It is the highest time for me to share my feelings about working from home for almost a year now.

I always imagined that working from home will be relaxing experience, as digital nomad – half day of working, half day spending on journeys or relaxing beach.

Unfortunatelly in my case this dream wasn’t true last year – for me it looked rather as marathon:

1. wake up at 6:30, feeding my cats, waking up my kids, preparing breakfast for them
2. if they attended to school – walk them to school before 8:00. If they had remote lessons – turn on their computers and prepare everything for them and very often supporting things like:”Mom, it doesn’t work and I don’t know what key to press”. Then taking the opportunity to turn on the computer quickly I read all of the emails – about 20-30 in the morning, scan all of support issues on both of the environments, which I supported.
3. Next – fast deciding and dividing tasks in 3 pilles: the ones which can be done in 5-15mins, the ones which require scripting or deeper analysis and at the end import/exports of data. If I was lucky I could do 3-4 easy tasks before meeting at 9:30. If not -it meant that I had several messages on WhatsApp, SMS, telephones from school teachers or something more complicated just crushed at work. Then the real fun began: fixing the problem from work-log analysis, searching event viewer in Windows, reviewing all mail queues, debugging scripts the same time: participating in teleconference or asking my husband for help with kids. The rest of the tasks must have been done next day between other meetings.
4. When first wave finished – then I had marathon of meetings like: how to upgrade one system in 9 hours if vendor doesn’t provide any reasonable software for that, testing integration between systems or providing next idea on how to implement things, which are possible only in one system, finding the solution on migrating data from one system to another, providing support to my colleague, who refused to learn to code or read documenation. Meanwhile I checked my kids’ homework, listened to my husband meetings or read/write messages to somebody on Teams, Skype, WhatsApp. At the beggining I had also configuration of monitoring or debugging monitoring applications – believe me I really hated these days.
5. Of course there were also days when I had to check and find out new solution – like MFA in MSAzure for Omnitracker. Then tactits was different – thanks God for video recordings from conferences! I could watch it several times – even if the recording was in German, then belive me – after 5-6 times you could understand all of the content or at least guess what could be English name of the option;) Then fast checking in Google- read several articles and one free MsAzure training later, little help from BUD helpdesk – and voila – new settings in Omnitracker were set up;)
6. Rarely happened that I had only support tasks at work – then I could watch IT conferences or listening to podcasts while doing my work.
7. Some of my days were also divided between work and:

• taking care of my mother, while she was at my home during her flat renovation
• taking my son to special excercises (1,5h off)
• taking my cat to vet (1 week – during lunch time)
• going to school for books or to mechanics to pickup my car
• going to doctor/dentist

Rarely I had the real opportunity to pretend to work and ie: watch tv or doing laundry during the work. Many times on contrary I had to work in the evenings- because customer wanted to have change in the evening or copying of data was faster in the evening while network bandwith was better.

After work we usually: played board or computer games (I never suspect that I came back to this addiction from my teenagers years;)), watched tv series or working on our hobbies like: building robot, coding games, sewing, painting, reading books, making jewellery. Unfortunatelly also: teached our younger son how to read or help him with other homework. With older son as he will have his first communion next year – going to church for different devotions and retreats.

And the funniest thing is at the end – all of my work is done from the room in my flat, which we call: „workshop”. In that room we have: 2 sewing machines, 6 computers (one is Minecraft server), printer, scanner, 3D printer, different tools for various purposes, robot, fews of RaspberryPIs, basket from Tesco, some interesting books and CDROMs with games and of course at least one of our cats lying under the desk or on my knees. I usually work wearing casual things like: sequin dress or Mickey Mouse blouse…Thanks God, my customers can’t see this combination…;)