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Working remotely, coworking spaces, and mental health

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Re: Working remotely, coworking spaces, and mental health

#71

Post by SyneRyder »

ENTP wrote: post #3

This echoes my current gig to a tee: worked at home for a couple of months, went stir crazy, found an office. For me, the first office space was a hipster cafe type place that was just too freaking noisy. I moved to a Regus office which was ok but Regus were awful so a few of us clubbed together and got a truly shared office with both closed and open spaces for different type of work. I can highly recommend this setu…

+1 to the comments about Regus. While some of the spaces are really well designed & in perfect locations, their billing systems were so broken that I got out of my contract as fast as I could. They couldn't even charge credit cards automatically each month, and they accidentally leaked their entire Australian client list in the To line of an email (then tried to fix it by using the Outlook "Recall This Message" feature).

[Since then I've opted to work from cafes, shopping malls that have started encouraging laptop workers, and a 'coworking' space I found that was mostly empty.]

Re: Working remotely, coworking spaces, and mental health

#74

Post by edem »

AYBABTME wrote: post #51
edem wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this REAL remote (I can apply from any country) or "just within the US" remote? I checked the link you provided but this was not detailed.

I'm from Canada but in Argentina right now. We have lots of folks in Europe and some in Asia! We have folks doing the round the world dance too. We had folks in Australia.

Is that a YES to "REAL remote" or no?

Re: Working remotely, coworking spaces, and mental health

#75

Post by AYBABTME »

edem wrote: post #74
AYBABTME wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm from Canada but in Argentina right now. We have lots of folks in Europe and some in Asia! We have folks doing the round the world dance too. We had folks in Australia.

Is that a YES to "REAL remote" or no?

It's a yes!

Re: Working remotely, coworking spaces, and mental health

#76

Post by mderazon »

AYBABTME wrote: post #36

For the last 2.5 years I've been working at DigitalOcean as a remote employee. DO has more than 50% of the staff remote. I think it's important that a large chunk of a company & team be remote, to be successful in the exercise, so that there be a forcing function to use asynchronous communications. It's been really life changing for me. We have a bunch of style of remotees; work from home, work from coffeeshop, work…

Out of curiosity, do you have kids ? I bet the answer is no.

I envy you that you can do it. Having young kids makes things like that more complicated. Still possible, but not optimal.

Re: Working remotely, coworking spaces, and mental health

#77

Post by AYBABTME »

alltakendamned wrote: post #65
AYBABTME wrote: post #36

For the last 2.5 years I've been working at DigitalOcean as a remote employee. DO has more than 50% of the staff remote. I think it's important that a large chunk of a company & team be remote, to be successful in the exercise, so that there be a forcing function to use asynchronous communications. It's been really life changing for me. We have a bunch of style of remotees; work from home, work from coffeeshop, work…

What's your setup like that enables you to work from those crazy settings ?

My mac and tethering. It's more about being used to not work with external screens and SSHing on workstations to do data heavy operations.

Re: Working remotely, coworking spaces, and mental health

#78

Post by amyfransz »

As a remote worker myself, I can definitely resonate with the dark sides of working remotely as described in this article. The lifestyle is mostly portrayed as living the dream, however the lack of social interaction and finding a proper work-life balance where you also set time aside for friends, exercise, or meditation for example, is pretty difficult. That's actually what gave me the idea to bring together a community of remote workers to work, live, and travel the world together where the hassle of accommodation, flights, work spaces, gym passes, and social activities are taken care of so remote workers can enjoy the remote lifestyle to the fullest. If anyone's interested you can find more info here http://www.theremotetrip.com

Re: Working remotely, coworking spaces, and mental health

#79

Post by kayoone »

socialist_coder wrote: post #16

I wouldn't consider myself an extreme introvert but I am 100% satisfied working from home (been doing it for 4.5 years now). The author mentions socialization only in real life. What about online socialization? I still talk to 2 of my best friends in a chat room (used to be IRC, now we use Slack). I keep up with old friends on Facebook. I have discussions and arguments on HN and Reddit. And probably most importantly,…

i'd consider myself pretty introvert and have been working remotely for 5-6 years and only realised on how much i missed out socially after getting a regular job at a startup again. I just enjoy working in a team of motivated people, talking to them randomly about non-work/non-tech stuff. I still feel more productive even though there are more interruptions, but at home i tended to create these interruptions myself and was never really satisfied with my productivity either.

Online socialization interactions/chats (even video) with friends/team members never gave me the same kind of feelings, and i still felt more lonely. I guess there is something about face to face that I like.

Re: Working remotely, coworking spaces, and mental health

#80

Post by alkonaut »

I have tried coworking in both co-rented offices and "office hotels" as well as work from home. For a long while I had a (pretty expensive) seat at a coworking space that I didn't use, but just knowing that I could leave my isolation at home and go there meant it felt less isolated.

I wish I could work in cafes, at friends etc, but I just can not bring myself to work without a proper big screen and keyboard, which means most nomadic coffee shop setups are off limits. One day working off my laoptop and my neck, eyes and and back hurts. I need a proper desk, which makes it a lot harder to move around.

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