Making Your Bedroom a Sanctum from Technology?

millisa asks: "With the tightening economy, technology workers are finding themselves picking up extra tasks in the workplace which in turn can raise stress and detract from the ability to relax. Many of us are strapping an assortment of gadgets that beep, vibrate, and blink at us (and most of them aren't the fun kind) with the purpose of on-call response at any and all hours. Where does the restful bedroom exist? What I'm looking for are ways other nerds in the community have made their bedrooms into a place where they can release tension of the day and improve their overall quality of life? What measure have others taken to be considerate towards that signifigant other (in order to keep them being the signifigant other)? Hidden receivers and speakers for mood music? Ambient lighting? Walled windows and soundproofing? What's in your de-teched sanctuary that keeps the minimum for you to fulfill your job obligations? Economical suggestions are quite welcome!"

"The lucky few of us who've managed to not remain single can have one recalcitrant database or webserver strain a relationship to the extreme when it misbehaves multiple nights in a row. I personally have developed severe sleep disorders over the past half decade due to the little issues that always seem to happen just after that much needed REM sleep kicks in. I certainly can't fathom the patience my signifigant other has for sharing the disturbances.

I woke a few months back with a laptop near the pillow, flat screen still powered on the tv tray and an equal distribution of cats and wireless devices at my feet. I had a headache from various system fans, drives spinning, and the 'dings' of incoming mail. Enough was enough. I decided I wanted to make the bedroom as much of a sanctum as possible. The other 85% of the house can have wires, TiVos in various states, and homemade networked kitchen appliances; the place of rest should be geared to that purpose if I'm to be an efficient geek."

About the gadgets that beep, vibrate, and blink

[Masa]

Can't comment about my bedroom which is just an alcove near my computer, TV, gaming console, stereos and other electrical devices :) But I have made few things to stop work-related calls interrupting my spare time.

I have a Nokia 6210 cell phone which has these nifty "profiles" and "caller groups". I've set two profiles to my phone: "spare time" and "work hours". In the "spare time" mode no signal is given if the call is coming from the office or the caller is one of my co-workers. Also, the phone is silenced so if someone not-work-related person calls, the phone just beeps and vibrates.

The "work hours" profile on the other hand has a ring tone and all other annoying panic-causing effects turned on and all calls are accepted.

With this simple trick I can truly turn off my work and relax and enjoy me spare time.

I find beeps and flashing lights relaxing

[braddeicide]

I don't find technology stressful, i love things beeping and flashing as me. My bedroom is my office, so i can keep an eye on things 24/7, i have them setup to "beep" if somthing goes wrong. I used to have a seperate bedroom, but i actually found that quite stressful, wondering what was happening in the office. On many occasions i'd leap out of bed and run in here thinking that i heard somthing.

The only thing i've done towards relaxing is getting a WiFi laptop, so i can sit under a tree in the backyard and code :)

I'm addicted to my work, lucky me :)

Take a different strategy.

[AtariDatacenter]

Personally, I don't think you should ban technology because it is technology. You should, instead, ally yourself with your technologies. (And that may mean using more technology. Or using your existing technology smarter.) The most annoying technology in my house? Probably the most basic one. The telephone.

It rings a lot and half the time I don't want to answer it. But I've got to check the Caller ID to see if I want to answer it or not. How do I ally myself with this technology? Answer: technology. A talking caller-id box, for example, would save me the trouble of rushing to a caller-id box to figure out that I do or don't want to rush to the phone. Have it announce over the whole-house intercom during waking hours if that is pleasurable. If you've had enough of the phone for the day, unplug it at the network interface box outside your house. It is amazing the peace it can buy.

WiFi is a nice way for me to have my technology when and where I want it. Instead of having to go to the computer to look something up, I can figure out the answer to a question in the living room. Or I can log onto a server from the bedroom. It has freed me from 'you must be in the office to reference the WWW or log into work'.

Probably the most useful and enabling device in the house, second to the general purpose PC, is the TiVo. I can't think of why I'd want to ban it from the bedroom. It is an enabling device that allows us to watch television on our own terms. Unless you don't believe in television in the bedroom.

Really, you have to look at your technology as devices that serve you. If they don't serve you, change them so where they do. If your company gives you a pager that you hate lugging around, swap it for a Timex pager-watch. If you can't change them, then I can see your approach of RIF'ing them.

As far as the bedroom, the only technology that I have found to be disruptive in there is the pager. But that is exact purpose of the pager, to be disruptive. So I can hardly complain about something serving its useful function.

It is all about planning

[D.A. Zollinger]

When I got my most recent job in IT, and was handed a phone, I decided I didn't want to be a slave, even if I was expected to answer the phone/pager. So I turned it off when I got home in the afternoon, and turned it on when I left home in the morning for work.

After a couple of 'emergencies' (don't get me started - one person's emergency is usually another's lack of planning) took place and I was unreachable, I was called into my boss' office. A little white lie later, and we decided that my house was in a 'dead zone' between cell towers, and since the company didn't want to buy me a new house, I was suddenly passed over when it came time to 'carry the phone/pager.'

Problem solved. I never had to deal with late night emergencies, and I never had to give more hours to my job than were nessessary. It is nice to have my evenings free for my family and myself.

I've taken the opposite approach.

[Anonymous Coward]

What was my bedroom is now my "geek room", and my bed is out in the living room with only my TV and radio to keep it company.

The joy's of single living, aye?

Re:uhhh, dude...

[perljon]

In our shop, we are on call for 100's of webservers. We aren't responsible for all of them during the day, but 1 lucky guy a week gets to stay awake for the whole group of servers. I imagine that's the way it works in a lot of places. Plus, at any given time there are 1000's of code updates occurring acrossed multiple machines in the middle of the night. Not to mention other maintenance that the oncall may not be called in on until someone created a problem and their maintenance window is quickly coming to a close. Or, perhaps it's a database that isn't responding but the owners of the db can't figure out why, but it's 3 am and you got paged for the website that uses the db not responding.

So until you work somewhere that has more than 2 servers doing file and print sharing for a daytime staff of 12, don't tell me or others they are bad admins for a server not working _multiple_nights in a row. You haven't walked a mile in their shoes. I can safely assume from your ignorant comment that you've never worked with real servers before.

Focus on the bed

[grammar nazi]

Last Fall, I came to a realization that I love my bed. We each should spend about 30% of our lives laying in our beds, and up until December, I was neglecting that crucial area of my apartment. Since I work 10+ hours each day *and* go to school part time, I spend too little time in my bed. This makes me wish I spent more time there, and as a result I love my bed even more.

So what did I do? I went out and got a down mattress pad, down comforter, a bunch of down pillos, and some kick-ass bed sheets. Now, when I sleep in my bed, I'm surround everywhere by warm fluf. On top of my extra firm matress, it feels like heaven.

We spend most of our lives either at work or laying in bed, so why not put a littl effort into having a nice bed?

personally ...

[Anonymous Coward]

I have no computing devices in my bedroom. The cell phone doesn't go in there unless im talking on it. I keep guitars under the bed, and a book next to it. The only things plugged into the wall is the phone and alarm clock(dont know why.. i dont use it anyways). I also made very sure to tell my boss that unless something basically explodes, please dont call, most likely it can wait till morning. However, I do tell him that if I expect that thier may be problems over the weekend etc, then he may call me(he usually does). I really try to keep work out of my apartment. please repeat this ... YOUR WORK IS NOT YOUR LIFE! .. if it is ... thats your first problem.

Backup.

[Zapman]

You must have backup. If you don't have someone else to do this, and you have a shop buging you extreemly regularly you need to get them to hire a partner.

Phrase it something like this: I am the only person who understands how these systems run. I'm the only person who can fix them when this breaks. If I get hit by a bus, you're in a world of hurt. If I don't start getting more sleep, I'm going to burnout, and you're in a world of hurt. I work 70 hours a week regularly, and the backlog keeps piling up. I need someone to help me.

Then (well, after 2-3 months training the person), you can take weeks off from pager duty. There's a reason doctors have on call rotations. You should too.

One of the things that I've done is set expectations at my place of work. 90% of the time, my pager is available to them when they need me. That other 10% is well communicated in advance, and my boss knows that my pager will be on my bedstand, but I'll be in another state.

(Oh, and reguarding the person who saw 'recurring nights of database server issues' as a sign of stupidity, they might be right, they might be wrong. We've had a sun e4800 go really flakely on us recently. It took WEEKS of long nights (since the box was production, and we couldn't take it down in the day) to get the hardware on that box stable (it would work fine for 3 days or so, then flake out hard). Sun wouldn't give us a new box (with at least an understandable reason), and keep insisting on replacing individual pieces. And it certainly wasn't our doing. It turned out to be a bug deep in the IO chassie's firmware.)

The best bedroom...

[TheSHAD0W]

I've heard from a lot of people, and my conclusion is, the best set of furniture to put in a bedroom is -- a bed.

No, don't mod this as funny. I'm serious.

The way human psychology works, you want to have a place where you do nothing else but go to sleep. Any other distractions, and you're creating a basis for insomnia. I can understand the need to save space, so perhaps add some clothes storage so you can get dressed there, but even that is a distraction. If possible, you should do that in another room. The bedroom can be just large enough for the bed, and a little stand for an alarm clock, and that's all.

Don't put a TV or stereo in the bedroom. Don't read in the bedroom. Again, you're only distracting yourself from falling asleep. I know you're using them to try to fall asleep; don't. If you want to watch TV or read, do it in another room.

Re:uhhh, dude...

[pthisis]

In our shop, we are on call for 100's of webservers. We aren't responsible for all of them during the day, but 1 lucky guy a week gets to stay awake for the whole group of servers. I imagine that's the way it works in a lot of places.

Take a page out of google's book. By the time you have 100s of servers, with proper redundancy it doesn't really matter if one (or several) of them is down. Google's to the point where once a week they reboot the failed machines and replace the ones that don't come back up. You might need to do it daily.

Only if there's a good _business_ reason for you to be called in/working late should you do it. "The machine is down" is not a business problem; "the site is down and we're losing customers" is. Work things out so the first doesn't imply the second and you'll get a lot more sleep.

Sumner