Working from home is totally awesome!
and kind of not awesome

I was stumbling over what about today had made me go a little crazy by the time 4:30 rolled around and then PC verbalized it perfectly - I overcompensated for working from home by working much more intensely and diligently than I ever would from my cube. But I think once I learn to cut myself a little slack, and get a little better at structuring my day so that it's a bit more broken up, I should be fine.

I just went sort of blithely in to this whole working from home thing because, hell, it's what I've been doing for the past x years as a student. But the trick about working as a student is that I was task focused not hourly focused. And when I was working on something for which I was getting paid by the hour, I was tracking my hours and no one particularly cared how many of them it took me to accomplish said task. So I worked as long as I wanted, for as long as I was being productive, and I stopped when I wanted and did whatever else I wanted instead, and didn't feel guilty about any of it.

In truth, my job is task oriented, but I'm new, especially to this whole salary thing, and every time I strayed from work today I kept feeling guilty about wasting company time. But in the office, obviously, I'm going to spend a few minutes talking to coworkers when I bump in to them in the kitchen or on the way to the bathroom, and I'm going to take a break when I finally get my code to compile and go decompress for five minutes chatting about non-work stuff. And that's normal and expected and not wasting company time because everyone does it because how else can you not lose your mind sitting in a cubicle for 8+ hours?

So I just need to overlay my in-the-office mindset while working from home. I'll get there.

And the good news is I was totally, awesomely productive today, in ways I think I may not have been from my cube. In particular, I tackled a coding problem I had been putting off, because I knew it was really going to occupy a lot of brain space. Which, for me, means talking out loud and sometimes pacing. Perhaps with time I'll get comfortable enough to do those things in the office, but for now, I was pretty happy to be the only one around while babbling about file structures.

Plus, I got to brew a giant pot of coffee just for me, sit around in my pajamas, and get a load of laundry done!

And when I did finally call it a day, I went for a jog up to Inspiration Point in the Presidio (picture below stolen from that website) and thought to myself, holy shit! This is where I live!