Weebles the cat isn't particularly happy either.
Going stir crazy after a few days of self-quarantine? Follow these hermit tech rules of success.
1. Avoid Netflix, Prime Video, and Apple TV.Ok. Impossible to do. How many hours have you streamed this week? Me? Dozens.
I turn on my Apple TV, and the outbreak is there, too, pitching “Contagion,” the trending movie about dying from a disease spread in part by touching your face. (I indulged the paranoia.)
2. Prepare for the Broadband to go out.
Download whatever work you can knowing that the WiFi is going to go out. You'd be surprised how often during the day and night it goes out for no apparent reason.
Also download lots and lots of Netflix and Amazon Prime shows to your iPad before the broadband crashes, can you hear me Comcast? If you know anyone with a DVD player you need to borrow it now. Hit 2nd hand shops before quarantine and stock up on DVDs for the blackouts but do not indulge in these pursuits in your dedicated workspace or during dedicated work hours.
3. Use a separate dedicated workspace.
I mean it. Don't sit with your feet in the swimming pool holding your laptop. Set up a workspace somewhere and stick to it.
4. Have a dedicated work-at-home wardrobe.
PJs or sweats from the night before won't cut it. Its also very unsanitary.
5. Have clearly defined work hours. . .
followed by exercise or cocktails (or both).
Otherwise you will just keep working forever or you won't work at all.
Woz claims he may be USAs coronavirus patient zero
6. Clear your Cookies.
To keep up with new and stock shocks during the outbreak you're going to constantly encounter paywalls at new sites. Try reuters, ap for real news really free and with no ads. CNN works if you don't mind all the ads. I use the Purify App to block as many ads as possible. If you prefer the Seattle Times, Washington Post, New York Times, or LA Times you're going to have to get more creative.
Set your Chrome browser to clear cookies every time it reloads. On Safari clear cookies often manually and automatically every day.
Blocking all cookies entirely works on some sites but not others as paywalls are evolving to the flood of COVID-19 news demand.
7. Do Not Follow the Wild Gyrations of the Stock Market
It is difficult not to watch your retirement account disappear, reappear, then disappear again. But if you have to watch try the MarketWatch app. Its free and has good analysis of the days events. Barrons.com is also a good resource. Bloombergs is all inclusive but the paywall is relentless.
8. Stock up on Essentials, Not Toilet Paper.
Floridians know you stock up on chocolate, granola, tuna, cat food. . . not toilet paper and not paper towels. What is going on with the run on toilet paper? It is non-essential. You could use a wet rag if you had to. But what if you run out of essential munchies or pet food? Bread is no good. Perishable. Bottled Water? Bad for the environment and unnecessary. The tap water is not contaminated, yet. Keep to the basics.
9. Track your Productivity: Work time is for work calls.
When Mommie Dearest calls for the 3rd time to tell you the latest horror story she heard on Fox News, don't answer. Tracking work-at-home productivity is easy with apps . Optimize your workday with updates, to-do-lists, host stand ups and more.
Track your work-at-home productivity with apps like these listed on Slack.
10. Do Not Follow my Instagram.
Instagram is a huge time suck by design but so irresistible on days like these.
Follow Phillip
on instagram
adapted, edited and paraphrased from the original
by Geoffrey Fowler
Quarantine might not seem like a big sacrifice, but my experience shows it’s no snow day. It lays bare the vulnerabilities — and the vulnerable — in our online-everything economy.
My online quarantine is nowhere close to the nightmare facing the people under medical orders to quarantine or isolate in hotels, nursing homes and cruise ships. To limit the spread of the disease, Microsoft, Twitter and other companies told their employees in early March to start working from home. I followed their lead and self-quarantined to see how it might feel different with all of today’s tech.
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| Don't do paperwork on the bed. |
Hermit Tech
Even before the coronavirus, there was a name for the Internet’s on-demand economy: hermit tech. Or sometimes, assisted living for millennials. “You already live in quarantine,” writes Georgia Institute of Technology professor Ian Bogost about apps ranging from Netflix and Instagram to DoorDash and Amazon Prime Now that help people practice the “social distancing” being recommended by some health authorities.
There’s not a huge difference between living in a millennial bubble and being completely isolated from the outside world. Over the past week, growth in the use of grocery-delivery service Instacart has surged by 10 times in California and Washington and by 20 times in New York, says spokeswoman Natalia Montalvo.
On Instacart, searches for hand sanitizer increased by 23 times.
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| Working at Home with COVID-19 adapted from illustration by Michael Parkin |
Now this tech has a more urgent purpose than the luxury of convenience. It makes staying at home possible (and much more palatable) to people who can afford it. For the fortunate, work, shopping and even school can be rerouted through the Internet. But it also bakes in tech-industry assumptions about work happening behind a keyboard, not to mention access to resources and how we interact with others. These apps were designed by engineers with efficiency as the No. 1 goal.
My hermit-tech lifestyle is extreme for the United States because I’m also avoiding leaving my house. But it’s not that far off from the new reality elsewhere, now including parts of New York state. In some Chinese cities, people have been in quarantine for over a month and online services are even more advanced.
My favorite example: In locked-down Wuhan, teachers use an app called DingTalk to remotely assign homework. So thousands of kids gave it one-star reviews in hopes it would get booted from the App Store.
Depending on the speed covid-19 spreads here, I could be on the leading edge of The Great American Self-quarantine. That would test many aspects of our government, economy and — closer at hand — personal technology. So it’s time to ask: Is the home WiFi ready? And just how much power are we handing over to Silicon Valley’s values?
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| Don't make your desk drawer into a bed for the cat. Its very uncomfortable for you, not the cat. |
Working, working and more working from home
Some 43 percent of Americans work from home at least some, according to a 2017 Gallup poll.
But will the WiFi hold. I’d previously invested in a mesh router (I recommend Eero). And I was already plugged into work with cloud-connected office tech that I can access on my office laptop, personal iMac, smartphone and tablet, too. I signed up for more Slack messaging channels, so I could better track what everyone was doing.
Not all of it worked as advertised. I know video conferencing has major devotees, but in my experience it has worked about half of the time. My smart colleagues are continually befuddled by Cisco Webex. For some meetings with far-flung people, I’m the only one on video because nobody else could make it work.
Then, at 8:45 a.m. on my third day at home, I had a real jolt: My Internet went down. My heart raced as I ran around the house trying to figure out what happened. I blame my Internet service provider Comcast, though it tells me there were no major outages in my area. The problem fixed itself, but uh-oh: What’s going to happen when networks designed for home use suddenly get stressed by millions? Even when you pay extra for faster downloads, with many residential broadband services you are still sharing a limited resource with all your neighbors.
As the days tick by, I’ve noticed a bigger problem. Without any boundaries between work and life, I just keep working. No screen is an escape. Why, oh why, did I sign up for all those Slack channels? The software just keeps sending me a mountain of information; it doesn’t care if I’m actually processing it. I’m part of the problem. I feel guilty WFH, and sending Slack messages at all hours lets me show what a good colleague I am!
There is no technology to replace the intel you get in an office: that someone is on a call, having a bad day, or at home taking care of a sick kid. I can only imagine how these frustrations multiply if you also have kids on coronavirus leave from school bouncing around the house.
Friends and colleagues who work remotely on a regular basis advise a few things no office app is going to do for you: Use a separate, dedicated work device. Have a dedicated work wardrobe — at least different WFH pajamas and sleep pajamas, as Vice noted. And most of all, have clear remote work hours that end with a daily ritual like working out. Or a stiff cocktail.
Dinner on demand, at a price
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| Working at Home with COVID-19 adapted from Art by Martin Lisner |
Coronavirus self-quarantine can be delicious. I can choose from thousands of restaurants from delivery apps that bring the food right to my door.
But it hasn’t been cheap. On my first day at home, a $10.78 Impossible Whopper meal from Burger King ran me a whopping $24.46 through Uber Eats.
One time, I asked the DoorDash driver bringing me Thai takeout if he worried about being out interacting with so many people.
“I’ve got cars and stuff I’ve got to pay for. So I have to go out and get it,” said the driver.
“Maybe I’m a little less afraid of it than other people are,” he said. “But I know that my immune system is like every other person.”
Nitasha Tiku writes that the on-demand economy conditions us to not think about why these services are affordable. Gig workers typically don’t get paid sick leave or masks and sanitizer as they run around town, though on Monday Instacart and DoorDash announced new sick pay policies for in-store shoppers.
Both DoorDash and Instacart also began promoting “contactless” deliveries — an option for people who order online to say “leave it at my door.” To borrow a favorite techie phrase, it’s social distancing “as a service.”
Bouncing off the walls
I lost it around day five. There’s certainly a lot more to keep me entertained: I eat lunch with Twitter, tracking the infected cruise ship docking a few miles away in Oakland. There’s a growing list of streaming services that each want $8 to $35 per month to keep me entertained: Apple TV Plus, CBS, Amazon Prime, Hulu, Sling TV and Netflix. By my rough estimate, I’ve streamed at least 30 hours of TV over eight days.
I checked out an e-book from the library for my book club but can’t seem to find the focus to finish it. I’ve also become a sloth: Normally, I walk 3.9 miles per day, according to my Apple Watch. In the past week, I’ve averaged less than one mile per day.
A group of tech workers and journalists working at home experimented with a form of virtual socializing on Monday: A 5:00 #WFHHappyHour streamed over Zoom video. Sadly, when I joined few participants seemed to actually have cocktails. . .
While Gov. Ron DeSantis (Republican) and lawmakers appear poised to boost the state's response to the virus outbreak with $25 million in supplemental funding, experts say that won't make up for years of underfunding that have eroded the Florida Department of Health's readiness.
. . . I hit peak anxiety on Saturday night when I sat on my couch with a plate of cookies and streamed the 2011 thriller “Contagion.” The Apple TV movie store recommended it to me and, apparently, lots and lots of other Americans, because it’s currently the second most popular film in the Warner Bros. catalog, up from 270th last year.
Well, if I wasn’t freaked out before, I sure am now. In the film, a disease spreads much like the coronavirus, with health officials reminding people to wash their hands and not touch their faces … until it kills off millions and millions of people.
Shortly after I finished the movie, there was a knock at the door. It was my groceries from Instacart. I brought them inside and felt compelled to wipe them all down with antiseptic wipes.
Perhaps I need to try meditating. There are apps for that, too.
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