Working From Home Tips for Technologists
When COVID-19 hit, countries around the world were faced with a dire problem: how could they keep their workers safe without losing productivity and profits? Fortunately for the tech industry, precedents for working from home were plentiful. Many companies were quick to declare work from home as mandatory. The gambit paid off — employees continued to work effectively (and safely!) from home. Companies began to take notice. They began extending their generous remote policies, some even indefinitely, and circulating articles about the benefits of ditching the office. It seemed to work out for both sides of the equation. But not for me. I struggled to maintain the steady output of work that my team expected from me, and working longer hours to make up for it didn’t help. To work in a new environment, I had to learn new lessons.
Turn Your Home Into the Zone
If you’re anything like me, you spent a bunch of time when you first started your job getting your office workspace in order. I had my monitors in the perfect position, my friend’s origami proudly displayed, and my standing desk with the perfect heights set up. And I lost it all when I had to work from home. But once I realized I was going to be settled into my home space for a solid period of time, I realized it was definitely worth it to invest time into making that work space a little more familiar. I moved away from my cramped bedroom desk and spread out on my living room table. I found some aesthetically pleasing decorations to display. I went back to my good ol’ headphones instead of trying to listen to my speakers from another room. I started to approach the zone that I often got into at work, and you can too.
Missing out on white boards? Get a command-strip mountable one here, or use some old fashioned pen and paper. Use a mouse at work? Get one for your house! The brain is great at associations. The more you feel like you’re in the office, the closer you’ll come to your in-office productivity. But don’t forget that being home has certain advantages as well. Any customizations you’ve wanted at the office but couldn’t convince others of? More plants? Loud snacks? A strange picture of a clown that calms you? All on the table. I’ve personally been keeping my home warmer than the office and working out during lunch to take advantage of the fact that my shower is right there. Your home is your oyster.
Pick a Schedule and Stick To It
Code is more likely to produce the expected behavior when it is well structured — the same is true for a work day. For me, the boundaries between working from home and living in home threatened to blend together, as did the boundaries between weekdays and weekends. You might be tempted to just let them. Take a break to do something else during work hours. Return in the evenings to finish up some work. And these decisions can be ok! As long as you are reachable when your team expects you to be reachable, you should feel free to forge a schedule that gives you better opportunities to do more focused work.
I felt like my entire day was being taken up by work, so instead of going into the evenings I’ve started waking up earlier. This gives me more time to work without sacrificing the ability to do my own thing at night, my favorite time of the day. But remember that smart structure is a result of smart decisions. There’s a difference between planning to nap through lunch to be more productive in the afternoon; and arbitrarily deciding to nap at 2 because you can “go back to work” later and risk throwing away your whole momentum for the day. Thoughtfully structure a schedule that works best for you, aided by some controlled experiments, and stick to it. Keep track of it in your favorite calendar app and hold yourself accountable. If your schedule is truly optimal, deviating from it will only make you less efficient. Your optimal schedule might not look like everybody else’s. But as long as you are still getting your work done and your team is ok with it, that’s ok!
Hold Onto Your Hobbies
Restrictions are starting to ease, but a lot of your old hobbies and escapes still might not be available to you. It may be tempting to fill the remaining time up with work. But remember why you had hobbies and escapes in the first place — if you could work all day and still feel fulfilled and happy while still working efficiently you would have been doing that a long time ago. Your hobbies are what keep you sane and able to work. No matter how good your codebase is, you will always find new ways to improve it and new features to add. More hours working does not always mean more work is being done, in the same way more engineers does not always mean that development will go faster. You risk losing focus and burning out. I used to think vacation days would be a waste because I would just be at home either way. But I needed one to get out of what I like to call “the inefficiency guilt cycle”. This is when, for whatever reasons spring up in your new environment, you have an inefficient day. You try to make up for this inefficient day by powering through and working more hours, which causes you to either lose sleep or lose out on the time you have set aside to relieve stress. So you go into the next day either tired or frustrated, which leads to, you guessed it, another inefficient day. For obvious reasons, this cycle becomes hard to break.
I took a day off to clean away the clutter of my physical space, and having that sense of structure influenced my mind as well. When I came back, I started each day with a clear goal in mind. I was a part of an agile team with daily standups, and thought about what update I wanted to give the next day. Then I worked towards that update, knowing that if I got to the point where I could honestly give it, I was confident putting down work for the day. As my day went on, I kept track of whether or not I was on pace for my goal. If I was falling behind because of reasons I could control, I took precautions to eliminate further distractions and focus up. Being honest with yourself is the key to breaking the inefficiency guilt cycle. Not every time you fall behind will be because of something you can control. How often were you working in the office, business as usual, and a task takes longer than you thought because of hidden gotchas or having a new priority pop up? These issues remain when you work from home, and if you try to mitigate them in ways you didn’t before you’re going to have a bad time.
The stress may still start to mount, but this is where your hobbies come in. One of the hobbies I’ve managed to successfully transfer over to being virtual is playing board games. My two favorite games of all time are Dominion and One Night Ultimate Werewolf, both honestly better virtually. Another hobby lost was going to the gym, but I’ve managed to stay active with walks and body weight exercises. Not all of my hobbies were easily transferable though. I’ve had to say goodbye to pickup basketball, music festivals, and indoor BMX. But it’s never too late to learn something new. A new hobby I’ve picked up is cooking, after Youtube recommended a million Kitchen Nightmares videos. I won’t be opening a restaurant of my own anytime soon, but I can now cook a meal for my friends without a backup pizza already on its way.
Communication in the Time of Covid
Good communication is the core of any successful team effort, and Software Engineering is no different. Gone are the days where you can just hop in a room with your team and hash out a problem. Hopping on a video call with everyone isn’t always the solution. You lose a lot of the visual aids that would typically be available to you in person. Even if you had them, it is not always possible to gather everybody on a whim due to differing home environments. We have team members keeping different schedules, across different time zones, and with real life issues that could pull them away at any time. Now is the time to work on your written communication and make use of the old adage: Meetings should be emails, emails should be texts, and texts should be nothing at all. While emails and texts may be obsolete these days due to all in one messaging platforms such as Slack, the basic premise still rings true. Get better at communicating in the written form and stop using meetings as a crutch. Learn to be just as precise using text. When that fails, there are plenty of tools out there to help you organize your thoughts and diagram your architectures. Before our team would just leave up temporary architecture drafts on the white board of one of our conference rooms. Now, we use LucidChart. Everyone is on the same page and can update the diagram. No tools available? Use pen, paper, and a camera. Get creative!
These are trying times, but always remember that tough times don’t last — tough people do. The toughest of people take the necessary steps to prepare and make the necessary adjustments to optimize so that they can be as tough as possible. Good luck, and if you have any other tips and tricks from working from home be sure to share them in the comments!
