A year of working from home

What is your routine for a work-from-home day?
How did it affect your performance?
What did you do to get over these difficulties?

In Malaysia, we have spent nearly a year not going to the office and there isn’t any signal that we can go back to the old days when people were gathering, worked effectively without any sufferings.

So what I’ve done to prepare for a work-from-home life and make sure those difficulties become my barriers?

Find a new house

I’m an introvert so the first thing is I decided to move out from the current sharing house with other guys — the main reason is I want to have my own space to chill out after a long working day also I need more space to prepare for my work corner.

Also during this pandemic period, the renting price is marked down and you can easily find a good place nearby KLCC (Petronas Twin Towers).

Setup work corner

As I mention above, I have to have a comfortable corner to enjoy coding, learning and entertaining.

An external monitor: brought from the office. This is an essential device for most developers because we are always work with coding and not a few line of codes but hundreds. A bigger screen will help me to focus on coding for a period of time without having eyestrain.

A desk pad (optional) for better alignment of my devices and make them stable.

A notebook comes with some A4 papers for learning and brainstorming.

An iPad (I bought for myself last birthday) - this is a very helpful tool not only for entertainment but also for my daily task, here are some examples:

• Meeting and video call in Microsoft Teams without switching my IDE or browser tabs.
• Reviewing codes, yes, you did not mishear about it. Every morning before start coding or researching, I often do some code reviews for my teammates because my head is fresh and I’m not rushed for anything and make sure I will not be distracted during the coding period. It will take me around 15 minutes and I can do it on my bed ;)). The Github on iPad is very friendly so it makes the same experience as the website version.

A noise-canceling headphone (my best choice is from Sony) — Actually I only used it when I was in office or on train but at home, sometimes I want to open the balcony to have fresh air and enjoy music or meeting.

And the last important thing is a cup of hot coffee.

My working desk at the first setup — I already replaced this tiny chair to prevent hurting my back

Keep being positive and healthy.

I must confess that I'm used to be a person with unhealthy life (coke, coffee, Redbull / monster) and gaming overnight. But ya, it tends to be normal of a boy that never grows up. During this pandemic period I found that I can take an advantage of being at home and learn much knowledge.

Yes, I made some hard decisions, thought about what will be next in my life and what if this lockdown will not get over soon. I attended some short interviews to find out which knowledge that I’m lacking. It forces me to revisit my lessons, my experience and start learning new things in tech development.

So I changed my hobby (or keep some good practices):

• Tried to commit a full work or partial testable work at the end of the day and don’t care about what is working hour because I cannot go out for chilling or photography anyway (It will not make sense to someone).
• Take a short sleep for 20 minutes every time I feel tired and get back to work after.
• Turn off notification from social network — even cancel some meetings that is not related to my current work/ not-important meetings.
• Close mailboxes for a while and only check them twice a day — lunch and after working-hour
• Side projects are good but they cannot be my main income so I will stop visiting them until the main tasks in my company are finished.
• Learning after work — it’s used to be my hard decision (and always) become I can sign into an online game easier than open a tutorial/documents in Github/Medium or Geekforgeek. But I slowly stepped on it by writing down everything I was listening from Youtube videos, created and pushed a small commit to my personal Github repository and now write a long Medium story :D.
• Keep in touch with people who are important to my life (my family in Vietnam, my friends in KL,…) helps me to feel alive and positive.

So what is your routine for the work-from-home life? Let us share and help us improve together.