Ask HN: Remote Working • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Remote Working

#11

Post by pjungwir » Fri, Jul 31, 2015, 10:09 PM UTC

jasonkester wrote: post #6

You mention having a family, so the biggest struggle you're going to have is convincing everybody around you that you're "at work" even though you're physically around. The best plan is to have your office be in a separate building from your house. A shed out in the yard, a room over the garage, even a rented desk in town. Whatever you can do to avoid being anywhere where anybody can walk past and casually interrupt…

I work remotely and I agree with all this, although I'll add that you don't really need a shed in the back yard. I have four kids aged 6, 4, 2, and 0, and I work fine out of a separate room in the house. I close the door and the kids know not to bother me. You might have to train them a bit at first, but really it hasn't been a problem for me. Right now my office is upstairs, which definitely helps keep things quiet when I'm on a call, but I did this in a downstairs office too for a couple years and didn't have issues. Good luck!

Re: Ask HN: Remote Working

#12

Post by ErikRogneby » Fri, Jul 31, 2015, 10:30 PM UTC

Depending on the gig I've been recently working remotely 40-50% of the time, and have in the past done 100%.

1. have good collaboration tools with your co-workers. Whether this be IRC/HipChat/Slack, a good Kanban board, daily standup, a Hangout etc..

2. Carve out a quiet space in your house with a door. Make a Stop/Go placard to hang on the outside. Stop means you are busy and not available. (a call, middle of debugging something nasty, etc..) Go means your kid can come in and show you the awesome thing they just drew.

3. Have a clear start time, lunch, and end time. These can flex just like if you were in the office, but routine isn't just for you but for your family and work like balance too.

4. Just because you are remote, don't be afraid to step away from your computer for 10-15 minutes to get a breath of fresh air, stretch and reset. Surprisingly you spend a lot more time at your desk remote than in an office. You aren't grabbing a conference room with a colleague for some ad-hoc white-boarding to hash something out. It's all happening through this glowing screen and perhaps a telephone.

5. carve out some time to get face time with others in your company monthly or bi-monthly.

Re: Ask HN: Remote Working

#13

Post by kashyapc » Sat, Aug 01, 2015, 1:41 AM UTC

Lots of helpful comments on this thread. Things that have helped me in my past year (been doing it on and off before that) or so as a full time remotee.

Organizing work. Personally, Emacs 'Org mode' has been of tremendous help in this regard. Key thing was sticking to it consistently for about 7 months -- it has now become an almost reflex action to break down work into manageable chunks. Not 100% diligent at this, but I'm reasonably happy so far.

Also, having a fast communication tooling setup (my environment on Linux: 'mutt + offlineimap + postfix' and IRC) that works smoothly over intermittent network connections can be quite handy. Especially so when you need a change of scenery -- working from coffee shops with feeble internet connection, or from a park near by, to shake up the day-to-day humdrum.

Most other points here about work/life balance seconded.

And, yes -- remote work is great, warts and all!