We're almost 3 months into lockdown. Wow.
Time flies. On 15 January I was on a plane to Shanghai as a normal routine work trip, and by 23 January I was wearing a mask and heading back to New York worried about the sudden lockdown of Wuhan.
Working from home during this has been a challenge. The first time I did it, I remember coming back to the office with a mess of a document and remarking to my colleague, “how do you focus? I couldn't get anything done.” I remember it was so concerning to so many of my colleagues that I had essentially had a cliff dive in productivity, and all I could do was shrug my shoulders and remark how it all seemed like a blur. And it still does – I'm not sure what happened, just that I had a document, words were not falling into place, and I couldn't understand why.
Fast forward to this situation today, and the initial work from home issue took hold again, but at a shorter interval – possibly because I planned for it. But as someone who tried to keep a strict separation of work and home, physically more than anything, my home workstation was nowhere near prepared for this. Buying KVMs, laptop stands, new adapters... it made for some tough times at the start of this one, especially since it was sold out everywhere. I didn't plan well enough – probably should have bought all of these things before everyone went into lockdown, but I probably thought I can survive through this again, and try my best for it to not be a blur – then when it passed 2 weeks I realised that was more than definitely not happening.
And being so used to physical separation of work and home sucks, too. There are days where I sit down at my computer at 9am and don't get up until 9pm, and I'm still staring at the same screens, except now they're my computer instead of the laptop I have plugged in. So I'm still sat here, and that's not a good thing.
I got a pull up bar, though, so occasionally when I'm stressed or need to stretch my legs I'll go over there, attempt a pull up, hear my back crack from the stretching, and then go back and sit down – but it'll feel much better.
Anyway, other than the obvious productivity hit, I think things have been relatively okay on my end. Kind of wish I had a patio. But not sure there's enough money in the world to afford a place with a patio in New York City right now.