I think a good indication that I’ve been working from home for too long is that I can’t remember how long its been. The days are starting to melt into each other, and I started to get that horror movie cabin fever feeling. Its that odd feeling of having more time to relax but feeling way more exhausted than usual. I couldn’t pinpoint exactly when the novelty of working from home had worn off, but I knew that I had to start to take care of myself more. So, when the weekend came around, I took some time to organize my workspace and myself. I won’t go into everything I did to help with my mental health as its a unique process for everyone, but one thing I’d like to say is important is divide your living l working space. I would also recommend talking with the people at your work and be honest, there’s a good chance that they would understand. Even though I’m just an intern with no real-life problems I can still get stressed out with the isolation.
If anyone reading this is stressing out working from home, I urge you to take some time to reflect and relax.
And from the work side of things it’s been good. We have been working on an inventory management system (IMS) for a while now and will probably be working on it for a lot longer. This is a big additional feature that will be included in Chemishield (surprise!) It will be used to organize the inventory coming into the laboratory and keep count of where everything is and what’s left of every item.
It is for organizing and counting the inventory coming in and out of the labs, keeping track of their amounts and locations. Turns out there is a lot of work in counting numbers! I’ve been working on the front end side of the inventory management system. One thing I have learned from making the forms and layouts of a page is that if a system or a layout make sense to you, it may not necessary make sense to everyone else. Sadly, when programming and designing a flow for a user to follow, you have to take into account other people.
One thing I have spent a good deal of time working on is the flow a user goes through to use the inventory management system. For just checking in an item into a location the user needs to select the item, add a quantity equal or lower to the amount in the system, choose a location to check in to and verify their choice. For just this one step we have gone through multiple reiterations to find the perfect flow that makes the most sense to the user. The process is discovering the perfect flow for the software is long and taxing but will be worth it in the end.
If you are struggling working from home or just curious, I’d recommend this video as a starting point to helping yourself. https://youtu.be/snAhsXyO3Ck.
Be kind to yourself.