The most incredible thing for me was avoiding getting sick. Been remote about 4 years now, the number of colds I get went from 2 per year to about 1 every 2 years. I shouldn't have said that.
I Only Work Remotely
101–110 of 222 posts
Re: I Only Work Remotely
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
I guess you don't drink coffee? How many people use caffeine to chemically alter their state? How about using alcohol to ease social interaction anxiety? Nicotine is another very popular tool for altering one's state. We are all essentially bags of chemicals. If someone hacks their diet to optimize nutritional chemical input, are they a chemically altered monster? Where's the line? Even playing sports together, shari…
You think drinking caffeine makes you feel anything like getting stoned? Or that smoking a joint is comparable to smoking a cigarette? If you ever get stoned, you are in for a surprise.
I tried a drag from a cigarette a few times, always made my head spin like crazy and I puked.
It was stronger than a drag from a cannabis joint. But I have never been a nicotine user.
Re: I Only Work Remotely
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 3. Put down screens like phone, laptop, and TV after about 8pm. The artificial, bright light throws off off your body's natural instinct to get sleepy when it gets dark. What I am supposed to do during four hours with basically no media? That sound a bit extreme. 90 minutes of that ought to do. Oh, if you DO watch something (eg. movie), try an app like redshift, to reduce make the light blueish, which is what actua…
Books, exercise, instruments, writing, drawing...
Three of your five examples are screen-related, though?
Re: I Only Work Remotely
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you elaborate on smoking "weed to get creative"? Wich kind of tasks do you achieve by doing this?
For my part, after taking THC(tincture) I "get creative" on architecture solutions, new feature ideation, and things like that. I generally keep any code I write during this time in a separate branch to code review while sober before merging in - it's the ideas that are most important, not the actual code.
This has been my experience as well. It's not a good time for writing maintainable code, but it IS a good time to abstract some complex solutions and think of possible problems that could arise from each possible architecture.
Re: I Only Work Remotely
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's comments like these that do an incredible disservice to actual conversation. No one is arguing eating food doesn't aid in the regulation of a standard baseline for natural chemical balances in the body. Which is exactly what it is. A standard baseline for your typical, normal, healthy human being. Taking your stand of "but everything is chemically altering" is being intellectually dishonest in this argument and…
It's not a "ridiculous position". It's a succinct rebuttal of a position that serves no purpose other than to grand stand. Evidence based perspectives are not intellectually dishonest. >A standard baseline for your typical, normal, healthy human being. This is so vague. Ironic that you feel the need to claim I am being intellectually dishonest. When I consume marijuana, am I doing more harm to myself compared to when…
If you think "but everything alters your chemical makeup" is a sufficient rebuttal, you're mistaken for the outlined reasons above. There's simply no more to say about it and I'm not going to get drawn into a pointless debate over mind altering substances as a recreational outlet or how it "enhances your mind" when all it's proven is otherwise.
Re: I Only Work Remotely
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
It absolutely is okay for him, you're right. And it's absolutely great that there is such demand for tech right now that people can afford to be so particular about their working hours and their various ways of working. What I find less great is the suggestion that all employers should "accept your employees for who they are and optimize for their abilities" - does anyone really think that if everyone just worked wha…
It obviously depends on what work there is to do. In most of what I do, I work alone, with little need for cooperation, working through the backlog of tickets to implement. And the same goes for my coworkers. So I don't know why the morning people would have to wait for the night owls or why the night owls would need the morning people to stay around late. Everyone has their own stuff to do. If I need to talk to othe…
Yes, it certainly depends on the nature of the work. If you work pretty much entirely independently (and remote work often can be like this, especially freelance), then working hours become less important - if your arrangement is that the software will be deployed by 9am Friday and all the features implemented and testable by that point, and that's your sole responsibility, no one is going to be bothered if you worked 4pm to midnight every day to do it.
I once worked with a very senior creative who was exceptional at his job. We all worked in an office together - this was a few years before the current remote phenomenon had quite the momentum behind it that it now has. He came in at midday, on a good day, and normally stayed late into the evening (I think he enjoyed having a little red wine whilst he was working, which probably slightly stretched the boundaries of acceptability in that office). His work was exceptional - on-brief but always extremely innovative. But, you know, when you actually wanted to schedule a meeting with him to discuss a project, it was always bloody hard work - he collaborated very well with the other members of his team who enjoyed staying late in the evening, but he was a constant thorn in the side of the project managers who often wanted to talk to him in the morning when he was never there.
So, yes - it depends.
Re: I Only Work Remotely
#107Re: I Only Work Remotely
#108> I am a night owl. You can tell me I have to have my butt in a chair within your line of sight at 8 or 9am, but that is very wasteful. This used to be me and I used to believe it was just the way things were. I'd naturally sleep 10+ hours until noon on the weekends, struggle to wake up for work, and then struggle to fall asleep before midnight. I had little energy for exercise and always felt stressed trying to find…
> But the truth is, it's perfectly possible for anyone to adjust their sleep schedule and become a morning person. It just takes some conscious effort and the will-power to suffer through a week or two of re-adjustment. That's not 100% true. I've done it, and deal with a couple of weeks of pain to realign my schedule. I then went to bed late ONCE, and slept late the following morning. My schedule had the re-sync'd ba…
> I then went to bed late ONCE, and slept late the following morning. My schedule had the re-sync'd back to it's original form, undoing three weeks of work.
How long had you been doing the night owl schedule before that? You're trying to break a habit that you've been forming for years in a matter of weeks (for the record, I was a self proclaimed night owl until about a year ago)
Re: I Only Work Remotely
#109> I am a night owl. You can tell me I have to have my butt in a chair within your line of sight at 8 or 9am, but that is very wasteful. This used to be me and I used to believe it was just the way things were. I'd naturally sleep 10+ hours until noon on the weekends, struggle to wake up for work, and then struggle to fall asleep before midnight. I had little energy for exercise and always felt stressed trying to find…
I also find my sleep schedule to be flexible (although I'd be wary of your assumption that this is true for everyone.)
I find that the key ingredient is others' expectations. If I'm going to be arriving at a workplace with the person I report to sitting right opposite me, and sleeping in means arriving an hour or more after them, then I can get in gear, avoid pressing snooze, and catch the 07:33. At my previous job, the norm was to arrive between 10 and 11: I was rarely up more than 15 minutes before my carpool arrived, and the idea of getting up earlier regularly gave me headaches.
Edit: some stuff I've done for a while: no caffeine after 18:00, no blue light after 21:00. Falling asleep is much harder if I don't do these things.
Re: I Only Work Remotely
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not a "ridiculous position". It's a succinct rebuttal of a position that serves no purpose other than to grand stand. Evidence based perspectives are not intellectually dishonest. >A standard baseline for your typical, normal, healthy human being. This is so vague. Ironic that you feel the need to claim I am being intellectually dishonest. When I consume marijuana, am I doing more harm to myself compared to when…
If you think "but everything alters your chemical makeup" is a sufficient rebuttal, you're mistaken for the outlined reasons above. There's simply no more to say about it and I'm not going to get drawn into a pointless debate over mind altering substances as a recreational outlet or how it "enhances your mind" when all it's proven is otherwise.
>If you think "but everything alters your chemical makeup" is a sufficient rebuttal
Considering that the original claim had no depth to it what so ever other than attempting to grandstand, it is odd you feel to have two completely different standards here. You have to point out why it isn't a sufficient rebuttal other than saying it doesn't. Time for some intellectual honesty. Or you can just blanket label people that consume certain things as having a "crutch" with absolutely no basis for such a claim.
> when all it's proven is otherwise.
Where's the evidence for this?