Day 37 in the Virtual Office!
Total Time in VR: 2 hours and 26 minutes (across 5 VR sessions)
Use Cases: Focus Work (66% – 1 hour 36 min), 1:1 Meetings (20% – 30 min), MiniMindfulness (10% – 15 min), Team Meetings (3% – 5 min)
Another slower day, but again life keeps getting in the way. Pre-blizzard prep today pulled me away a bit, and a field trip to “field test” a VR functionality. So again most of my time was Focus Work, as I wrap up things for the year.
Cup Half Empty: My first VR meeting was Stand Up and the avatar issues persisted again (thus 5 minutes and we gave up). I had a 1:1 later in the day and we didn’t have any issues with avatars, so I’m becoming suspicious it might be headset related (read WIFI related) not a systemic problem. This goes to the point that any issue that comes up in VR could be one of a bunch of root causes, and it is important to keep the options open as you move to discover the true root cause of a failure. Gotta have that engineering hat on!
Cup Half Full: I did have a great 1:1 meeting with a co-worker. We got to chat about our upcoming visit to New York City and then get into some work I’ve been doing with my team. Good balance between our social and working relationship. This is so important at a remote company. It can’t just be about the work. There are just so many things we take for granted when we work in a physical office. So many little gestures, blink and you’ll miss it interactions that are harder to simulate in the remote setting. Zoom can’t cut it. VR might have answers. I strongly suspect it does, but that’s getting ahead of the data.
#TLDR
Still a shaky last week, but life will always be a factor in how the day rolls out. And the crush of the end of the year, prep for a long holiday, and a family trip are the perfect storm for the experiment not being as active as previous weeks. The Christmas Blizzard hits tomorrow, so should give me good reasons to stay inside and in VR as much as possible. Plus I’m hosting a Holiday Gathering on the Walkabout Minigolf Course in the morning for Community Time!
Till Tomorrow…
Carrier Pigeon XR 