Welcome to BoultTips! I hope this finds you and yours all safe and well.

I am typing away to you, at my kitchen table, now entering the one month anniversary of our lockdown here in London.

I hope that some whimsical observations and reflections could help colleagues, wherever in the world, survive these trying times.

How has working from home been for you?  For me: all relatively new.  I have always tried to keep some invisible barrier between work time and home time.

Yet now my lovely kitchen is overrun daily with my laptop, necessary papers, and the echo of Zoom meetings.  Home is now work and work is now home.

But there shall be no pettifogging!

We have no dewdropper here!  Quite soon into this new life I managed to fashion a (much needed) stand-up-desk from a sturdy ironing board.  This really helps with back pain if used for 10-15 minutes every hour.  I heartily recommend.

My dear colleagues and I were then bombilating with other ideas: daily 11am quick coffee drop-ins on Zoom (other providers are available), Friday lunchtime quizzes, bingo seems to have gone down very well.

I also enjoy having a sneak peek of other people’s kitchens.  We all do it!

One very helpful thing I have found, sturdy ironing board aside, is an antibacterial wipe.

Put simply, whether in a fully-fledged family abode, or a tiny central London house like yours truly, WAH will affect your living and “safe space”.

Before I start work, I clear the kitchen table from breakfast and run that antibac wipe over it, ready to reload with the laptop, papers, Dictaphone...  I totally recommend making a loud and active point of this at the end of the day.

Your home is the new open plan office, so collate your things, shut them away in a locker (drawer), and wipe down that work surface.  It is now no longer a visible place of work.

Whether it be your kitchen table, your bedroom, or a study or spare room, you will inevitably walk past it that evening.  So have a “safe space” to lock away this stuff; out of sight out of mind.

A fresh new surface for a well-deserved end of day beverage.