Working from home - Day 14
Tags: watercooler, remote, webdev, development
Published: 2020-04-01 09:21:19

---
title: Working from home - Day 14
published: true
description: Continuous journey of working from home due to COVID-19 outbreak at the world. This is my journey, my challenges in trying to be productive and completely changing my work habits from office first to remote first. 
tags: watercooler, remote, webdev, development
cover_image: https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/i/yh4h33xsmt5zzvr94xu2.png
series: working from home
---
## General

After 2 1/2 weeks, I think we as family and myself accepted the current situation. It's cold outside and even going out for a quick walk isn't valuable 😅.

Interestingly, our kids were tired around 8pm without doing anything specific. They are slowly used to the schedule. Our daughter moved from early bird to a long sleeper. 

The schedule we have in place works but after starting the day around 7am and finishing at around 9pm, I feel tired. I've also realized that all the content on Amazon Prime Video or Netflix are not really interesting. 

It's often repackaging old ideas into new tv shows. I've moved already months ago watching Anime and now hit a limitation of not having enough content 😅 I'm thinking to subscribe to [Crunchyroll](https://www.crunchyroll.com/) as they have a huge catalog. 

For now, I found some joy in playing [CoD Mobile](https://www.callofduty.com/mobile) with a couple of friends remotely. I'm surprised how good the game is and even how easily we can talk with each other 🤩

At the end of this week, I'm planning to go through all posts and reflect on them. Reflect on my learnings, have some action items. 


## Work

Since our last Retrospective two weeks have passed and yet another Retro! 
I would call myself an "Retrospective Evangelist" as experienced often that during Retrospectives real problems are addressed (team-related but also global).

This week, we had our Chapter Lead Jan as the moderator and I really enjoyed his way of doing things and doing the Retro.

The 3 parts of his Retrospective:

- Collect "Fun Facts" and "Mood" before the Retrospective starts.
- Take 10-15 minutes and play a game about the "Fun Facts". He is reading them out loud and the team guesses who wrote that fact.
- Do a [Small Starfish Retrospective](http://www.funretrospectives.com/small-starfish/)

![Small Starfish Retro](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/i/qk38b20z4n9iw17x4k9p.png)

It's a simple structure but helped us identify a couple of issues:

- **Stop:** Stuff we do and we should stop doing, e.g. stop sending many short meeting blocks.

- **Start:** Things we should start doing, e.g. start remote watercooler hangouts, start having a clear process between copy-ux-frontend. 

- **Change:** We do it, we want to keep it but we see improvements, e.g. send agenda when scheduling meetings, change grooming meetings to be on focus topics.

Also Google send us an Email that Chrome Web App Reviews will be slower and delayed.

![Alt Text](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/i/5617feqhclvifi9j68nc.png)


## TIL

I was half of the day in meetings. The learning here is:

> Remote Meetings seem to be more exhausting than regular once in the office.

It looks like, I'm slowly discovering the points Basecamp (DHH and Jason Fried) discovered in their [remote communication guides](https://basecamp.com/guides/how-we-communicate).

I'm reading that now.

Cheers,

Ferit