“Sorry, I was on Mute…”

…is one of the top 10 phrases you will hear while in a conference call. Anyways, it’s been a while. So here I am, summarizing what has been a year since my last post.

In the past year I have moved to a bigger appartment, one with an extra room that allows me to deploy all of my home office goodies. I have a secondary monitor which I am very happy with, I’m much more comfortable than the co-woriking space I used to go. I do miss the walks when I could listen to my audiobooks. Speaking of which, The Year Without Pants was one of them. As I said in an earlier post, remote means many things for different people. A company may tackle Remote in a given way, but that does not mean that if you’re doing things differently, you’re doing it wrong. Moving on…

So, I discovered I am not the type that can remote from a coffee shop, or public open spaces. I don’t have team bonding retreats (remember, I’m a remote worker in a non remote company, so I miss out on things and sometimes dealing with it can be a bit frustrating, feels a bit like an outcast). I miss the guys and the office buzz, but I certainly do not miss commuting through Buenos Aires and other big city life style stuff.

Personally, I work better when I have all my tools with me, a quiet environment and my dog sleeping at my feet. I’ve been discovering mini daily routines that help organize my working day and enjoy very much. These are:

• Walking the dog first thing in the morning, before breakfast, before work. Oxygen.
• Use those precious morning hours to tackle the hardest task of the day. Being 4/5 hours ahead means 100% undisturbed time and I love it.
• Taking a shorter lunch break but taking the dog for another long walk before standup (I’m 4/5 hours ahead so timing is perfect).
• Afternoon hours tend to be a bit more social, sync ups, emails etc, so, if possible, I try to leave the smaller time boxed tasks for the end.
• I finish the day with another (you guessed it) walk with the dog. (Did I mention I got a dog?)

So clearly, I prefer to give some structure to my day (the team and the project also benefits from this, since they can expect when I’m online and offline). None of that “I’ll push through the night cause I’m on fire…” or “hm, it’s a rainy Sunday afternoon, I can get something done…”. It’s not a rigid structure either, I consider that to be unhealthy too. If, for whatever reason, I need to step out for a bit, I will, as long as it doesn’t affect the team.

Things to improve? always:

• That “finish the day” line is often blurry, and mixes with some useless casual internet browsing. At work, when we finish the day, we send a daily status email to the customer. Because of time zones, it is always sent around my 22hs… I sometimes take a break before writing my daily summary… and then coming back to it is just a world of pain. I have mentally checked out and forgot what I did during the day.
• Some days are better than others, feeling a bit isolated is natural, so never forget all the upsides (and potential unexplored advantages) of your remote working situation (Listen to your environment!)
• Infrastructure improvements are also important… mainly chair. In the office days I was spoiled with a nice Embody chair by Herman Miller. What I have now is not even IKEA worthy. It’s in the backlog.

That is all for the time being. I will check in soon.

Happy remoting!