After yesterday’s exhaustive commute home, I decided to play it safe and work from home, at least for the morning. As temperatures dropped below freezing overnight, there were weather warnings about black ice on the roads and sidewalks. I wasn’t sure how that would affect the roads so I just decided to stay home. As such, I set my alarm for just before 10am and got a good night of rest.
Once my alarm roused me from my sleep, I got up, did my morning rituals, and got in front of the computer. I logged into my workstation at the studio and began reading e-mails. As far as commutes go, going from your bed to the desk in your bedroom is pretty great. After half an hour of work, I got hungry so I went downstairs to get a breakfast of scrambled eggs, hash browns, bacon, toast, and a terrible tasting coffee. I got it to go so I could eat and work back upstairs at the same time. Except for the coffee, breakfast was so tasty.
I worked until around 12:30pm and after monitoring Twitter and some real-time transit maps, I decided it was safe to go into work. After the nightmare commute last night, it was clear sailing today. There was hardly anyone on the train and instead of a 30 minute wait with hundreds of people for one bus, it was a five minute wait with three people. The only iffy part was the walk from the bus stop to the studio. Parts of the sidewalk had frozen over, so I had to be careful.
Once I got into the studio, I got right back to work. I had a solid afternoon. I felt much more mentally sharp compared to other days. I attribute that to the increased amount of rest I got and the gentle start to the morning. I really wish our corporate culture encouraged working from home a lot more. I understand that meetings are tough to conduct remotely but almost everything else can be done from home now. Let’s take this morning as an example. I made some changes to some code that needed to be tested on one of the consoles on my desk. Modern game development tools now allow me to remotely start up a game, see the video output of the console, and even control the game as if I had a controller. I did all of this while I sat in my PJs at home.
Well, it’s going to snow again on Thursday, so perhaps another work from home day is fast approaching.