Before lockdown started:
My official office timings were 12 PM to 9 PM IST. I used to start from my home at 10 AM ], change transportation twice and reached office between 11.45 AM - 12 PM. The first 30–45 minutes were spent in reading and replying to e-mails from the previous day or the ones that came in the morning.
I was in a Production Support project. So we had a queue to check any tickets that were left unassigned. After the emails are done with, I used to check this queue and take in a couple of tickets for myself that I think I can work on.
By this time, it was time for our daily stand-up call where we discussed the items pending on our plate and the things we had finished, basically our progress since the previous day.
That was followed by a lunch break at around 3 PM.
Back in 30 minutes. Then I start debugging the issues raised and work on the solutions. Parallely there are client meetings that require my participation. If the issues raised by tickets were knowledge gaps on the client’s side, I had to schedule calls with them to discuss it, otherwise, fix it for them.
Towards the evening at around 6/7 PM depending upon work pressure, I used to go out for a brief evening walk within the office campus.
Back in 30 minutes. After the much-needed relaxation break, keeping aside all the tickets and support work, I used to focus on the development part. being in a support project, tickets were our first priority followed by new development work. By 9.30 PM I used to wrap up and leave and reached home at around 11 PM.
That was 9.5 hours at work and another 3.5 hours in traffic.
After lockdown, while working from home:
The project's official working hours changed to 12 PM to 10.30 PM in order to support new clients all across the globe. However, the days used to start as early as 9 AM on most of the days and the usual schedule followed. Checking emails, replying to them, following up with users. Since we were all working virtually, the number of team meetings increased. Daily we had 3–4 internal meetings to discuss stuff. Additionally, if we wanted to discuss any tickets or required help from somebody, there were ad-hoc meetings for that.
Breakfast, lunch and snacks had to be taken sitting in front of the computer since the work pressure increased a lot. A lot many clients were added to our system which kept us a lot busy than before. During my notice period, I was required to impart KT to two juniors and that took an extra 3–4 hours daily.
Micromanagement was getting too high. We had to maintain a document listing all the things I worked on a single day and my plans for the next day. Coming to the next day, I had to tick off the things I finished from yesterday’s planning, list down the reason why I missed out on something and then plan for the next day’s work. This thing took another half an hour or so.
At times when the work pressure was less, we scheduled a small fun session between us where we played Pictionary online. That remained the only highlight of the day but was as rare as once a week probably. My development work increased a lot since more clients resulted in more change requests and we had to implement their changes and later incorporate their changing demands midway which caused further delays at work. Towards the end of the day, we had another call to discuss the stuff we worked on the entire day.
By the time I used to finish, it used to be 11 PM on most days, sometimes a little later too pulling off a good 14 hours almost without any breaks in between! Then I took dinner, retired to bed only to keep an alarm to wake up before 9 AM the next day.