AdNews brings the stories of those working from home (WFH) in the advertising and media industry during the coronavirus crisis.
Deirdre Fogarty is assistant digital content director at the Triple M network:
How do you deal with the silence?
I work in radio; it’s never silent, not even at home! I have Triple M streaming from the time Iet up, so I’m either listening to what’s happening live on-air, or listening back to earlier breaks for online content.
My dog also has a terrible knack for heading out to the backyard to bark at neighbourhood cats as soon as I join a video call and my partner wanders in and out throughout the day, so there’s always some noise going on.
The good?
Aside from the hour extra in bed each morning? I’m enjoying being home and around my dog a lot more, barking notwithstanding. I’m lucky that so much of my job is online, anyway, so it hasn’t been a huge adjustment in that regard.
Plus I’ve always found that I can get more done at home than in the office, mainly because there are fewer distractions/ I’m not getting up and wandering around to chat to people.
The bad?
I’ve noticed that I have a lot more meetings now; I think that, when we were all together in one office, it was easy to pop our heads up and ask a quick question. Now that we’re (almost) all working remotely, those quick questions now sometimes require a VC, which chews up a lot more time than the quick questions did.
I also – and I never thought I’d say this – almost miss my commute home from work. Aside from the incidental exercise in walking to and from the station, those 25 minutes travelling are a great way to decompress and put some distance between myself and the day. It’s much harder to do that when your office is in your kitchen.
Tips for making WFH work?
I’ve tried to stick to my pre-WFH schedule as much as possible. I still get up and walk the dog first thing, then have brekkie and coffee before logging on. And I’m pretty strict about switching off my computer at the time I normally would as well, and then ending the day with another dog walk. It’s definitely helped maintain a sense of normalcy, for the weekdays at least.
My team and also have a mid-morning “check-in” each day, which is an optional VC to drop in to, workload permitting. There’s no work chat, and it’s a revolving cast – some days we have two people on, sometimes 10 – but it’s a great way for us to have face time and just… have a laugh. We usually do a quick quiz plus an accidental new favourite called “What’s In The Bread Box”, where I put something random into the little cupboard behind me and everyone on the call has to guess what it is. It sounds as silly as it is, but, believe it or not, there’s demand for it!
I am looking forward to getting back to the office because …
Coming up with creative ideas is a lot more fun when you’re surrounded by other people!
I’m missing the off-the-cuff conversations that spark an idea that turns into a great piece of online content; it’s just not the same in isolation.
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