September 2020 - Working and Home Schooling: Notes from a CIO

Question #1: What was your initial transition like? Any gotchas or successes?

Having spent much of my career in a work from home or partial work from home environment and having all our collaboration tools ready the transition was fairly straightforward as far as my remote office setup. It also forced me to improve my knowledge of some of the newer collaboration tools such as Teams and all the capabilities it can provide. My wife Anna had a smooth transition as well as her employer practices remote work testing as part of their BCP planning.

The challenges that we had to adapt to were our kids also being at home and requiring assistance with schooling, lunch and some outdoor activity or exercise. WFH is much more challenging with your children by your side.

Question #2: What is your day to day like now that you’ve settled in?

It’s busy. We started with a routine, up early, get breakfast ready, get the kids dressed and setup with their ipads to start the day so we can start our workday. We would try to break up the day into two breaks to assist our children Macy and Jacob with their homework and to get them outside for a bike ride or walk. What started out as routine quickly transitioned to organized chaos as with our busy  work schedules we had to adapt to when we could spend time with the kids. Our kids have done really well all things considered; they both learned how to use a laptop and did very well with their online learning. We had to be selective and focus on what school work we would do each day as we wanted to balance with time to get outside.

Question #3: What are your biggest challenges?

Time to spend with the kids was challenging, some days we never were able to get outside and could only do 30 minutes of school work. Other than that our kids adapted well.

Question #4: Have there been any nice surprises for you/your family that come out of all this?

Even though our days are busy it has been nice to have the opportunity to be with our kids everyday and have breakfast lunch and dinner together. Anna and I also cleared the dust off our bikes which we had not used in 10 years and we go for a family bike ride every evening. I have also been impressed with how quickly our kids picked up using a laptop to do their school work.