So half my office got sent home this week and the other half followed a day later, and I've officially been working from my kitchen table since Tuesday. I want to write this down while it's fresh, because I've done the "work from home for a day or two" thing before but never the "nobody knows when this ends" version, and the setup matters a lot more than I expected it to.
First thing: your home wifi was never built for this. Mine's a five-year-old router that lived in a closet and mostly handled Netflix and a couple of phones. Put two people on video calls at once plus a laptop pulling down build artifacts and it falls over by 10am. I dug up an old TP-Link Archer C7 I had sitting in a drawer, didn't flash anything fancy on it, just set it up as a second access point on the 5GHz band and pointed my desk specifically at that. Sounds dumb. Fixed it completely. If your calls are stuttering, before you blame Zoom, check whether you're actually stuck on 2.4GHz fighting with every microwave and baby monitor within 50 feet.
The VPN is the real problem
Everyone's talking about Zoom this week (fair, it's having a moment) but nobody's talking about how bad corporate VPN clients are under real load. My company runs Cisco AnyConnect and it's been dropping my connection two or three times a day, always at a bad moment. Tuesday it kicked me out mid-standup at 9:40 and I had to explain over Slack what I was about to say like an idiot. What actually helped was asking IT to turn on split tunneling, so only traffic that needs the corporate network goes through the VPN and everything else (Slack, Zoom, plain browsing) goes out my own connection directly. It's a five-minute config change on their end and it cut my drops down to almost nothing. If you're in IT and haven't done this for your remote folks yet, do it today, not next week.
Headset, not laptop speakers
I resisted this for years because I figured it was overkill for someone who mostly works alone. Eating my words now. A $30 Logitech H390 USB headset made more difference to my daily sanity than anything else on this list, mostly because I stopped hearing my own echo on every call and stopped being the person everyone else has to mute. If you're still running calls off your laptop mic, people can tell, and they are quietly judging you for it.
Keeping some shape to the day
This is the part nobody puts in the "how to WFH" listicles, and it's the part I'm actually struggling with. When your commute disappears, so does the natural start and stop to the day. I've started doing a genuinely pointless ritual where I walk around the block before I open the laptop, just so there's something that functions like a commute. Feels silly typing that out. Works anyway.
One thing I read this morning that put my little router problem in perspective: Apple's closing every one of its retail stores outside Greater China for a couple of weeks and moving as many employees as it can to remote work too, which is a strange thing to watch happen to a company built so heavily around physical stores and people standing around tables touching demo units.
If your team went remote overnight the way mine did, the two things I'd actually spend money on before anything else are a second access point (or a plain wifi extender if your place has dead zones) and a real headset. The fancy webcam, the standing desk, the ring light everyone's suddenly posting about, all optional. Those two are not.
I'll probably post a follow-up in a few weeks once I know whether any of this holds up, or whether I've just jinxed the whole setup by writing a confident tutorial about it two days before it falls apart.