Looking back, I think the big difference is that I used to be able to leave windows and programs active in my office for days or weeks at a time. I could lock the screen at night and come back the next day to resume a sprawling workspace, with all the persistent layout helping me orient to continue a longer effort. Switching to WFH with continuous ratcheting of the IT/networking policies at work, I now suffer from forced termination of idle or long duration VPN and SSH connections on a regular basis. I can't even take a lunch break and expect to find everything open where I left off...

When a session involves restarting or reattaching too many different windows and working states, it isn't worth the trouble. I've adjusted my working style to be smaller campaigns with bits of local/offline work, quick forays into remote systems to test/debug, and separate bursts of commits, tagging, or deployment of code.

In some ways, I treat my future self more like another remote coworker with more formal process and less implicit state sharing. Onsite in the past, I might have done all editing, deployment, and testing from a working copy on the workstation before making commits. Now, I might edit, commit, and push to a branch from my laptop and then pull and test on a remote server, making small bugfix edits and commits there with a remote editor.

I went from using dual 21" 1920x1600 monitors to using dual 28" 4K monitors with a desktop in the office, to having those 4K monitors for WFH with a laptop. With the IT disruptions described above, I now have the 4K monitors in different rooms where I might want to dock the laptop, but I often just work directly on the 1920x1080 laptop screen from other comfortable locations. With the quick in-and-out of ephemeral VPN and SSH sessions, I don't miss the large pixel areas as much. Just one large 4K monitor affords a lot of space to pull up side-by-side editing windows, documentation, etc.