I went in to this last week thinking very practically and actually literally about hardware — about what I needed bring with me to write while I was away looking after a family member. But I’m coming out of the week thinking instead about software, about mental software, and how these past days are making me reassess how I do anything.

I’m not going to say that lessons have been learned, but I’m at least looking at the new curriculum.

All that happened, all that I was expecting, was that instead of being in my office, I would be in this other place. With certain exceptions that were just physically not possible, I was to be doing exactly the same work as normal.

Hence all the hardware. I spent time thinking about microphones, for instance, and a peculiar two-factor authentication issue that means remembering to bring some gear that I’d only need for about one minute. In the end, I decided there was no possibility of recording anything, and I forgot one key part of that one-minute gear.

I also forgot how slow the internet was going to be here. Every week I produce two versions of a new “58keys” YouTube video and it takes me, well, I’m going to guess 10 minutes to upload. I don’t really know because it’s quick, I don’t have to know, I just push the buttons and get on with something else.

It took me more than 15 hours to upload this week’s videos. Since YouTube has this thing where it might simply stall and never finish uploading — you just have to start a new upload and hope — it was a tense half a day watching that percentage upload struggle up hill.

So in that case, the new location and the new situation meant having to radically change my schedule for those videos. I’m glad that I could, I am deeply relieved that I happened to finish the edit and begin uploading when I did, but if I were to continue here, I’d have to revise when I produce the videos at all. I don’t know how I’d record them, though. And live videos would be impossible.

But I think it’s the different schedule in other senses that has me pondering more. While I do most of our cooking, for example, here I’ve been doing it all and — weirdly for me — doing it at pretty regular times. Usually eating takes second place to whatever else we’re doing, but here it was a thing by itself.

Then I admit that in my own place, sometimes I am so tired that I don’t even notice going to bed, it’s just suddenly the next morning and I am fractionally less exhausted. Most of the time, though, going to bed feels like another failure, another day ticking by without my getting enough done.

Here the bedtime was rigid and far too early for me. But then lately I’ve been getting lazy at home and a consequence of a required early night has been a consistent getting up to work at 06:00. I’ve got quite a lot done in those first hours before other commitments kick in.

Intellectually I knew that everyone’s schedule is different, but perhaps I didn’t intellectually realise that we all think our routines are the normal ones. The moment I’m back home, I’m going immediately into my own, old schedule — possibly literally, since as I write this there’s a problem that means I may need to produce a podcast at midnight.

I will embrace my “right” schedule and be so glad to be back in it, but I’m also going to re-examine it all. I think I’ll try to do evening meals at a set time instead of anywhere in a two- or even three-hour window, for instance. I’m going to prepare more work in advance, as if I’m going to hit the ludicrously slow internet problem, but also to see if that frees me up from the day to day rushing. A bit of planning, I can see it helping a lot.

What I’ve learned is that I lurch from week to week, and actually what I’ve learnt is that I haven’t been appreciating that enough in any sense. My world has been a lot smaller for a week and I wonder if it isn’t always smaller than it could be, that it should be.