Balancing work and life from home

Disgrifiad

When I started working at home, some of my colleagues in customer services were still at work taking shifts to keep the library buildings open, and I was concerned for their safety and well-being, until we finally closed the doors.

Adjusting to working at home was difficult, I haven't got room at my house to dedicate a working space, but I know I am in a much better set up than others reading this may be.  I am grateful that there is a ready supply of food in the kitchen nearby.

IT Services were excellent in the first couple of weeks for me, this work laptop is quite old and nearly fell over when I upgraded it to Windows 10, but they were on hand to provide me with new encryption codes as needed.  And accessing work on the University shared drives is easy.  I am lucky to have a work laptop to use, I know others are using their own devices.

Students and staff sent me enquiries about getting access to e-books where we currently only had print books, sending myself and colleagues into long workflows with publishers about how to get these books online.

There were also queries about how to access databases and journals off-campus and I have spent a lot of time signposting to the library catalogue.  This shows me that some library users haven't really understood authentication methods, and don't recognise that access was so seamless on campus because my colleagues had worked behind the scenes to make it so.

For me, those first 2 weeks after the library closed were exhausting, and I was happy when the Easter weekend arrived.  I find that video-meetings are more tiring than face-to-face meetings, and the extra effort to concentrate on top of everything else we are worrying about was taking a strain.  Not to mention the home schooling initially until the primary school starting sending work (you can see my initial efforts in the attached photo). But the sun was (and still is?) shining here in North Wales and so a long walk with the family was a lovely treat at the end of the day.