I have been fortunate to be able to telecommute, which gives me more flexibility with my hours to be available for my kids and still meet deadlines for work. I also avoid a long commute to and from work, which gives me more time with my kids. Since my kids aren’t in school full time, I have had to enlist the help of others during the day so I can keep semi-regular hours and have quiet while on conference calls. I take breaks from work to take my daughter to preschool so I can see what she is doing in school. Also, I take breaks to feed and put my infant son down for naps. When necessary, I make up for this time by working before they wake up in the morning or at night after they go to bed.
I have a separate room in the house that is a dedicated office, so I am able to close the door and focus fully on work. In my office, I have three computers and a laptop. This may seem excessive, but the type of work I do requires a lot of disk space and RAM. One computer is a Hyper-V computer running Windows Server 2008 R2. On this computer, I create all my virtual machines. Even though this computer has 8 GB of RAM many times the RAM is almost fully utilized by the virtual machines. That is why I have another desktop computer. I use this computer for other work applications and overflow from the Hyper-V machine. For the most part, I create my documents, such as PowerPoint presentations and demonstration scripts, on the laptop. I set up the laptop next to the Hyper-V computer, so I can write down demonstration steps while performing the steps on the Hyper-V computer. The third desktop computer is mostly for my husband and kids. I don’t want them to use the other computers and inadvertently delete or change my documents. I also use it for my digital photos; I don’t want them to get mixed in with my work.
In addition to my computers, I have an iPhone, so I can still get e-mails when I am not in my office. I have an all-in-one printer that has a scanner. I also have a fax machine, although I rarely need to use it. Finally, I have two external hard drives that I use to back up my data.
Posted Monday, March 1st, 2010 at 9:23 am by peterl
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