What I learned from working remotely for two years as a graphic designer
I worked remotely as a graphic designer for almost two years, and the past three months in an office as a UI designer, not only the environment but switching work areas and moving to a different city were completely opposite world directions for me.
On your own
The very first I learned that you need the most focus on to work properly is self-initiative. You are your own “boss” in terms of work timing, delivering and schedules. You decide if you wake up early or stay very late at night finishing everything, which I foolishly did the first months I started working remote because I was used to work that way in college.
Normal house and work daily things may become more difficult at first, such as balancing your life, and stay healthy, and are fundamental keys to work properly, they took me a while to set.
Create your work environment
I’m an all life heavy sleeper, like, seriously rolling in the deep heavy, so, if by any chance I went to bed after my bed time it’ll be very rare if I heard the alarm, so, I strictly go to bed early, and that helped me wake up early every day, and that’s how I try to started every day.
Because your home and work space are in the same location, managing to give every space a different purpose is my huge advice to take, you need to limit what you can and cannot do in every space, like, setting a not-crossing line from both. For example, I couldn’t work in bed.
Every day I had to make the bed before everything else, and my room needed to be organized and mostly clean, next to this, and foolish as it may sound, I have to get dressed, comb my hair, even use lotion, pijamas were totally not optional.
So, in order to I can work properly, bed needed to be made, room have to be clean and I have to be presentable.
I worked from around 8:30AM to 6:00PM or 7:00PM at home, but gave myself breaks, clean my apartment a little bit and sometimes went for a running or coffee breaks.
Refresh your mind
During my time working remotely I moved three times, one of those times, I waited for almost two weeks to get the internet company to activate my service, so I became a Gold Level member at Starbucks for going daily to work. Not only I enjoyed the coffee, (I strictly take a cup every morning before starting my day), but I discover changing work places is refreshing.
“Go to movies, travel, read a book”, as a designer you need to see things from different perspectives, your mind must collect all those places you’d visited and seen, if you get stuck at any point will mostly be because you need to see more in order to create more.
Result from those days, I went for coffee with my boyfriend one day and, unintentionally, a tradition evolve, every friday morning I’d go to Starbucks with him, he’d worked on his homework and I’d work on that day’s tasks. Now, I have more reasons to expect for a friday.
I travel a few times, and work became one of my partners. Traveling allows you to grow up as a human, is the ultimate mind refresher, that and a great book. Letting your mind and body let go on an adventure is the best way to know your inner creative person.
Transparency with your team
Technology is great, is actually more than great, communication is simple, fast and natural via internet, but miscommunication is commonly everywhere, one of the very big difficulties I had to deal with was not know entirely what’s happening with the rest of the team.
There were days I have zero communication with someone else from the team, mostly because I already knew what my tasks were from that day.
I’m a quiet person with almost everybody I know, but a massive talker when in a completely comfort zone, so, now I’m trying to be best in communicating and have a transparency with my team, make the best use of tools like Slack, WhatsApp, Google Hangouts, or a phone call. We’re all here to help, ask, reply, start a conversation, not only online.
At the end, being a graphic designer is all about solving communications’ problems.
Balance life
As anyone, balancing life isn’t easy, but If you get to organice everything the best you can, trust me, it can get a lot easier to handle. There were days were I simply couldn’t do anything besides basic stuff, and even then, my head, brain and body were not cooperating, so I simply stop everything I was doing and try to go through those rough times.
One of the main reasons I love to work at Beek is that I genuinely feel human and vulnerable, if anyone is going through some stuff it’s okay, and most importantly, it feels okay if they need to back off from everything to solve that.
Try new things
Working remote in a familiar environment leaves you with a lot of time for yourself, I truly suggest to explore the areas you want to get to know more, and achieve the most of your personal and professional goals in your spare time. Learning is a process works best when you decide you must have to try something because you will failed yourself if you aren’t even willing to try out.
I explore more about photography, which I deeply love, gave a few talks about reading encouragement for youngers in some schools and book fairs, and became a house lover. Those are thinks I particularly couldn’t discover I love to do (or simply would be a lot harder to be doing) if I wasn’t remote working at that time.
Work in an office has been grateful and pleasant for me because of the team I work with, it is a small team with pure energy of learning, it’s like school but cooler. Remote and non-remote work have been great for me, and if I’d to answer which one I prefer I’d say that remote work is the future, but office brought me a lot more than I could’ve ask for, not only on my professional life but in my every day life, and that is simply amazing.
