My experiences of working remote for a year

http://modess.io/2015/08/16/one-year-of-working-remote/

by nerdklers • 11 years ago

102 63 11 years ago

modess.io

wiremine3• 11 years ago

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.

maratd2• 11 years ago

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.

nerdklers3• 11 years ago

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!

rizzin2• 11 years ago

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.

ensignavenger2• 11 years ago

Why phone? What is it that the phone offers that IM doesn't?

noxToken• 11 years ago

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.

borplk• 11 years ago

What's GTD?

mati• 11 years ago

"Getting Things Done" (David Allen)

fnbr• 11 years ago

"Get Things Done"

It's a popular book [1] discussing a system of how to be more productive.

[1] http://gettingthingsdone.com/

eswat• 11 years ago

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.

eloycoto• 11 years ago

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.

Cheers

jcater• 11 years ago

I've also been working from home for 3 years and love it.

My 3 year old understands perfectly well that "daddy's at work... we can't disturb him."

Oddly enough, it was the teenagers at home during the summer that had a hard time grasping that.

randlet• 11 years ago

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!

A nice set of headphones is mandatory though ;)

wiremine3• 11 years ago

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).

wainstead• 11 years ago

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.

TallGuyShort• 11 years ago

+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.

TheCondor• 11 years ago

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.

UserRights• 11 years ago

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.

praseodym• 11 years ago

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.

yoz-y2• 11 years ago

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.

matwood• 11 years ago

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.

ryandrake• 11 years ago

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?

nerdklers3• 11 years ago

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.

dublinben2• 11 years ago

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.

lenomad2• 11 years ago

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.

dereke• 11 years ago

Just because you are remote doesn't mean you can't instantly talk to coworkers. Just call them by phone/skype/hangouts/screenhero.

My remote working friends and I have a slack group where we hangout and chat about stuff, it is great you never feel alone.

TheOtherHobbes• 11 years ago

Conversely, just because you're in an office doesn't mean you can instantly talk to the right coworker.

I find on-site has high-bandwidth communications but limited productivity because of distractions.

Remote is the opposite.

However - it's usually easier to find ways to increase bandwidth than to remove distractions in a shared space.

lenomad2• 11 years ago

This works, but can't beat talking in-person, at least in my case.

That said, I still don't consider going to a regular office. Should try a coworking space.

dijit• 11 years ago

I've always dreamed of working remote.

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.

mattt416• 11 years ago

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:

https://www.wfh.io/categories/2-system-administration/jobs

DaveWalk2• 11 years ago

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.

ryannevius• 11 years ago

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.

nerdklers3• 11 years ago

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.

copsarebastards2• 11 years ago

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.

jaawn4• 11 years ago

It would be nice if more managers agreed with the "what works for you" mindset, instead of "what works for the manager."

My experiences of working remote for a year

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