Working From Home in Tokyo

Unfortunately, shortly after I talked about Tokyo being in a mystery situation regarding COVID-19/Coronavirus, cases spiked.

The situation in Tokyo (as of April 2020)

The country declared a state of emergency in early April. Apparently, the law forbids the government from enforcing a full lockdown, so Tokyo and several other prefectures are in more of a quasi-lockdown, with the government firmly requesting adjustments to business and working from home.

The goal is to cut person-to-person contact by 70%.

While many non-essential workplaces have abided, some haven’t.

Luckily, my company has had a work from home option since the beginning of March.

What I do

I work at a marketing agency, TAMKO, and most of the projects I’m on are with international clients so I’m never in physical meetings with them anyway.

Even on regular office days, it’s common for my teammates or myself to not always be in the office, so communicating through chat or video conferencing is already something we’re used to.

The daily routine

Slack is our main communication tool

The majority of our communication happens over Slack. To clock in, we type one of several messages and it’s recorded automatically. Most people use “おは” (oha) which is short for ohayogozaimasu, or “good morning.”

Almost all communication happens in Japanese.

I go about my day checking and replying to emails (we use Gmail), working on client projects as well as internal ones, and having an occasional meeting or virtual team lunch.

Uber Eats has become more popular

For lunch, I try to make something simple or eat leftovers, but sometimes there’s nothing or I’m lazy.

My usage of Uber Eats has gone up quite a lot.

I’m not alone, apparently.

The app has recently been in Japan’s top 5 of the App Store’s free app rankings, and has gotten additional exposure by people like celebrity Tsubasa Honda, who recommended the service in a YouTube video that got 1.8M views in a little over a day.

I’ve been watching a lot of YouTube while I eat lunch. I tend to watch videos where I can learn something from, videos from channels like CNBC, Vox, Gary Vaynerchuk, Business Insider, some vloggers and so on.

Amazon has also been pretty great.

Amazon delivered to a apartment delivery box

For the most part Amazon deliveries have been so far unaffected by the situation.

Amazon Prime deliveries in Tokyo are really fast, sometimes within 12 hours if you order the night before.

My apartment also has a delivery box system in case we aren’t home or able to get our deliveries when they come in. It’s been helpful as we order online a lot, especially during this time.

About twice a week, we have an all-hands team meeting. We were using Google Hangouts but have more recently switched to Zoom for these.

Team meeting on Zoom

If you’d like to see a day in motion, feel free to watch the video I made.

Otherwise, I hope everyone is doing as well as can be.

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