WFH*

One of the benefits of all this broadband penetration and connectivity is the option of working from home. It is pretty convenient – I’ve been a bit off-color all week and the workload’s not getting any easier. Completely drained out by the evening, I head home, take a nap, get some food and log in after dinner and work till I’m too tired to (Unfortunately, not. I work till my work’s done).

I’d been pretty bad at this earlier, and I went through one job where I didn’t have remote access. Now that the convenience is back, I’ve learned some lessons that I’m applying well to this:

1. Environment is everything: I don’t have a work table (my apartment’s too small to have one of a configuration I’d like). But my dining table, albeit small, is always uncluttered. Except during dinner, my laptop is always on it, ready to be powered on. Sitting upright in a work-like mode helps me get work done ( I could lounge in my papasan chair, but that’s reserved for reading blogs and the news) . My CD player’s right next to the table, so music’s always handy.
   
2. Planning: If I leave work early in the evening with no concrete plan as to what I want to accomplish when working at night, I get nothing done. So I get the hard things where I’ll need advice or help from team-mates finished before I leave office. Home time is for flying solo.
   
3. Tools: This is more technical. My job entails me physically re-booting machines often. "shutdown –f –r –t 0" is your friend. I also commandeer multiple boxen, and the right tools to do so matter. I have installed a neat console manager (internal company-use only, sorry) for managing multiple remote desktops on my primary machine. This means that whenever I have access to my primary machine, I can pretty much start working on all the machines I want to.
   

Till I get my health and my sanity back. Ciao.

*non-standard acronym for "Working From Home". Commonly used on IM clients to indicate to colleagues/friends that you're not in office but working from home.