Days 20-24: Beginning WFH

Emotions

Unfortunately, I became sick half way through the week and ended up taking Thursday and Friday off to sleep and rest. The beginning of the week was spent trying to adjust to working from home and feeling really disconnected from the world. Even though all my meetings were online, it still felt off not having the same human connections that I have at the office. It felt more difficult to be effective as a manager - this is something I’ll need to learn how to do since everyone will be working from home for the foreseeable future.

Tasks

As a result of working from home and having some of my meetings shuffled around, I had more time to do some IC work. I did some investigations on some bugs and actually fixed some stuff. All of my meetings moved to online meetings and some went great while others did not. I had all my typical meetings as well as some future planning meetings as we start looking at future milestones and where we are going to make investments. I ended up moving most of my 1:1s to later in the week and then had to cancel because I was out sick - that was a bummer but I know my team understands and we’ll catch up next week!

Learnings

I will need to learn how to be an effective manager remotely for the time being. Some of the goals on my mind are:

• Making sure the team still feels connected

• Making sure I still feel connected to each of my reports

• Keeping everything “business as usual” as everyone is working from home

It’s exciting to be going through all these challenges right now. As much as I wish everyone wasn’t working from home, it’s a chance for me to learn and grow to be a more effective manager. It will take some time to adjust but I know I’ll come out of this experience better than when I started.