046: Working From Home

A lot can happen in just a few weeks. Due to COVID-19 pandemic, business as usual is anything but … and Andrew and I felt like we should interrupt our regularly scheduled podcast to take some time and talk about working from home – something that we all are going to have to deal with for the foreseeable future. Since so many of the people we listen to this podcast are single or small office practitioners, we thought that instead of running our scheduled (and completed - DOH!) podcast episode – which was titled “A Culture of Design” and will be released a bit later in the year - that we should take this moment in time and talk a little bit about how the current climate is impacting our daily routines, our jobs, the basic stuff that for the vast majority of us, are the givens that help ground us. A bit of this is purely selfish on my part because I wanted to make a record of sorts of this particular moment in time - talk about what is happening to our daily lives in what is unquestionably unprecedented activities. We will also be talking about working from home – what that actually looks like – home office setups, multiple people all working from home, teaching classes remotely, thinking about what that might be like from both the teacher and the student side of things, along with some more mundane realities that we are having to deal with. I will go on record and say that I am not really a "work-from-home" fan. As an employer, I will concede that I don't think that the vast majority of people really do their best work when left completely to their own devices, a big part of that is based on my own behavior, but as an employee, I really feed off the energy and conversations that take place within the work environment. [Note: If you are reading this via email, click here to access the on-site audio player] Traveling and Going to the Grocery Store [ 4:36 mark] Just about every part of our daily routines is being affected in ways that still don't make a great deal of sense to me. I'm not sure if it's hoarding behavior taking place, or something along the supply chain has been impacted (across the entire planet) but I don't know why it's so difficult to get your hands on some toilet paper. I was out of town for the week when most of the craziness took place where I live. I was in Northern California spending the week at a rental house in Sea Ranch (if you're not familiar with this landmark project, I've written about it in detail previously here: Sea Ranch, California) and from afar I watched more and more things close down and become unavailable. Friends were telling me about how everything in the grocery stores was gone and that by the time I get back into town all that will be left will be canned asparagus and potted meat. Luckily it wasn't that bad but there were limits put in place on the number of specific items you could purchase. Luckily, my wife and I do not exhibit hoarding personalities and most of the things on this restriction list were not an issue for us. Working from Home [ 15:12 mark] I would be interested to hear from people how their work from home situation is shaping up. Andrew and I recorded this episode on Sunday, March 22nd, and I have now spent 1 week working from home ... and my opinions on the matter have been profoundly impacted by this single week. I will say that my dogs LOVE having all of us at home all day. In the beginning, it was a bit overbearing - they wanted to be around me all the time and for them, they wanted me to pet them, throw the ball and play fetch, even a game of tug-of-war was not out of the question. On day one, I thought "Okay, I'll do some of this so you will leave me alone ..." They still aren't leaving me alone. Hopefully, they will start to tone down their neediness of my attention because I honestly don't have the time to pay attention to them. I was very surprised by just how much time I spent working last week. I'm not sure I was very efficient with my efforts on Monday and part of Tuesday, but I finally broke down and set up a "proper" workspace late Tuesday night because sitting on the couch and standing at the bar counter was not working for me. We have two viable workspaces in my house - there is a proper office at one end of the house which is the domain of my wife. Since she already works from home from time to time, not to mention that she runs the household finances, she rightfully claimed this space when we bought this house a few years ago. My daughter has a built-in desk in her bedroom because she basically has 4 hours of homework every night and has needed a proper workspace since she started the 7th grade 4 years ago. And then there's me ... I have nothing. Here is a look at the "temporary" workspace I am throwing down. I am set up in my bedroom in front of the sliding glass door, and while it looks terrible, so far it's functioning fairly well. I can open the sliding glass door - which I do every day - to get fresh air, the view is pretty nice, and the surface area is pretty large and can accommodate all the computers and papers that I put on here. However ... I might need to do something about my chair. It's unquestionably the coolest part of this setup and is remarkably comfortable for long periods of time, but the issue is that it is about 1" lower (or the table is 1" higher) than what I need and by the end of the day, this disconnect results in sore and achy shoulders from being hunched up all day. This is my (Andrew's) current setup. I am working on my dining room table. While this is 100% temporary, it is working well enough. Obviously I need more desk real-estate. I have been spending some of this isolation time to work on my future home office space, but it has been going a bit slower than I hoped. That is mainly due to the amount of actual work I have been doing during spring break and now isolation. I hope to have my permanent home office completed in the month of April. It will be my new home for professional practice, teaching, podcasting, and blogging. A real HQ! At the moment we are in sheetrock repair and paint mode. Teleconferencing - The New Normal [ 21:10 mark] I am a little shocked to admit that I have participated in more teleconferences over the last two weeks than I have in the first 25 years of my career. At my last job, I participated in a grand total of three in a 6-year window whereas at my current position at BOKA Powell, I might do 6 a week! I did a screen grab during one of my meetings last week when we had 10 people on the call. We are working through a masterplan study and I am part of a 4-person team within my office. On this particular call, we were presenting our progress to the clients with the intent to receive their input and feedback as we move forward on this project. While this was the presentation meeting, I bet the members of this team jumped onto a teleconference call either using GoTo Meeting or the conferencing feature within the Teams feature offered by Microsoft 365. So we wanted to provide a small list of teleconferencing/remote working applications during this time. While there are dozens of services, the list I have compiled below is based on those services that I personally know someone who is using them. A few of them, to be honest, I had never even heard of before, but as it turns out, they are fairly popular. If you look up a “Top 10” list, these will most likely be there. GoTo Meeting This one has been around for a while. They have 2 standard plans ($14-$16/month) that you can choose. The ‘professional’ plan has limited features and the business plan would most likely be the one used by AEC. This is mainly due to the drawing tools feature that is not available on the basic professional version. They both allow a large number of participants (25+ HD video) and have the standard features of most applications. GoTo has a good mobile interface for Android and iOS and it seems to have some good fe