On Working Remotely (Part 1)
This is a three part series where I’ll talk about working remotely. The first post is mostly about the view of a worker being remote on an individual basis. The second part will focus on managing a distributed team. The third take the point of view of the company.
I started working remotely, full-time in May of 2015. I was fairly certain it wasn’t going to go well for me. I knew other people did it, and it was fine for them. I was worried. I am a social person. I love face to face speaking, hanging out, and generally just being with people. Moving 2,000 away from the home office in Portland seemed scary. I didn’t know anybody in my new location.
My biggest fears were:
- I would go crazy from not talking to people
- Serious FOMO (Fear of missing out)
- I wouldn’t be able to divide home/work well
- Missing hallway conversations which turned out to be important
- I wouldn’t be good at managing a team remotely
- Timezones
Make a place to work
The first thing I did, after unpacking and taking care of family items, was invest in a workspace. I bought an awesome microphone with headphone amp. I bought a height adjustable desk. I got an office fridge, an ice maker, some programmable lights, and eventually a new chair. I had the Portland office send me two large monitors and mounting arms. If I was going to be in this room 8+ hours a day, I needed it to be comfortable.
Addressing Social Issues
It did take some adjusting, but really, it wasn’t bad. Since the main office made a substantial investment in video conferencing, the interactions with others were pretty great. It was still fairly social. I also found a few other things really helpful.
In terms of social time, there is certainly less at when working from home. It’s not as bad as I thought it would be. I am in video calls everyday to some extent. Some days it for 8 hours. Others just 1 or 2. Sometimes in the evenings after work, I have to get out of the house just because I’m a little stir crazy. That doesn’t hurt anything though.
Unforeseen Productivity Gains
Firstly, when you have 5 minutes between meetings in the office, you go grab coffee, soda whatever. You talk to people. You end up 2–3 minutes late to your next meeting. When working from home, you might still go grab a beverage, but that’s the entire transaction. If that’s 30 seconds of 5 minutes, you now have 4.5 minutes to get something done. I can read emails, send quick replies, review a pull request, or do quite a few other things in 4ish minutes. Not everything can be done in that little amount of time, but enough that it can help keep your plate a little cleaner.
The other advantage of this 5 minute break remotely vs in the office is that new work requests don’t happen out of ad hoc conversations. In the office, you have that 5 minute conversation with a person from BD or Product, and you both agree that you’ll get them more information, or you’ll write up your thoughts, or sure, you could join that meeting you weren’t planning on being at. This is a double hit against productivity. Firstly, you’ve eaten the 5 minutes or so to do small tasks. Secondly, you’re now signed up for work you probably wouldn’t have been a part of if you were just sitting at home.
The next time I was back in the office, (in Portland), was when this truly became evident. I felt like I got about half of the normal amount of work I would accomplish done that week. I took a note of it and wondered if it was just a fluke. The next 3 times I was in town, I noticed the same pattern. I’m pretty convinced.
Yet another way I can make headway on the ever-growing todo list when working away from the office, is doing some other work during a meeting. I know this isn’t the best thing to confess to. However, sometimes, I am in meetings that are not interesting to me, or that I contribute very little to. If that happens regularly, I stop going to those meetings. If it’s more of a one-off thing, I can get some work done while in the meeting. I can also work while watching our Friday all-hands video on Monday. If something really demands 100% of my attention capacity, I can simply rewind it. Brilliant.
This is a double-edged sword though. I really try not to work during meetings if I can help it. Because of video conferencing, eye contact and direct body language are just not quite as good as face to face. If I was in a room with somebody, I wouldn’t have my laptop open and be 100% present to listen to them. There’s no reason to not give the same respect to somebody on a remote meeting. It can be difficult not to click that bouncing icon for your chat program or whatever. It takes some discipline. I will say, that because I use the computer as my video mechanism, I can get OH tweets up much faster…so that’s productivity too, right?
Serious FOMO
Since I do like to be social, I also hate being left out. It’s a personality thing I have. I was very afraid I would miss out a lot by not being in the office. I do miss on some things. However, I also miss out on lots of things that I’m not aware of, I assume.
I also miss out on free lunches, snacks, soda, beer, meetups, video games, and other stuff. None of that is completely terrible (though I do seriously miss Pacific Northwest beer).
Work/Life divide
I also worried about my ability to stop working. When you enjoy your work, and you’re fairly connected, it’s really easy to just keep working. I was terrible at that in Portland, when I had a commute and everything. Controlling that in the house seemed like a dream that people with willpower well beyond my own may be able to achieve, but not for this mere mortal.
The only way I’ve found this to work, at least for me, is to just be medieval about it. I won’t accept a meeting after 18:00 Central time. I don’t care who you are. That’s my time. That’s when I spend time with my family. I often get back online after 21:00, when my little guy is asleep if I am still needed. People are more understanding of the hard stop than I thought they would be. I also don’t make exceptions to this rule.
Another great aspect of working from home is that I can interact with or see my family during the day. If I go downstairs to grab a sandwich, I can say hello. I can help carry in groceries if I’m not occupied by work. It’s quite a treat to get 5 minutes with my child on a break. That doesn’t happen at the office.
Missing Hallway Conversations
I had a real fear that without the hallway chatter, I’d know a lot less about what’s going on. Honestly, that’s true. However, I quickly came to realize, that’s not on me. If information isn’t getting to me, I can’t be expected to react to it or deal with it. If key decisions or directions are set in meatspace ad hoc conversation, we’re not building a culture of a distributed workforce.
I pull fairly often from different people to try and get information. I request a whole lot more information in writing. I don’t really know what I’m missing out from in the hallway, or in the 2 minutes before and after every meeting when the AV is connecting or already off.
I don’t have a solution here, other than to fallback on knowledge that I can’t control it. If I need to know something to improve my work, team, or the company, it needs to be deliberate communication.
Wrap it up
As an individual, I had a lot of fear about working remotely. Most of it, has turned out much better than I anticipated. There certainly are times I wish I was in the office. More of than not, however, it’s for social and not business reasons.
What’s next?
The next post will focus managing a team when you’re thousands of miles away and spread across 9 timezones. It’s new challenge, but very rewarding. I also haven’t touched on setting up local community involvement, or much on remote culture yet. I assure you though, to be effective, we don’t all live within 30 miles of the main office.
