The plants in the window in my home office corner are outgrowing their space. I bought them for my large window niche at the tretton37 office, where they would have plenty of room. Now they’re squeezed onto a narrow window ledge. And since my home office is in the same room as our bedroom, we pull down the blinds every night, so the plants can’t be allowed to spread outside their narrow space. I’ve already had to move one to a different window because it grew too large. Others will soon need to follow. If not now, then in the spring, when the nights will be lighter and it will no longer be enough to pull down the blinds until they just touch the tops of the plants.

Not that their disappearance here would make much of a difference. I can barely see them behind the huge monitor that takes up much of my field of view.

The home office still feels like a semi-temporary solution. Or 25% temporary perhaps. OK for another year, but not for 10 years. I’d want to make more adjustments if this were to become permanent.

It’s hard to know how long to plan for. The coronavirus situation will resolve itself one way or another – vaccines are on their way, even if not within touching distance yet. But how much time will I be spending in an office after that?

My mouse gave up the ghost. I can’t remember when I bought it but it was years and years ago. Logitech is reliable.

I think what finally killed the mouse was near-constant bending of the cord where it pushes against my stack of magazines. It started disconnecting and then immediately reconnecting at random intervals, which made the computer go ding-dang-dong and then dong-dang-ding each time. That was a bit of a bother but not too bad, until the behaviour changed to disconnecting but then not reconnecting on its own.

With some experimentation I figured out that wiggling the cord would make the mouse come to life again so I got another few days of use out of it, while I researched mouse models.

Web shops list all kinds of specifications and measurements for mice – dpi and weight and battery life and sensor technology and what not. What they mostly don’t say much about is the shape of the mouse. I specifically wanted a mouse with an ergonomic shape that slopes down towards the little finger, like the old one. The web sites do not make it easy to find such mice. The shape of the mouse is usually not part of the description. There are photos, of course, but if those aren’t from the right angle, they don’t help much either.

The old-school way – asking people – worked much better. I asked at work what ergonomic mice people liked, got two or three models recommended, and just picked one of them. (Another Logitech model.)

The new mouse is wireless. I like the reliability of wired mice, but on my small desk a wireless one will be more convenient. That cable won’t be hitting my magazine stack any more.

I wonder how many years this one will last. There’s a chance that I won’t find out: I’m letting work pay for it, so it’s possible that I will switch jobs before the mouse dies (although I have no plans in that direction).

I went to the office for the first time in three months.

I was looking forward to cycling to town but it rained all morning and I really don’t like cycling in the rain so I took the train. Regretted it. All these people everywhere. I can only describe the train as “crowded”. Not as crowded as it would have been a year ago but still.

On the plus side, I met a few of my colleagues face to face, which was really lovely. We had a great workshop (about recruitment and technical interviews) and plenty of the kind of idea-bouncing and discussions that just don’t happen online.

On my way home, I passed a pavilion in Spånga where some representatives for the city were gathering information about how the locals here use all the parks and other green spaces that we have. I realized that our family rarely uses the green spaces in Spånga. We’ve outgrown them. If we want greenery, we want something larger than the little patches that Spånga has to offer, and we’ll go to Starboparken or Nälsta at the very least.

It was interesting to see just how detailed the city’s inventory of green spaces is. The map used nearly ten different kinds of green colour to mark the different kinds of green spaces. “Nature park” is distinct from “nature in the city”, and a “city block park” is different from “park square”. Some of their terms I can’t even find English equivalents for.

Last week, my first week back at work after vacation, was dull and slow. Half the team was still on vacation, and one of the two other developers was off sick, so I felt alone and isolated. I had to make a real effort to keep myself focused on work.

This week has been better. The team is back, we’re working together, talking to each other again.

And having meetings.

Remote meetings work very well when they’re small and tightly focused. But when we are six people in a meeting then inevitably some parts are more relevant to a part of the group and less so for others. In a face-to-face meeting, when others are talking about something that I am only peripherally involved in, I don’t lose focus much: I feel like I’m a part of the discussion just by being in the same room and looking at whoever is talking. But in a remote meeting, especially if I’m looking at a screen share rather than whoever is talking, my focus starts slipping and before long I am quite distracted, looking at code or browsing reddit or reading the news.

Giving myself something to do when I am passively listening helps a lot. A small distraction keeps worse distraction away. Crocheting works, and colouring. I keep my colouring books and pencils close at hand, in my desk drawer.

My second day back at work.

I realize now that I need to start thinking about lunches in advance again. During the summer someone has usually just ambled off to the supermarket when lunchtime approaches, and cooked something. But if I want to get a reasonable amount of work done during the day, I can’t take time for that every single day.

Today I fortunately found some odds and ends in the fridge. One half Mexican-inspired sweetcorn soup and one half Asian-inspired noodle soup plus a handful of roast cauliflower actually made a surprisingly good combination.

The workday was dull, both yesterday and today. The people on the business side of the team are still on vacation and one of the developers has been off sick so it felt rather lonely. And there is nothing interesting ahead of me in the backlog, only boring tasks. I had real trouble focusing and finding the energy to get anything done.

I met my colleagues face to face for the first time in months. We had a retrospective meeting and then lunch at Urban Deli’s rooftop restaurant. And since I was going to the office for this anyway, I worked there before and after the meeting as well.

Meeting the team was lovely, but working in the office was much less so. There were interruptions all the time – and while it’s nice that people stop by my desk to say hi and chit-chat, it really kills my productivity. Add the time spent on commuting, and by the end of the day I felt like I barely got anything meaningful done (and I do count the lunch as meaningful and time well spent) even though I was away for eight hours.

And for the first time in months I felt stressed. I had to look at the clock to start heading home at a reasonable time, and I felt the pressure to hurry home to the kids. Not pleasant at all.

Back in March, it took time for me to get used to working from home. But now that I’ve settled in, it really works very well for me, and I haven’t felt this relaxed and productive at work since… forever.

Working from home, I’ve cut out well over an hour of commuting time from every day. I “go to work” the same time as usual, but since there is no commute, I actually get to work earlier. So I’ve been racking up overtime daily. Now I’m close to hitting the overtime limit, so I’m going to have to make changes. I could go up in working time, but I really don’t feel like it.

So: more breaks, and more days off.

I already take proper lunch breaks, with half an hour for exercise and half an hour for lunch itself. Breakfast I usually have at my desk while reading emails or doing some other semi-passive task. I’ll be taking proper breakfast breaks from now on. Especially when the weather is as lovely as it is, and I can have breakfast outside.

This is the most relaxed, stress-free daily routine I’ve ever had during my working life. I have no schedule and no deadlines. I have time to sit in the sofa and read the morning paper. I work when I feel like it. I don’t need to hurry home in the afternoon – I’m already at home when Adrian comes home. I don’t even need to plan or cook dinner, because Ingrid cooks nearly every day now, to earn money.

tretton37 usually holds regular code lunches in our offices. Now that we can’t do that, we’ve moved our knowledge sharing events online. Today it was my turn to do a talk – a repeat performance of a talk I’ve done before, but this time streamed on YouTube instead of talking to a live audience sitting in front of me.

It felt weird at first to talk to a camera instead of real people, but I got used to it pretty soon. I found a decent setup with all the screens and windows and peripherals, with my presentation notes close to the camera. And I managed to get my talk done within my allocated time, just barely. I do tend to ramble on sometimes.

I noticed afterwards that I wave my arms a lot. When I speak in front of an audience, it feels natural to move around and gesticulate, and I imagine it looks normal. On screen, it seems more distracting. If I do this again, I’ll have to try and tone down the gesticulating.

Here’s my talk about multi-tenant architecture, in case you’re interested.

I had a chocolate cookie for today’s online Friday fika, ending our third week of remote working.

I’m sort of getting used to it, settling into this new reality, and finding solutions to make it a sustainable way of working. Our team retrospective today was also all about adapting to working 100% remotely and compensating for not being in the same room.

How do you check if your teammate is available for a quick chat, or deep in the middle of a tricky problem and doesn’t want to be disturbed? In the office you say their name, and if they’re busy, they can reply and tell you to go away, without breaking that thread of concentration. Remotely, you ping them on Slack, and then sit and wonder if they didn’t reply because they just forgot to check Slack or because they’re really busy.

Various reasons took me to the office today.

1.
An appointment with an optometrist with Ingrid, a few blocks from work, which unfortunately got cancelled just before, because the optometrist was off sick. She’s been waiting for that appointment since we first discovered her vision problems in December 2018, and it already got postponed once, so this was rather a disappointment. And probably all that the optometrist has is a slight cold.

2.
A job interview with a potential new hire at tretton37. While we generally work from home, the candidates get the choice between remote and face-to-face interviews. Today I had one of each.

The remote one was my first remote technical interview, and it was a bit of a challenge. We always do these in pairs, and a surprising amount of coordination between myself and my co-interviewer apparently happens wordlessly. The most noticeable difficulty was in taking turns – signalling when I wanted to jump in, or seeing whether my colleague was waiting to say something. In a room, three people naturally sit in more or less of a triangle, and it’s very obvious whether I’m facing the candidate or my colleague. When we’re on screens, they are both right in front of me, separated by a hand’s breadth. I am inevitably always facing both.

3.
While I was there anyway, I brought home more of my things, especially the plants. The things I need for work I already carried home two weeks ago. Now came the turn for the things that need me, i.e. my potted plants. They had all survived two weeks without water, but probably wouldn’t last much longer than this. Right now I can still go there occasionally to water them, but who knows what the situation is like two weeks from now?

The windowsill in my home office nook is quite full now. I just barely managed to squeeeze in the jade plant and dracaena and others from the office between my African violets.