Working From Home Forever: Day 1

Well that went well, I thought.

They say, people, people say, sometimes, once, one time one person said to me, that you need to have a strategy for working from home or you will not only be unhappy but, far worse, you will be unproductive.

My strategy was this:

• Wake early, when my boyfriend who has a real job does, go for an hour long walk/jog.
• Work solidly from exactly 9am until exactly 12.30pm, stopping every fifty minutes to do press ups and read a light-hearted Guardian article.
• Go out for lunch, see another human being perhaps, or have another long walk.
• Work from exactly 1.30pm until 5pm, except for sit ups or spontaneous running on the spot.
• Cook delicious meal, like I am a housewife, even though I am not and have definitely been at home all day working, definitely.

It went a little bit more like this:

• Walk was done, and I even incorporated a supermarket run into it, picking up fruit and coffee (white teeth are for sissies, not people who stay at home all day). At this point, I was actually overachieving! This may have been a mistake.
• Got to my table at 9am to start work. Except the wireless wasn't working, and so I chastised myself for not having tested my computer on the wireless and then, I'm sad to say, lightly chastised my boyfriend via text. He hadn't really done anything but it was definitely his fault, if you know what I mean? Anyway, I eventually just dragged my table to another room and connected to the internet wirefully.Dreadful system.
• Worked a bit.
• Bumped into a neighbour while collecting the post. He was carrying a laptop and I wondered if he were one of my lot. 'Hello,' I said in solidarity. He said 'Hello,' back but waited about three seconds to do so, during which time, I felt as though I'd made a terrible mistake.
• Spent the rest of the morning reliving that interaction, trying to make it better. It was him, right. (There is an important and deadly serious lesson to be learnt here, I mean it: when you have almost no human interaction in any one day, it must be good!)
• And then the afternoon went more or less as planned, though I did take some time out to email all my friends and start a blog, and I didn't do much in the way of physical activity.

So, in summary, a strategy to working from home is really all well and good when the machines and the other humans COOPERATE! And if they don't, then you're hardly to blame for any lack of productivity, is what I think.

So have I learned a life lesson or was that all just a convenient new standard decided on after the event to justify a largely sub-standard day at work? Who can really tell? Not me, that's for sure. And not you. Definitely not you, Judgey.