-Hello from my home office.
I'm "Washington Post" tech columnist Geoff Fowler,
and like a lot of other people,
I've been told to work from home during the coronavirus.
Let's video-conference in a bunch of other folks
who've been dealing with this for a while.
-My name is Tim Perzyk in San Francisco,
and it's been seven days since I've been in the office.
-I'm Maria Fernandez Guajardo,
and I live in Sunnyvale, California.
I have been working from home for a week.
-My name's Jared Spataro. I'm here in Seattle.
It's been six days since I was asked to work from home.
-Did you have a home office already?
Is this a room that got converted?
Where are you? -Yeah, I'm in my home office.
We were lucky enough that we have one.
Our guest room is part home office, part guest room.
-So it's its own self-contained room.
I'm at a proper desk,
though I do not have a new display or monitor.
-Well, she bursts in and just wants me to pet her
while I'm on my conference calls.
Nothing like having the companionship of your dog
for a difficult conference call.
-Our workdays were bleeding into our personal lives.
We were just not used to this thing, right?
We also keep looking at our watches,
telling us that we have been sitting for the entire day.
And none of our -- -Mine thinks I've died, I think.
-Horrible. -I really focus on movement.
I like to walk and run a lot.
That's my reward for the end of the day,
the thing that I get to go and do as a break.
-I don't know if the relationship part of it
is gonna suffer down the road, but it's too early to say.
-Has anything in your process
so far just not worked, like, broken?
I mean, I'll give you an example.
Last Wednesday morning --
maybe it was a neighborhood thing,
maybe it's happened to you, too --
my Comcast connection went out entirely.
-I had the same issue with AT&T, and I have U-verse.
And it went down on Thursday,
and I think I had six or seven calls
starting at seven in the morning that are all video-based.
-Oh, yeah. So, the first day --
the first day that I had to work from home,
it was a multitude of disasters on the same day.
My husband had dental surgery.
There was a fire on my street,
so my kids got released from school earlier,
and the Internet went down.
So that was my first day working from home.
I'm like, "Oh, my God."
-But I feel like I'm working, like, 12-,
13-hour days right now. Have you had any of that?
-I try not to work and have the same routine
as I used to have prior to working from home.
Wake up, you know, you shower.
You get dressed -- nicely dressed, out of the hoodie.
Like, wear, like -- We are properly dressed.
And what I do is that I'll go for a walk to the nearby
Starbucks and I grab a coffee and I bring it home.
It gets me a nice walk in the morning, so the moment
I come to the house, I'm at work.
Like, that's my start of day, not before.
-One of the solutions to distance is undivided attention.
Somebody working in Dubai, a team member in Singapore,
that type of thing.
And to make sure that those conversations are I guess
what I would refer to as interpersonally nutritious,
I really try to -- My phone is facedown.
-The way I run my calendar is that
I create blocks in my calendar
when I'm not having meetings, and I get stuff done.
-I have no other windows up active
while I am on the video chat.
Little things that are -- I don't know --
sort of behavioral nudges that I've set up for myself
so that I am really focused on what I'm doing right now.
-And then in the afternoons, what I do
is that I take the last call,
the last meeting that I have, like, in the calls,
and then I add 30, 45 minutes to it,
and I declare the end of the day,
that I will close my laptop and I will, like,
tell my family, "I am done with work."