Working remotely, 4 years in

Not OP, but for me... I was working in an office and then my wife was offered a great job in another city. I was going to quit my job when I realized I should at least ask to work remotely first. They said yes!

I've been working remotely for that company for coming up on 10 years now. It's a software consulting company, and I'm the only person who works remotely full time... however many of our clients have employees who work remotely, so it generally works out very well.

When working with people at my company, there was an adjustment... at first I would miss out on a lot of office discussions, but it has been a learning process for them too. My colleagues and I have a lot of mutual respect so it didn't take long before they realized they needed to halt a spontaneous conversion for a moment and loop me in on the phone/skype.

I think you go through different adjustment phases, but I've come to realize I need to treat working at home with great discipline to do it long term. This may not apply to everyone, but I need to maintain a routine, although the flexibility is available if/when I need it, but that sometimes comes at a cost of focus and/or productivity for that day (although I think the much greater focus and productivity that is achieved most days more than makes up for any of these off days). So although flexibility is one of the great perks, I'm not someone who can take advantage of that every day. But, when things come up it's great!

I can help out in my kids classrooms, or show up for their midday school events whenever I want... which is an unbelievable luxury. If we want to beat traffic for a long weekend we can leave the day before and just work from the hotel the next day. This is an amazing treat because then when you're done work, you're already at your vacation destination and you can start to relax or enjoy the place.

Just like the author wrote, I never had a problem with it before but now I find it much more distracting to work in an office. Even if my wife is working from home and I can barely hear her across the house, just having someone around is distracting. It's not a major problem that can't be solved by some noise isolating headphones, but it definitely a change I noticed.

Even though I don't spend any time with them, I know of a few nice people on my street who also work from home if I really needed something. I have also met people on meetup.com who are interested in similar hobbies to mine, and regularly get lunch with the ones who live/work near me and it's surprising how many other people work remotely now too.

Oh hi Julia, I apologise I referred to you as "he," that was careless of me.

Nice article anyway, I appreciate you sharing your experience, since you address most concerns people might have when taking the jump of working remotely. Take care!

...and my initial question still isn't answered. :/

These largely sound like problems with your ability to manage working remotely and management at the companies you worked for.

> if you are struggling for 3 days x 10 hours per day to fix a bug, chances are high that nobody will realize this

That's on you. You need to seek out help no matter what environment you work in. You should never struggle on something for more than an hour or two. Seek help early instead of wasting time.

> You're constantly alone.

The author described the way they tackled this. You can also join a coworking space or rent a shared office.

> There is no separation between private and professional life, unless you have an office space

Also an advantage of working at a coworking space.

> You need to be everything.

Only at very small companies. In that situation it'd be the same problem if you were working at an office. Larger companies should have a proper management structure and good management of remote workers.

In this case I think it's a flex muscles illustration. Either way, it works!