Category / Life

by ksamaschke

How I work from home

To successfully work from home, I follow some simple rules allowing me to stay focused and productive.

To successfully work from home, I follow some simple rules allowing me to stay focused and productive.

Notifications

  1. Silence all acustical notifications
  2. Disallow all optical notifications

Work, Meetings and Time-Boxings

  1. Make a To-Do-List and work accordingly
  2. Don’t be frustrated if you don’t get all tasks done from your list – review them, schedule them for the next day, adjust
  3. Don’t do back-to-back-meetings
  4. Keep time-boxings for meetings
  5. Turn your camera on and focus on the meeting
  6. Take notes

Breaks

  1. Take regular breaks (like 5mins every hour)
  2. Allow yourself to get distracted once in a while, don’t punish yourself for it – in the end, we’re all humans, aren’t we?
  3. Get outside, when the weather allows for it, walk around, enjoy the nature

Infrastructure

  1. Invest in your infrastructure – if not already present, buy a good monitor, a good keyboard and perhaps (although currently overpriced as hell) a good webcam
  2. Invest in your meeting equipment – if not already present, buy a comfy headset, don’t use in-ears for longer meetings
  3. Invest in your interactive equipment – buy a good keyboard and a good mouse
  4. Invest in your working zone – get a good desk and a professional chair

Family-Life

Family first
  1. If your significant other is working from home as well, then use separate rooms, if possible
  2. If your kids are at home, then don’t punish them for being kids – just take the time for them, involve them, give them tasks if necessary, introduce them, wrap your day around them
  3. Take your time for your family

I try to work and live according to these rules. To me, this works out.

Hope, it does for you as well.

by ksamaschke

Prepared for a longer stay at home

The past days, I was re-activating and refitting my old iMac, allowing me to work on a big screen. In parallel, I also moved some other equipment, such as an additional monitor, a professional microphone, a way more comfortable chair and a bigger desk to my new workplace.

My workplace

I have to say, I’m quite happy with this arrangement. It allows for professional work, and I still have some room left. I need to do something in regard to the blank wall behind, but that is an additional step.

Cool. I’m settled! 🙂

by ksamaschke

Living Home-Office

To me, being trapped at home is quite a new experience. I am used to work remotely for the past 15 years, so no issue with that, but now that I am forced to work from home (a stationary location), my Laptop might not be my best companion anymore, at least for the foreseeable future. So I figured, I had to change something…

My approach to working from home is to use my old 2009 iMac (which I understood to be some hobby project to me) as my main computer, at least as long as raw power is not required. I therefore executed some minor upgrades: I moved it into my “new” workspace at home, added an SSD, changed the graphics card, connected a professional webcam. Today I will replace the desk with bigger one and add 32 GB of RAM. And then I’ll be fine working here the next months. 🙂

My old iMac is my main work computer 🙂

And, BTW: I love having 27 inches. I wished my laptop would have this screen size. 🙂

by ksamaschke

Five minutes late…

I am delivering a Xamarin workshop this week. Unfortunately for my sleeping habits, the location is Munich, appr. 550km away from home.

The best way to get there is by train, at least if you don’t like flying. So, my train was to depart at 4.30am. Which implied I would have to leave home at latest at 3.50am.

Well. So much for the theory.

In practice, I left home at 3.55am. Which caused me to directly head on the Autobahn towards Munich. Instead of having a somewhat relaxed trip to the Bavarian capital, I had an unrelaxing one in my car. And instead of elegantly driving with an ICE-train from Munich to Frankfurt and then back home on Friday, I’ll drive back home on Thursday and try to catch the morning train from Berlin to Frankfurt on Friday, since I don’t want do sit in my car for 10+ hours.

This makes five minutes quite important.

And that’s why I try to keep an eye on the details, though I’m the high-level guy at Cloudibility.