I got a big monitor and separate keyboard and mouse well before the pandemic, when it because clear I would be working from home a lot for early and late meetings. Since the pandemic we’ve managed to put together desks that fit my (lack of) height at both houses (I say we – really my husband the woodworker created shorter legs for one existing desktop and one top that was originally a table leaf), and added a monitor, keyboard and mouse for the other place when I started spending more workdays there. Working on a laptop is not really ergonomic for more than short periods!
The bigger change is that I have even fewer boundaries. I am not unequivocally recommending this for everyone, because it goes against the prevailing advice and doesn’t work for all, but it works for me. Working in non-business hours is nonnegotiable in my job, so I compensate or it. For instance, last night I had a 9PM meeting and today I went to the grocery store during a break between meetings to get a prescription refill and because we were out of fruit. My standard workday is 7-4:30, but I regularly am at my desk by 6:30 and often have meetings til 5. I also check work email on my phone before I even get out of bed, a holdover from when I supported several European teams and people might try to reach me early. The flip side of that is that if it’s a beautiful day and I have time between meetings, I might grab a kayak and go; I have a knitting group (from work) that meets Mondays at lunchtime, and I have carved an hour out of Friday mornings for voice lessons, that I try very hard not to schedule over (it’s only happened once or twice in the past year, and we have rescheduled those lessons).
OTOH I don’t take meetings during my sleep hours (10-6) except on very special occasions, and I do little work on weekends – usually only when I have a small, concrete task that urgently needs to be done. And I do check work emails on my phone on weekends, once or twice a day.
This all works for me because I have never been one of those people who does very rigid separation between work and home, needs commute time to destress, never ever goofs of during work hours, and keeps a separate personality or work vs home or friends. So I am not recommending my methods for all, but they work for me.
Anyone happen to read this and know about WordPress? For a while now, I have had to use the Classic Editor – with the new one, I type in a block and then the content all vanishes after I click anywhere outside the block. Very annoying!