I've worked 100% remote for 7+ years, and it is awesome.
- I've had the opportunity to see my kids grow up (they're 6 and 9 now).
- I get to see my wife for lunch and a coffee break every single day (she also works from home)
- As a developer, the amount of focus I'm able to achieve in my home office is incredible.
It isn't for everyone, though. Here's some things I've learned:
- If you're any sort of extrovert, you're going to need to find outlets to recharge your social batteries (I'm an introvert, so not much of a problem for me).
- It is MUCH easier working for a 100% distributed company. I've had friend work in both fully distributed organizations, and semi-distributed, and it is much tougher in the semi-distributed environment.
- You absolutely need to set yourself up for success. I have a home office in the basement, and it is _the_ office, not another room. You need something more than your kitchen table if you really want to do it long-term.
- You need to find a system to keep your focus up. I use the pomodoro technique and GTD.
- If you work with a team, it is critical you jump on the phone a few times a week to touch base, and a few times per year face-to-face. It is as much for human interaction as it is for the work itself.
Like I said, it isn't for everyone, but I think more companies should give it a go.
> You absolutely need to set yourself up for success. I have a home office in the basement, and it is _the_ office, not another room.
This is the most important piece of advice. You need to have a space that is for work and for work only. When you enter that space, it puts you in a work mindset.
If you work wherever, you will never be able to focus.
> it is critical you jump on the phone a few times a week to touch base
In my experience, it is critical for you to jump on the phone every day, once a day. Like clockwork. The meeting shouldn't last more than 5 minutes.
Go over what you did the previous day and discuss what you're planning to do today. Discuss anything that's blocking your progress. Then start your day.
And what can be done if there's no easy way to separate "work" and "home" environments?
Pretty soon (in less than a month) I'm going to have the following working conditions: I'm gonna have a room to myself and a powerful tower pc. I need it both to work and to do non-work related stuff like videogames.
Of course I can drag it to kitchen every day to work and move it back to my room afterwards but that seems absurd to me.
Some people are able to switch contexts easily. If you're one of these people, advice given here may not apply to you. If you do find yourself having trouble keeping yourself focused at work, try doing things to keep your environments separated. It doesn't have to mean physically lugging your tower PC to a different room (but don't rule it out). Try creating different user logins, or at least different backgrounds and color schemes.
I manage just fine without that isolation. However I'm the opposite end of the spectrum: I have a laptop and work from wherever I happen to be. It works just fine.
I don't find concentration is at all hard to come by, however switching off can be difficult.
Yes -- I think the separation for you (and me) is to see the laptop as the "separation" device. I have a home office, but the distractions are everywhere. If I can grab my laptop and head anywhere else, my productivity shoots through the roof.
Ultimately, the beauty of the GP's quote "set yourself up for success" is that you must do absolutely whatever works for you. If it's working in a bar at 2 in the afternoon, do it. With no "office" to go to, it's an ideal situation to experiment.
Seriously if you are not earning enough remote working to buy a new laptop / tower, charge more.
I worked remote for 2 years and was paying for a separate office space about 20 minutes walk away. You have to have that separation - otherwise you will take two hours to make lunch and just get that lawn mown instead of doing the emails.
Take a laptop to the library or to Starbucks, go find a friend I a similar shape and swap rooms, knock on local company doors and do website maintenance in return for a desk.
Do not work in your one room in a flat share. Get out. Have physical distance
Maybe it is different when you work remotely most of the time, but for me I primarily use my home computer for games / netflix. On the occasions that I do work from home, I find it extremely hard to concentrate as my brain immediately goes in to 'netflix / games' mode.
The only consistent success I have had is by using my laptop from a different location than one I normally use for another purpose, such as the coffee table while not using the couch.
> You absolutely need to set yourself up for success. I have a home office in the basement, and it is _the_ office, not another room.
>> This is the most important piece of advice. You need to have a space that is for work and for work only. When you enter that space, it puts you in a work mindset.
I will parrot this a 2nd time.
When I was at University, I worked for a very small company that allowed me to set whatever hours I wanted as long as the work was completed. There were stretches where I didn't show my face in the office for 3 weeks at a time, because the building's physical location was a 45 minutes one-way drive. I worked from the computer lab, coffee shops, empty classrooms, the park, the cafeteria - basically everywhere on campus.
Then my son was born.
For the first month or two, I only went into the office when there were meetings. I didn't set up a place at home to be my office. "Who needs a home office; I have this sweet-ass gaming rig with 50 monitors! I'm gonna be the most productive guy in the world." As you can guess, that productivity lasted all of one day.
HN, Reddit, Facebook, Skype, sites like CodeEval, the StackExchange network - I had never been so distracted. I don't even regularly use Facebook, but because I had no one to answer to, it became a distraction. I started doing these short work sprints that last an hour. As retribution, I'd spend 2 hours screwing around. I'd fudge numbers on progress reports. I'd write code and do a rollback citing that a different method would be better suited to extend the application further down the road.
I used the Podomoro technique to reign myself in. 20-25 minute work stretches with 5 minutes of do whatever. That got me through roughly 10 days before the train was off the rails. I settled on working from a clean Linux partition in my wife's studio space. The need to have a true workspace when working remotely simply _cannot_ be understated.
I'll chime in with a "same story, different result". I too was a student working remotely for a web shop. My son was also born during this time. I'll add that my wife was doing her student teaching and we couldn't afford a sitter so I basically took care of the kid full time. I would do work when he was asleep, where ever that was. Sometimes that was at home. Sometimes it was on campus in an engineering lab. Many times I found myself parked just outside a classroom I was supposed to be attending keeping an ear out for the words "iClicker quiz" and blindly answering because it meant I at least got attendance points.
In the end, it all worked out. I got plenty done at work, managed to graduate and the kid didn't starve.
Yes, there were some days I had to take a break, beg someone to come watch the kid for a few hours so I could run down to the pizza place down the street (with WiFi) and work in peace. But honestly, I get the same feeling working in an office.
My point is not to refute the need for a dedicated work environment. It's just to say that you may be perfectly fine in complete chaos. Just pay attention and you'll figure it out.
> This is the most important piece of advice. You need to have a space that is for work and for work only. When you enter that space, it puts you in a work mindset.
Yes and no for my part, I have different places for different kind of work I do like I wrote in my post. Desk = coding, dining table = writing. It works for me but will probably not work for everyone.
> In my experience, it is critical for you to jump on the phone every day, once a day. Like clockwork. The meeting shouldn't last more than 5 minutes.
When working with a team or simply more people than yourself, then yes!
> Why phone? What is it that the phone offers that IM doesn't?
Phone is better than text because phone gives you more information in the discussion. You can judge the other person's mood to some extent, get a feel for their energy level, their enthusiasm. Also quite often when someone says something in text, it can be interpreted multiple ways, and emotion in voice gives cues which way is intended. If they have mixed feelings on a topic, you're more likely to sense that. It's also easier to talk, so it's easier to quickly relate a funny story and generally bond.
It's also worth nothing that a Skype call is generally higher sound quality, so it conveys this additional information much better than a phone call these days, since phonecalls tend to be way over-compressed and muddy. It's also worth noting that a video call does all of the above better as well, because video offers an additional channel of information for reading people's emotions.
Thanks- I can see that at least with a high quality video call- I personally don't like standard phone calls because I have trouble understanding those additional signals due to the low-quality. But if you really mean high quality voip/video, I can see that working.
When it comes to business discussions, I find text a better format because then I have time to compose and re-read my messages, and re-read other participants messages to clarify the details.
For many kinds of business discussions, being able to read emotions is even more important than with interpersonal discussions. Many business discussions involve selling ideas, selling products, understanding concerns, and so on. Once someone says something, they tend to dogmatically stick to that, even in the face of clear evidence that their position was wrong[1]. This phenomenon is even more pronounced when they write something. Whenever someone needs to have their mind changed, writing is the worst way to go about it!
[1] Consider reading a book like Influence by Robert Cialdini, Ph.D. which has all kinds of fascinating studies about how people act in surprisingly illogical ways based on what they write. The book cites a number of studies on this issue of irrational consistency, and how it is routinely exploited in situations ranging from sales to indoctrination.
High-bandwidth communication channels are more effective for building relationships. It is much more difficult to build relationships when you don't have face-to-face interaction. Lack of good relationships with the people you work with will put you at risk when the team or your manager are under stress.
Something like daily phone calls will help you build those relationships. It's not as good as face time, but it's a lot better than text.
> Lack of good relationships with the people you work with will put you at risk when the team or your manager are under stress.
Bingo.
If you just communicate in text, you don't have a relationship. You're just another fish in a sea of a ton of other emails/texts/IMs/etc. And trust me, everybody gets so many of them, they don't differentiate based on who sent it ... it's all just one massive blob of text.
Break through that. Be one of the few people who make voice contact and if possible, face to face. You then get upgraded to being an actual human being. Build a relationship.
Then when the shit hits the fan, and it always does, you won't get the axe. Also, it's not all negative ... when there's a windfall or a new project, you'll be remembered and they'll call you.
Always push for the most intimate form of communication available.
+1 to your advice. I've only been remote for a year and a half. The company is only partly remote, but very distributed between a few offices, and they make it work well. My system: before stopping work for the day, I make a small list of tasks too start first thing. I check for critical emails, then just hit the ground running. Hard.
I've done so for over four years, the life stuff rocks. It's simply not a big deal getting home stuff done, dealing with sick kids, etc..
I'd flip it though, no matter how introverted you are, you probably need some social interaction. At the very least get outside, walk, exercise, etc... Working from can let you fall into some bad habits if you arent careful. In addition to an office, I shower, get dressed and have some "work" house shoes I put on and then go to work.
As a worker, you have to be proactive too, you have to work to forge friendships and a strong team feeling; that can be harder than you think and it does take work. It's great when you figure it all out, it can be lonely and miserable you you don't or can't.
I also will assert that if you have a couple of very effective remotes, it lifts the whole company. More people will feel free to do personal stuff when they need to and generally they'll do stuff in evenings and weekends when needed. I've seen a few places where "work at home" means work at night, weekends and when you're sick. Remotes sort of force that issue and they help promote the use of tools to facilitate it.
> If you're any sort of extrovert, you're going to need to find outlets to recharge your social batteries.
This is still the biggest hurdle I’ve had to get over after freelancing for a year.
I lived alone when I started but it was easy enough to meet friends for lunch or after work and go to meetups to recharge, in the summer. Once Canadian winter hit the meetups happen less frequently and people are less likely to brave the winter for a cup of coffee.
Depending on where you live you may be able to keep a year-long routine of getting your social needs in order after work. But for me I’ve also had to change my mindset and appreciate times when I have no choice but to embrace solitude.
I'm working from home for 3 years and I'm happy too. I share the lunch + coffee breaks with my wife, best thing ever.
But with 2 kids in home, Can you say to them that you're working? they respect you? I spoke with some people that had success working from home, but when kids born they couldn't follow working from home.
I may add make any sport when you working from home. Sport help me a lot to get fresh air and ideas.
> But with 2 kids in home, Can you say to them that you're working? they respect you? I spoke with some people that had success working from home, but when kids born they couldn't follow working from home.
My kids grew up with it, so it was relatively easy to handle it: they always understood that when dad was in the office he was working and wasn't to be disturbed.
And there are consequences for them if they come into the office just to chat. Nothing major, but it is enough to create a difference between "the house is on fire" (good to know) and "I want to show you this awesome new lego creation I made (also good, but now is not the time).
I work from home with a 3 year old and ~6 month old (and my wife) in the house. It's not a problem. The three year old knows that when I'm in basement it's off limits and she respects that. It's great to be able to go up and have lunch/coffee break with them!
I've been working 6+ years remote, and agree: dedicated work space, GTD and pomodoros. Without a dedicated work space you'll burn out in a few months because you live where you work. Pomodoros keep you honest about how much real work you do. GTD makes sure you don't lose track of anything.
After years of working remotely, I find I'm very different than the author when it comes to being flexible with my day. While initially it was great to be able to head out for an hour here and there when I was feeling burnt or losing focus, I realized that I often made excuses just to get out of the house. It also meant that I was working "all day" and late into the night in order to make up for the lost hours from taking these breaks.
Ever since I have converted to my own set schedule (5:30 am and finished by early afternoon), I've never been more productive. Long story short, find a way to be productive that works for YOU. This may mean working early, working late, or working in chunks from morning until you go to bed. The author's experience didn't parallel mine, and it may or may not parallel yours.
> Long story short, find a way to be productive that works for YOU.
Exactly. I am so tired of all these "Open offices are great", "Open offices suck", "Remote work is great", "Remote work sucks", posts. If it works, keep it, if it doesn't work, change it.
I try to be nice but people will take advantage even if they don't think they are.
They will say that they are getting the work done so those 5 hour days are justified. I don't always agree and as a working manager I'm working 10-12 hour days cleaning up the rest and need more help and that attitude doesn't help me.
If you finish early, there is usually nothing stopping you from helping out with other miscellaneous things than just the big projects.
> I try to be nice but people will take advantage even if they don't think they are.
> They will say that they are getting the work done so those 5 hour days are justified. I don't always agree and as a working manager I'm working 10-12 hour days cleaning up the rest and need more help and that attitude doesn't help me.
...which is the point you bring up, which clearly demonstrates the 5 hour days not working for you. When I say "you", it's the collective: the whole team. Not individuals on the team.
> If you finish early, there is usually nothing stopping you from helping out with other miscellaneous things than just the big projects.
From an employees perspective: Then what is the motivation to perform better than my peers? More work than my colleagues and the hope to get a bigger bonus?
If someone is performing better and helping out in the remaining 3h, do you also pay extra for these 3h? If not, ain't it wiser for the employee to finish the work in 7h and help out for 1h? Less overall work, same money and one still stands out as a performer.
You should have clear, stated goals for deliverables, each deliverable should have a group of people who is responsible for it. Anyone who is is responsible for any deliverables which are delayed should not be working 5 hour days.
Then, depending on structure, people could assist on the delayed dependency, or devote time to a lower-priority project until they are able to work on the more important one.
If neither of these are possible, then it probably is okay for that employee to work shorter days in the meantime, and leadership resources should spend time solving the bottle neck issues to prevent the situation in the future.
>I try to be nice but people will take advantage even if they don't think they are.
>They will say that they are getting the work done so those 5 hour days are justified. I don't always agree and as a working manager I'm working 10-12 hour days cleaning up the rest and need more help and that attitude doesn't help me.
Keep in mind that for about the first quarter-century of our lives, we are trained in everything that we do that someone else will tell us what to do and set the expectations, and if we meet them then we're doing good, if we exceed them then we're doing better and deserve a reward. First our parents, then our teachers, then our entry-level bosses. They know what needs to be done and how long it should take; if we finish early, they tell us what to do next (or that we've done a good job and can relax).
It's only later, if we happen to get into a creative career, that our bosses can only give us a vague idea of what needs to be done and it's up to us to work out the details, set expectations, and seek out other work to do if we finish early. That goes against the grain of everything we've ever been taught.
We also have to unlearn the bad habits that hourly wage jobs train into us. If you want more free time, get your work done quicker (or that if you work efficiently, you get paid less).
It may be that you are working with people who are still trying their best at doing exactly what they've been taught their entire lives, and expecting what they've always been taught to expect, not yet consciously realizing that the dynamics are completely different and 20+ years of trained behavior and expectations should be thrown out the window.
>If you finish early, there is usually nothing stopping you from helping out with other miscellaneous things than just the big projects.
Sure, if somebody's falling behind, help them out if you can. Or go for the hidden victories. Maybe devs are spending time every week dealing with the results of a recurring bug - find a way to track down the source so they won't have to spend that time every week. Maybe somebody in marketing is tediously copy-pasting things that could easily be scripted so they could spend more time on creative stuff. Or the business people could really use some data that they never even knew you could easily pull for them. Ask the IT team about their frustrations and you might find something that could easily be changed on the dev side to save them hassle and reduce friction. Time spent helping your coworkers is time well spent in more ways than one. Unfortunately, we're trained from birth to be competitive and passive rather than cooperative and active about things like that.
If possible, try to encourage them to understand that extra time gives them the power to be creative and really excel, possibly in ways that you haven't even thought of. If you must give them tedious or unpleasant tasks, try making it an opportunity for them to find a way to remove the tedium (or even the need for the task) in the future. If they still aren't interested, then maybe it is a difference of opinion on work/life balance (they're trying to maximize their free time while also doing a good enough job).
I agree, but what I mean is managers trying to govern how employees work rather than how they are managed. There are cases where these are related, but I think most of the time they are separate.
I completely agree! And I hope I got that across in my post (but perhaps not?), that it all comes down to finding the ways that work for you. Since all in all, switching to a remote job is about finding your own way, or at least it was for me.
I'm the kind of person who lives his work, I treat it casually (or try to) but when I'm in an office I feel the pressure to "look busy" and when I go home I (now) lose motivation to continue working (even when I get a surge of inspiration)
I've looked for remote work for a long time, but being a systems administrator this is hard.. employers want you to be in a bullpen full of other people, random noises, distractions, people looking at your screen nonchalantly. I just can't get used to it.. although over the last 8 years I've become a little harder to it.
Working from home 4 out of 5 days makes the most sense, you meet people when needed but "get things done" the rest of the week, communication is crucial but face to face communication, while important, is not the most important thing at the sacrifice of comfort and quality work.
Agreed that it's not nearly as easy finding a remote sys admin job as it is software development. On https://www.wfh.io, we currently have 20 active sys admin jobs versus 197 software development. I'm actually seeing this increase slightly though, so hopefully as more businesses adopt full time remotes we'll see this number increase. Our sys admin jobs FYI:
Your perspective is interesting, thanks for sharing. When I am in your shoes, I pretend that I'm in my manager's shoes, being asked about changing something about work. Kind of playing devil's advocate: why is this a good/bad idea?
I've found it's good for coming up with arguments and point/counterpoints. And trying to appeal to the manager's personality -- what makes them tick.
Nice article. As someone who has never worked at a normal office, I'm glad that you're finding remote work better.
I'm in my mid 20s, I do contract work and has several personal projects that I have high hopes for. But there are moments when I'm bored/stuck when I think having a coworker nearby whom you could instantly talk to would be better.
This shows the real problems with remote workers - they spread your company information to all kind of online platforms. The author here, of course, goes to the extreme with storing company passwords in a closed source password app and uploading them to dropbox!
Remote workers must have some sense for privacy and security, this is more important than anything else.
There's no reason that these tools cannot be hosted on the company's own servers and made accessible remotely via VPN. However, that's a decision every company has to make for itself.
A classic company nowadays will have their code in Github, their e-mail and documents over at Google, even more documents in office 365 cloud, critical company files in Dropbox etc.
All for the sake of convenience. For me the important thing is to keep a work machine which is solely dedicated to work, which is only connected to the necessary services.
Really? That sounds very unusual to me. I've never worked at a company where critical, confidential business information was permitted to be hosted on an external service. Critical company files on Dropbox?? That sounds to me like a fire-able offense. Maybe fine for a start-up, but for a "classic" company?
Fair point about the startups, indeed that is what I was talking about. I do not see it as much of a problem, personally. (side note: I do not have access to critical company information, however I know it is hosted on Dropbox)
Our code, which is probably the most critical part, is on Github and that is definitely the case for many, many companies.
> For me the important thing is to keep a work machine which is solely dedicated to work, which is only connected to the necessary services.
VMs do wonders for this. A work VM with only work things makes it easy to keep work and life separate, but at the same time way more convenient than two computers.
How would you suggest dealing with shared passwords? I would rather have a much better solution than having a vault in a closed source app (even though it promises encryption) on Dropbox which pretty much have to release information to for example NSA if I'm not mistaken. It's by far the easiest solution I've found but would very much want a more secure and more private solution.
The best way to deal with shared passwords is to not have them. If you find yourself needing to share a single account with multiple users, then you're doing something wrong.
This simply is not conducive to a modern team. There are better ways to ensure security while still allowing some ease of use.
Not saying that you should store private keys in not-so-private places, but if you need to access any non-critical accounts as a team, what you propose is simply not reasonable.
- I've had the opportunity to see my kids grow up (they're 6 and 9 now).
- I get to see my wife for lunch and a coffee break every single day (she also works from home)
- As a developer, the amount of focus I'm able to achieve in my home office is incredible.
It isn't for everyone, though. Here's some things I've learned:
- If you're any sort of extrovert, you're going to need to find outlets to recharge your social batteries (I'm an introvert, so not much of a problem for me).
- It is MUCH easier working for a 100% distributed company. I've had friend work in both fully distributed organizations, and semi-distributed, and it is much tougher in the semi-distributed environment.
- You absolutely need to set yourself up for success. I have a home office in the basement, and it is _the_ office, not another room. You need something more than your kitchen table if you really want to do it long-term.
- You need to find a system to keep your focus up. I use the pomodoro technique and GTD.
- If you work with a team, it is critical you jump on the phone a few times a week to touch base, and a few times per year face-to-face. It is as much for human interaction as it is for the work itself.
Like I said, it isn't for everyone, but I think more companies should give it a go.