Today is the last day of the Financial Year for both my company and our main customers. It’s always an extremely busy time of the year, with project reports to be written, reviewed and delivered. I’ve had three significant reports to review and approve in the last two days, which is about par for the course.
What’s different this year of course is that we are all in lockdown, working from home. It feels very surreal to be reviewing reports and providing performance feedback from the dining room table! Everything takes so much longer, and I’ve already had to spend a good 40 minutes on the phone to my ISP to get them to fix my broadband, which completely died on me just three days in. Not what you need when you are working from home!
I spent the first week just with my laptop, but that’s not good for my eyes, my posture, or my blood-pressure. Since it looks like this will be going on for some time, I’ve made the effort to replicate my setup at work, with a separate screen, keyboard and mouse. That’s much better. But teleconferencing , email and WhatsApp are no substitute for walking past someone’s desk and actually talking to them about what’s going on. It makes it so much harder to manage the projects effectively.
Hopefully things will get easier once the new Financial Year gets under way, and as we all get used to these new working conditions. At least it’s keeping us all from mixing in large open-plan offices, and swapping covid germs.
