A Day in Quarantine Life

Other than the 10 days I spent locked in the bedroom with COVID-19 (0/10, would not recommend), life has settled into an uneventful routine. To give you an idea of a typical day:

• 8:30ish: I wake up, shower, make two fresh mugs of coffee using a french press, and make breakfast.
• 9:00-9:30: Prior to the quarantine, I read the newspaper on my phone while drinking coffee out of my travel mug. Now, I now sit in the corner of my apartment by the window instead.
• 9:30: I used to get to work around 9:30 and say hello to everyone in the aisle, so now I log into my remote desktop at 9:30 and say good morning to everyone on Slack. I usually start my day looking through any new e-mails and answering any urgent ones that are outstanding.
• ~10:00: Both in the office and at home, if I have time, I usually read through the headlines and some of the articles from Streetsblog NYC's transportation round up, since I'll often get advance warning from their articles about data or analysis requests I'll get later that day.
• 10:30: My first meeting is usually around 10:30, since it's the earliest we can consistently assume that everyone will make it to the meeting on time. My office has quite flexible work times, so the earliest person starts at 4:30 (AM) and the latest starts around 10:45. Now that we are all at home and don't have to commute, this remains the earliest time we can consistently meet, since everyone is replacing their commuting time with sleep. I also make a second cup of coffee.
• 11:30: I usually use this hour before lunch to take on tasks that I don't feel like doing, whether it's administrative work to make sure everyone is up to date on a project, or writing new SQL or Python code that's different enough from previous requests that I can't just copy it from an old analysis, but new enough it's not intellectually stimulating. If I feel productive, I can push lunch to 1:00, or if I'm really dragging I can eat earlier. This decision is thrilling for everyone.
• 12:30: Lunch!
• 13:30: I know that most people end up feeling sleepy after lunch, but I think this is my most productive time of the days. While I have the occasional late afternoon meeting, this is when I normally open up my Bullet Journal (actually a Leuchterm1917 notebook) and look through my larger projects to see what I need to do next. Nowadays this usually involves opening up DBeaver to adjust all of our production data pipelines to try to patch our way around the official performance metrics that compare to a schedule, when there is no schedule. Almost all of our daily, weekly, and monthly performance reporting depends on comparisons to a schedule, so it has been a bit of a challenge (but really not bad at all in the grand scheme of things).
• ~14:15: The quick daily meeting with my boss and another manager. In the office, we would all run into each other several times to discuss a smaller decision and end up talking about our other work. Nowadays, we formalize this in the daily check-in, where we also go over some of the work our direct reports are doing too, which helps since they often need to work with each other across the group lines.
• ~16:30: I look over my task list again to make sure I didn't forget anything and that I won't keep anyone from being able to work the following morning. I try not to work after 18:00 to help differentiate between personal time and work time at home, and I inevitably have forgotten something time-sensitive. This usually includes written up reports/e-mails/documents addressing other questions for upper management or other departments, since it is really easy to fall into the mode of coding and helping analysts with their projects too.
• 18:00: I sign out of work, and stop reading e-mails (most of the time). I understand that not every job lets you do this, but to be honest the world of performance reporting lends itself fairly well to definitive sign off times, in comparison to anyone who works on the operations side. We don't really have an equivalent of a train derailment or switch failure which would require me to jump in and manage the emergency response.
• 18:30: Work out (usually following a YouTube video, after moving the living room coffee table), cook dinner if it's my turn, do chores, watch tv, etc. While I've gained over an hour each day from not commuting, the extra food and chores associated with making three meals a day and actually spending 23.5 hours in my apartment mean I don't actually have that much extra time for video games or watching TV with my wife. I can only imagine what this is like for my coworkers living with family members they need to take care of.
• 20:15 Dinner
• 21:30 Dishes/TV/Chores
• 01:00 Bedtime