawn his kids to leave him alone etc. and we were like well why isn't he telling them to keep away? Looked like his kids were about the same age.

After some weeks of trying, we ended up with the morning / afternoon dynamic.
I try to do some light work in the morning (mostly answering e-mails, setting up meetings, etc.) while I take care of the girls during the morning and the wife does all her meetings and work that need more focus. In the afternoon we change roles.
Besides that, we have some rules come meal time, we both need to drop everything and do teamwork focus to cook, put the table, feed them (90% of the effort) and ourselves (10% of the effort), lift the table, put the stuff in the dishwasher, prepare them to nap/bed, baths, etc. There's absolutely no way we can leave these tasks to just one of us and not go mad.
And the time we spend in the kitchen.. oh how I wish for a damn restaurant right now..
 
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And the time we spend in the kitchen.. oh how I wish for a damn restaurant right now..

For me, this is the best part of the whole situation. I love cooking and having an excuse to cook AND save money eating? Win-win. Normally, I'd be tempted to eat out to save time, but now I have an excuse to spend more time cooking instead and it is great.

And doing the dishes by hand is another physical activity to supplement exercising to stay healthy. This part I don't particularly like, but it's good to look at it in as positive a light as possible.

Regards,
SB
 
For me, this is the best part of the whole situation. I love cooking and having an excuse to cook AND save money eating? Win-win. Normally, I'd be tempted to eat out to save time, but now I have an excuse to spend more time cooking instead and it is great.

For us too. We both love to cook but after a long day + travel, neither of us have the energy to do it every day but now it's very different. Most fresh fruit, beg and meat are easier to get now that everybody has stopped panic buying a dozen chickens,

Neither of us worked from home before the current situation, but we've gotten used to it. The trick for us to have a clear divide between work space and home space - a home office helps immensely but not everybody has that luxury. One of my colleagues is working out of his kitchen. Most kitchen furniture is not designed to be worked from 8 hours, so a good desk, chair, and general cutter/distraction-free environment goes a long way.

Everybody is still getting up to speed on Microsoft Teams which seems to have four ways to do everything but the mono view design is not great for multitaskers. Why can't I see the videoconference/shared screen, whiteboard and things like calendar/other chats (for reference) at the same time? Can you? If so, how!?! :-|
 
Lots of people let their kids do whatever they want "cat dads" or whatever. They are now stuck with the choice of having them watch videos play games all the time or drive them crazy .

If your kids were used to boundaries before I think you will be fine . I do worry about the long term though for some of them. I have taken my two older running a decent bit . Gets everyone out of the house and the energy out. Our youngest takes more energy and time because that is the nature of these things .
 
uh... after being jobless for almost a year, i'm now working from home. and now i have a phobia of the "ding" whatsapp make LOL.

ding! and my heart skipped a beat.
 
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