Why be stuck at home when you can Zoom aboard with a far better backdrop, go for a dip at lunchtime – and be just as productive?

So, how has working from home been for you? Having a good idea of the Property Chronicle readership I imagine it has gone rather well – better than you’d care to admit to your boss. What’s not to like about no commuting, being able to exercise each day, and not eating sandwiches for lunch?

You may have got on surprisingly well with your partner – although that’s not true for everyone: I gather divorces are about to go through the roof. If you were stuck at home with young kids, you might have been telling your colleagues how difficult it was but secretly delighting in the extra time spent playing with them. If your kids are school-aged, at what point did you decide to a) pay up to get them home tutored, or b) effectively give up and let them decide their own educational priorities.

For She-who-is-Mrs-Blain and me, the initial excitement of lockdown was tempered by how quickly our fit and athletic 25-year-old son emptied the fridge of all the local produce and organic veg boxes we’d carefully chosen to see us through. It was a revelation and quite expensive. Otherwise we ate well, exercised, lost some weight and generally enjoyed more time together. Our daughter stayed in London – and missed out on some great games of Risk!

According to the universities that have researched this, the average workday increased by 48.5 minutes, as did the number of meetings (up 13%) and the number of emails sent to colleagues (+1.4%). But the length of those meetings was much shorter, meaning overall we have been actually spending less time in meetings than before Covid-19.

My family were fortunate that there was space for us all to have home offices and enough wifi bandwidth to cope. I still found myself waking early each day to write my Morning Porridge market commentary. There was a downside, though: I’ve been unable to use my ‘broker ear’. It’s a skill I’ve honed over the years – being able to listen in to all the other conversations on the trading floor to build up a sense of what’s really going on in the markets.

At first I found it difficult to co-ordinate activities and to find convenient times to talk with clients and colleagues. Our firm may be small, but our diverse range of business activities presented our management with considerable challenges during lockdown – which have been overcome with grace, skill and a considerable amount of humour and understanding.

We all very quickly adapted to Teams and Zoom calls, and equally quickly reverted back to phone calls because they work well. It’s often less of a hassle. You can pick up a phone and speed-dial without the hassle of having to discuss home-office décor choices. I began to despair after one call during which the client remained on his running machine as we pitched a trade.

But as soon as lockdown eased, things began to change. One client told me he’d stayed the whole time in a rented cottage in Cornwall. It set me thinking. As shops reopened, we decided to leave our comfortable house and climb on board our yacht, which has three tiny half-height cabins, a nav-desk, a table and a very small galley. It’s been fantastic. We sail to interesting places over the weekends, then work from the boat moored up or anchored somewhere beautiful – like the Isles of Scilly. This article was written from a marina in Falmouth. Over the coming weekend we’ll be heading east to Fowey or Salcombe. We might cut right to the Channel Islands.

We had to prepare for the trip, buying a booster for the boat’s wifi system and an antenna so we can pick up 4G from secluded anchorages. Our broadband has been at least as good as at home. We’ve been Zoom-calling with the English Channel as our background. We know we’ve been at least as productive as if we’d stayed at home. We’ve been able to grab some time for lunch each day on the boat, and instead of going for a walk we’ve both embraced paddle boarding and sea-swimming.

There are some logistical problems. We need to run the boat engine an hour each day to keep our laptops and phones charged. We broke the prop on our old outboard dinghy engine and had to wait days for a spare part to arrive, before it broke down completely. That means a long row to get supplies. We’ve also had to be frugal with showers because we need to go into a harbour to get water and fuel – which is something we try to minimise.

Someone is bound to complain that we haven’t taken lockdown and social distancing seriously, or that we’re just on an extended free holiday. We certainly don’t see it that way – we’re spending our time together in our own little social bubble and we’re being productive. If we get to wake up in some of the most beautiful parts of the UK, that’s a bonus.