hrj | Entries tagged with wfh

Back in the Before Times, I could regularly be heard to whine, "I could conquer the world if only I could get one good night's sleep first." I have a few chronic sleep issues. A rather light case of sleep apnea -- right on the line for recommending a CPAP, so I use one and notice the difference. Tinnitus that is highly noticeable when I'm trying to get to sleep or back to sleep -- which I manage by listening to low-volume audiobooks while sleeping. (I rather wonder whether that affects my sleep in other ways, but the trade-off is worth it.) And back in the Before Times, the crunch between getting up early enough to do my commute before the traffic got bad, and trying to cram in some productivity in the evenings.

When I first started working from home, my plan was to continue getting up on the same schedule as for a commute, but to get in some writing/productivity time before "the office". And, of course, with no evening commute, there was no need to stay up latish to get things done. And that worked for a while. But increasingly, I'm just enjoying the ability to wake gently with the sun rather than an alarm, to lie in bed for a while, to have a cooked breakfast in the morning. Mind you, I'm a morning person, so I'm still normally out of bed by 7am, usually earlier. And I still have a set of online tasks I usually get to over breakfast. But except for unusual circumstances (e.g., online meetings with colleagues in Germany or the like), I'm waking "naturally" and not rushing in the morning.

And I have all the time in the world in the evening after work. I do yard work -- in the daylight! I cook dinners. I read books over dinner. I watch shows on Netflix! I'm not as computer-productive in the evenings as I'd hoped I'd be, in part because WFH involves a greater percentage of time staring at a screen than being in a physical office, and my eyes and brain get tired of it. But I don't feel like I have to steal sleep time for my evening productivity. My Apple Watch reminds me that I want to get to bed by 9:30 (planned sleep time is 10-6) and I generally pay attention.

I never have that feeling of "there's sand between my brain and my skull" feeling I get when I'm underslept. I usually get up at the same time on weekends, rather than sleeping in to try to make up time. And at no time during quarantine have I gotten in the viscous circle of underslept > insomnia > underslept > insomnia > sleeping pills > groggy > repeat. Never felt any need for sleeping pills whereas in the Before Times there'd be at least once a month where I'd take half a dose to get me past the gate.

I think this is what "enough sleep" feels like.

It's well past the recommended wait period to pub up bird feeders again (because of the salmonella outbreak) but I was waiting for most of the contractor work in the back yard to get finished. Put the feeders back up today and was rewarded with a new sighting: a hooded oriole. Very striking! I got them occasionally in Oakland, but this is the first one I've seen in Concord.

Left to my own devices, I'm a binge-and-bust housekeeper. I'll ignore the clutter (and let the clutter impeded cleaning) until I get the intersection of time and frustration, then it's Clean! All! The! Things! (Also: I do one complete top-to-bottom cleaning on New Year's Day, just because.)

Back in the Oakland house, I finally came up with a chore management system. I identified all the individual routine (or not so routine) cleaning chores for each room, assigned each a frequency, then set them up in a repeating-chore app so I could check them off each time I performed one. I also did time estimates and set my schedule so that I spent no more than 15 minutes a day on housekeeping.

Then I moved. And I had a long commute that ate away at my time+energy on work days. And I had an entirely different house layout that required a different approach to chores. And I figured I'd just sort of float for a while while I figured out a new system that worked. Ten years later...

Working from home has not only meant having a bit more free time, but it's meant that fitting small tasks in around the work day is not only easy, but it's good ergonomics. However it took me most of the year to get around to applying this fact in a systematic function. Setting up the Roomba after my New Year's cleaning this year was the trigger for finally getting around to systematizing the rest of the tasks.

You see: it isn't even a matter of knowing what needs to be done, or of having the time and energy to do it. The big problem is the mental work of keeping track of what the specific task is that I should do *now*. This is what task checklists are ideal for. Plus: the physical joy of checking things off.

So I once again sat down and systematically identified all the routine tasks for each room, assigned each a frequency (weekly, monthly, bi-monthly, or annual), and drew up a matrix on a poster-sized post-it. My routine now is that at the end of each work day, I glance at the list and pick one task that hasn't been done yet for the current cycle and do it. Often I end up doing more. (The efficiency of doing all the similar tasks in all the rooms they apply to -- like wet-mopping floors--overwhelms the one-task-at-a-time theory.) If I wanted to, I could do all the tasks at the beginning of a cycle and get it over with, but I mostly stick to the idea that I should never do more than 15 minutes of housework on any given day.

Having set it up on a paper system this time (which works a lot better for triggering choosing a task than an app does) I now find I've identified additional tasks that need to be added, so I'll have to draw up a new matrix at some point. (The original draft covers 9 months and I don't want to wait that long to update it.)

It really *is* easy for me, in my current WFH status, to keep the place in a continuously presentable state by this method. But that doesn't mean I should beat myself up for not organizing this sooner, because the creative work of identifying and organizing the task list is nothing to sneeze at. And three factors are big contributors to the success. WFH means that the "15 minutes a day" is not a massive percentage of my at-home time on a workday. Having set up the Roomba, the need to keep the floors clear for it work is a big incentive for avoiding clutter. And having the Roomba take care of the basic vacuum+sweep aspect is a bit weight off the schedule. It also doesn't hurt that I'm the only person I'm responsible to for the results, so I can tailor my system to what works for my psychology. My sympathies to all those who have to coordinate housekeeping among multiple people with different psychologies and different tolerance levels. (I don't always clean to my own tolerance level, but at least there's no one to resent but me.)

At first I thought the whole sourdough fad was silly. Then I thought, why not be silly? A friend offered to mail me some dried starter with a "lineage", another friend jokingly asked that for a birthday present she'd like to have a sourdough culture named after her. After that, how could I not?

At first, I worried over the culture, keeping it out in room temperature, feeding it daily, making more things with the accumulating discard than I did with the culture itself. Eventually, by experiment, I figured out that the culture was perfectly happy sitting in a loosely-capped jar in the fridge and only being fed when taken out for walkies. Lately I've been baking around 1-2 times a month and it's perfectly happy.

At first, I used an elaborate process from the King Arthur website that involved a lot of steps, some interim refrigeration, and took about 3 days to go from first feed to finished bread. But through trial and error (and mostly trial, to be honest) I've come up with an optimum process for the batch size that works for me and goes from feed to bread in 24 hours.

Here's my method. It may or may not work for others.

Start in the evening. Mix 1 cup flour and 1 cup warm water in a medium sized bowl. Add the starter and mix. (I tend to keep about 1/4 cup, but the amount doesn't actually matter since you remove the same volume to put back in storage.) Either cover with a damp cloth or put it in a semi-insulated place (e.g., in the countertop convection oven) and let work overnight.

In the morning, remove the starter to return to the fridge. Add salt and olive oil to the dough and mix. Then measure out another cup of flour and add enough to make a kneadable dough. Actually stop when it's still a little sticky, put a bunch of flour on the kneading board, and knead, adding flour as necessary, until it's smooth and elastic (as the saying goes).

Use a little more olive oil to oil your bowl, turn the dough in it so it's oiled (against drying out) then return it to your rising location.

Any time during the (work) day when you end up in the kitchen, dump the dough onto your floured kneading board and knead it thoroughly. Return to the bowl, turning to oil the exterior again. Ideally, you'll have at least three kneading sessions.

After work is done, heat your oven to 425F and knead the dough one last time, shaping it in the process to whatever type of loaf you want. (If you feel adventurous, roll it into a thin rectangle and sprinkle with additives: cheese & herbs, walnuts & chopped olives, whatever you please. Then roll it into your loaf shape.) Slash the top. All my commercial recipes say to give it another rise at this point, but honestly I get just as good results going directly to the oven.

Bake for ca. 30 minutes or until browned and when it sounds hollow when tapped on the bottom. If you've done your dinner planning right, you'll have fresh hot bread for dinner. If not, you'll have it for dessert.

The six core Bay Area counties (including mine) are now under a “shelter in place” order. “People in the six counties will still be able to go shopping for items such as food and household supplies, and seek medical care. They will be able to go outside for walks or exercise as long as they keep six feet away from anyone they don’t already live with.” Though there’s some ambiguity because elsewhere the article says “In the six Bay Area counties, non-essential gatherings of any size are now banned, along with non-essential travel “on foot, bicycle, scooter, automobile or public transit.”” which suggests that “go outside for exercise” has tenuous status. Presumably some more detailed guidance will be forthcoming. Or not.

I’ll see what the tree guy thinks about it. We can get the work done without close contact, but it will depend on how he’s interpreting things regarding his crew. It'll be his call.

Today I had the first signs of getting twitchy about the isolation. Part of it was the combination of a lack of general chatter from the co-workers online, plus some annoyingly irrelevant requests from my QA reviewer on one of my investigations, which ordinarily I could have worked off via an informal bitch session.

But the rain let up enough that I could do a lunchtime bike ride, and now that the workday is over, I can get in some yard work. Then I've assigned myself taking notes from one chapter of Halberstam's Female Masculinity for the LHMP, then starting to declutter the computer desk (the one I never use for actual computer work because it's too cluttered). I should assign myself some fiction writing as well. Maybe I should make a wall chart and give myself gold stars for categories of tasks.