Joanna Stich

It’s six am and your alarm goes off. You snooze it to six thirty. Be Grand. Himself gets up & gets ready for work, puts on the kettle & his breakfast in the microwave. Snoozing your alarm did nothing, you’re both in the same room, you’re kidding yourself that out of the additional 30 minutes of “sleep” you might actually drift back asleep for another 5 or 6 minutes. If you’re lucky. 6.30am goes off.

You get up, make yourself breakfast, catch up on the usual Social Media, for you its the beginning of the day; for your family & friends in Ireland & Poland its past lunch time already. By 7.30am you’ve had your breakfast, got caught up on the newest gossip from Europe and done your daily lesson of Duo Lingo. [I haven’t shared this with anyone yet but I’ve been learning Portuguese via Duo Lingo, only couple of weeks but always something I suppose]. You stick on an episode of Pretty Little Liars, because Why Not – this TV show is literally endless. Seven seasons, each one approx. 25 episodes, each episode is 55 minutes… That’s a lot of your life wasted only to find out who the f**k “A” is, but I can’t stop, I am hooked. All the while all these new shows are coming out, second series, new recommendations. My Netflix list has never been this long, I blame PLL. Never mind the fact I’m about 15 years too old to watch this show. By the time you realize it’s 8.20am and you’re meant to log into to work at 8.30am. You haven’t washed your face, change out of your pjs or brushed your teeth. Productivity at a 100. Never mind, you stick on a kettle, put on a pair of sweats, bra-less (is there any other way when you work from home?) rush to put your hair into a hun bun and brush your teeth. 8.30am happens and for the next hour you hear a ping of an incoming email approximately every 30 seconds or so as everyone submits their morning reports. You grab a coffee and you’re in your own world, spaced for the next hour or so submitting your first report of the day. Next hour after that is spent on replying to most urgent emails, managing calendars & all of a sudden you realize your coffee is gone cold. Again, for the third day in a row. You drink it cold anyway, because you’ve no time to get up and make another one.

It’s 10.30am you dial into your first conference call of the day, then your second and all of a sudden its 11.45am. Few more emails and you can finally have a look at your to do list for… Wait a second what day is it? Yeah, for whatever day you’re in. The list is long and complex and its almost lunch time. You’re starting to judge your day by how much you have to do, what sort of email queries have been coming in today — are they complex or just quick questions? If you take lunch then you’ll have to work till at least 6.00pm to dig yourself out. 1.00pm, back from lunch – Immediately knew it was a mistake, another national call added at 3.00pm this time for an hour – awesome; you get through some of your work, dial in for the call, you can’t possibly be answering emails or catching up on work while on the call in case they say something important that affects you. 4.30pm – its really around the time to start prepping dinner, as soon as you get up of the table you get the email go ahead you’ve been waiting for the whole afternoon to submit your report. The dinner is getting burnt on the stove, great not again. Dinner is rushed, not seasoned properly, half arsed. It’s 5.45pm and you finally log off. You realize you’d like to get a walk in because its something like 20 plus degrees outside, you’d like to get through few chapters of the book for your monthly book club, get the yoga session in and a workout with Pamela Reif. Damn, where did my day go, its 9.00pm and I’ve barely managed to have a 15 minute conversation with himself. Your head hits the pillow but you can’t sleep because its so hot outside, you’ve all windows open and both fans on but if you leave the windows open you’ll be able to hear the Bin Bandits [as himself calls them that] rooting in the midst of the night.

HAHA: There are days where himself comes in at 2 – 3pm from work and I have to reiterate that I am not here. I am at work, I am invisible. There are days where I am on a conference call with my boss and himself is standing there with frozen peas, trying to catch my attention to see if we can put that with dinner. Some days you just want to laugh so hard and some days you just want to cry. But honestly, I love it. I love my job, the pace, the importance of it. The power it gives you, its a thrill. Feeling very very lucky I’ve landed this job.

Hope you enjoyed my daily recap of what’s it like really working from home in a studio apartment. May I also reassure you that 90% of the time, I actually hit the “quota” of what I’ve set out for myself. Lately I’d rather sacrifice sleep rather than a workout.

Stay Safe Everyone,

Jo xo