8.00 AM
I wake up, prepare and eat breakfast while listening to the news. I change into a decent shirt but the PJs pants stay on. Today I am working from home.
8.30 AM
I turn on my laptop and wait for everything to start up. Meanwhile, I make sure that I have my water, snacks and my notebook ready. I go through my emails and try to clear out the inbox to avoid another ‘your inbox is nearly full’ reminder. Then I go through my action items for each project and follow up with any pending items for today’s meetings. I touch base with each project manager to see if they have any specific tasks to do and I add them to my list.
10 AM
We have a daily Scrum meeting at 10 am and this is where the Project Management Team catches up with everyone and we get updates on ongoing concerns and notice on upcoming meetings. Any concerns or issues are raised in this meeting so we can rely on each other to help resolve the issue. After the meeting, I’ll engage with the project engineers who are doing any remediation work to get a status and to see if they need me to escalate anything.
11.00 AM
Depending on the day, I would start my clients’ meetings or internal meetings to get a status of where the project is at and the action plan going forward. I take notes and update the meeting invite with minutes or pending action items to be resolved before the next scheduled meeting.
12.30 PM
Lunchtime! The perks of working from home is you can make lunch every day but the con is that you have to make lunch every day. Uber Eats is also an option but that requires thinking ahead of what I want to eat.
1.00 PM
I log in and chair another external weekly status meeting. I take minutes, noting down action items and I will send these out afterwards. From this meeting, there is an action item for me to send out some documentation and follow up on ongoing technical remediation. I try to complete the action items as soon as possible whilst it is fresh in my mind and before other things take over priority and this gets pushed to the side.
2.00 PM
Time to start on project documentation. Today I’m working on a change request to include a new project scope and extend project support.
3:00 PM
It’s time to meet with my manager. Even though we chat often, we have a dedicated time in the calendar once a month to check in. This is a great opportunity to catch up on where I am with my work and any challenges I am facing and to celebrate the successes. We also discuss any training or development I might want to undertake. We also have a general chat and she checks in with how I am going.
One of the challenges of working from home is feeling connected to the team. So each day I make sure that I have regular communication with my team to talk about work and non-work things.
4.00 PM
I follow up on tasks that were on today’s to-do list and note down the items for tomorrow. Ticking off items from the list is one of the best feelings but then the list grows as the day goes on. I touch base with the project managers or the project engineers to give a quick status update.
5.00 PM
Home time! I make sure all my files are saved turn off my laptop and clear all work-related items from my table. Sometimes it’s hard to switch between work mode and home mode because I work from home 95% of the time so I try to remove work items from my sight to disconnect.
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