Member-only story
To say the least, the last year has been stressful, demanding, and scary. The pandemic has pretty much turned our lives upside down and with so many people transitioning to a Work From Home (WFH) model that can really add to the stress.
To give a little background, I left my traditional in-office company as a contractor and started my WFH journey in April of 2019, well before the COVID outbreak. If you’ve read any of my other posts you’ll know I work as a full-stack software engineer. Although your job may be different I’ll try and keep this article tailored more towards things that I think will be relevant for anyone working from home. I wanted to share with you some of the things I have learned working from home before and after the pandemic and how the pandemic affected me although I was already in an advantageous position for it. My hope is that some of you may come away from reading this with some ideas on how to improve your WFH life.
Communication
Some of the logos above may look familiar to you, as I’m sure most of you are using at least one of these services. Once the big WFH migration happened we saw a huge uptick in the number of people using things like Zoom to hold their daily meetings, some people were using email more to communicate, and some were relying on something like Microsoft Teams or Slack for their day-to-day communication.
I can imagine that for many of us communication has been the biggest transition to make when moving to a WFH environment and I can definitely relate to this. When I first started WFH I was new to the team as well as being a contractor. Given that I was a contractor (at the time) I also had 2 sets of communication tools. The client company used Outlook, Slack, and Teams while the contractor company used Google Hangouts and Gmail (pre-pandemic). I should also mention that pre-pandemic my co-workers at both companies were mostly in-office. I and a few others were the exceptions to the rule as we hundreds of miles away from either office.
