Work-from-home tech confessions
These are the major issues that tripped us up during the first weeks of remote work.
- Author of the award-winning, NY Times-reviewed nonfiction book The Tetris Effect; Longtime consumer technology expert for CBS Mornings
Every office is now a home office. Maybe it's the open-office version, taking up a corner of a dining table. Maybe it's even a kind of upgrade, to the kind of private office virtually no one has anymore, just tucked away in a den or basement. But unless you've been a full-time work-from-home type since before the arrival of the coronavirus, this is still uncharted territory, full of missteps, problems and unexpected consequences.
I asked some of the people I work with, tech experts all, what issues they've discovered in our brave new WFH world.
Read more: How to stay sane and productive when working from home
Josh Goldman
While I work from home regularly, I don't have the dedicated workspace that everyone recommends. It's never really been an issue either, but now with my kids at home, finding a quiet spot to work is suddenly about as easy as finding Charmin at the store. Instead, we're going the opposite direction and turned our dining room into an open office by using the table's leaves to extend it and giving each one of us a "workstation" so no one is fighting for space. And like a true open office, everyone has a pair of headphones.
Read more: Online education classes for every age and grade
Lori Grunin
My confession is I can't work from home. My chair isn't high enough, so my back is killing me, I don't have enough space to spread out, and on top of that, I can't concentrate at all. Being surrounded by sleeping cats makes me just want to go back to bed. On the upside, I can sit in the dark, and my network performance has been pretty normal.
A rustic desk, Katzmaier-style.
David Katzmaier
My basement, where I have my main "home office" desk, is a visual disaster that makes a terrible backdrop for Zoom calls. The first thing I did was create a decent backdrop with a bookshelf and some knicknacks in another corner of the basement. I can quickly set up the "conference area" using a secondary desk made of sawhorses and a plywood plank that nobody in the meetings can see.
Read more: How to change your Zoom background
Scott Stein
Even though I sensed the shutdown coming, I didn't accumulate enough home recording options on my own, like microphones. Now I'm realizing how key certain pieces of gear are. Also, while I've worked from home for a while, off and on, the continuous nature and the not-going-out-at-all part has made me respect and clean my spaces more. It's like living on a ship.
What have you discovered about the full-time WFH lifestyle? Share in the comments or tweet me.
More on WFH tech
- Useful gear for the quarantined creative
- Best tech for students working from home
- This is the gear you need to work from home
- Best cheap VPN: 3 options for working from home in quarantine
