Idle Thoughts About Working From Home

I’ve had a few days where I’ve worked from home lately. One and a half due to weather and one due to a stomach bug that left me mostly fine but unwilling to share bathrooms/run the risk of not being able to find a toilet in time. These are the first days I’ve worked from home in a while and the first ones where I was actually able to work on my highest-priority work while working from home in a year and a half or thereabouts. You see, the project I’ve been working on for that time has necessitated me being in the office. I can’t exactly bring it home with me and, even if I did bring some stuff home, it wouldn’t be terribly useful for all the work I had to do. So, on days that I felt less than stellar, needed some time to myself, needed a mental health break from being around people, or just felt crummy, I still went into the office. That’s the job, you know? Gotta go to where the work is and do the work, at least as long as you’re not sick or contagious or putting yourself (or someone else) in harm’s way by doing so. And I was not, so I went into the office and suffered through a lot of days where I’d have much rather been working from the comfort of my home. Now that I’ve got a bit of a reprieve from that sort of work, though, I’m absolutely working from home every chance I can get.

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So Much For Restraint At Work…

It has been a week and a half since my boss told me I could take my side “research” project and work on it more actively. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to really do that since I’ve gotten sidetracked every single day by something that came up and required my attention. I did get to spend one evening of work earlier this week doing research on some of the tools I’d be using and I got to have a chat with a few people about how to make this useful for them, but I haven’t made much forward progress because the other people I need to talk to are busy during every free moment I’ve got. Between not being able to access people and running into my own time and energy limitations, I’ve actually done less work on this project in the last week and a half than I did in the single week prior. There’s just been so much going on and I’ve been unable to pull myself away from most of it since, after all, this project isn’t really my job. It is now a thing my boss doesn’t mind me working on, but I think we’re both aware that he meant I had to still keep up with the stuff that features more heavily in my job description.

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