31–40 of 87 posts
That said, I prefer cafes to offices. It's nice to be around people with no real ties to your source of income. It eliminates the stress of needing to manage all of your actions more carefully.
Also, I find that over time I make actual friends coffee shops. Co-workers rarely make good long-term friends.
Coming up on my 3rd year now working from home and running my own company. I agree with most of this article. The lack of social interaction is probably what I miss the most. Overall it has been a positive change for me though. I had serious issues concentrating while coding at my last job. Working from home has mostly solved that. I've found in the last year it is easy to stop working at 4:30-5 since we have had our…
Agree with many of these points. I've worked from home for the last 3 years and I love it, but it definitely has it's downsides. I think the worst for me is not being able to switch off at 5pm. Without the journey home to empty my mind a little, I do find myself thinking about work for the rest of the night.
I've been working from home for going on 6 years. I have the same problem. It doesn't help that I also have a young child at home as well. He's only known me to work from home, so every few hours I get forced breaks, which is sometimes very nice to have. I am with the other commenter that having some sort of activity to transition yourself from work to home is important. Sometimes a jog, or walk is enough. Most days…
I worked full time remote for 12 years doing driver / kernel / firmware work for an IHV. What I missed most about working in an office (and what I liked most about going to work at an office again 2 years ago) is the sense of separation and decompression that a commute gives you. If you're not careful, you can easily wind up always working all the time since your "office" is right in your living space.
I've had a better experience when doing firmware upgrades for mature products, but has anybody had a good experience developing hardware products with a work from home team?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah I'm still setting up my second room as an office. Right now I'm sitting on my couch with laptop on lap. Not very helpful. Along with that, I'm also changing my diet and even starting to go to the gym since it's right across the street. Hopefully these things help.
I'd recommend, get up and go to the gym before work. As others mentioned, having that daily routine where you transition to work mode is really helpful.
Best way I've over come the social needs is to work out of a local cafe once or twice a week. Get to know the people there. Learn their names. Make friends. Work on a crossword together.
Get a whiteboard. Plenty of notebooks. Take time to journal your day. Thoughts, frustrations, tasks. Explain things to yourself out loud.
Reward yourself. Take a walk to the park. Catch up on the New Yorker Poetry podcast.
I don't find motivation to be a problem so long as the team is good at planning and there's always something to do that I can take action on without bothering folks. Use a system and stick to it: pomodoro, GTD, whatever. Be systematic and work with intent. If you're stuck wondering what you should be doing you need to re-evaluate your process and plug the leaks: you should always know what needs to be done next.
Things that make working remote suck for your remote workers:
1. Hallway planning. Making decisions face-to-face in meat-space and not documenting them anywhere. Everything needs to go into an email list or task tracking system.
2. Poor communication. If you're never available online, refuse too many requests for chats, ignore emails... it can be really frustrating. The great thing about working remotely is that communication can be intermediated by scripts. Set auto-replies, status updates, reminders, alerts.
3. Never enough information. When you're working closely in a group face-to-face it can be easy to draw consensus on an issue and document it with a single, innocuous task in the task manager and not bother filling in the description, properly rating it, tagging it, etc. Always add enough information so that anyone can come along and take care of it without having to hunt you down.
I worked full time remote for 12 years doing driver / kernel / firmware work for an IHV. What I missed most about working in an office (and what I liked most about going to work at an office again 2 years ago) is the sense of separation and decompression that a commute gives you. If you're not careful, you can easily wind up always working all the time since your "office" is right in your living space.
I have less distractions and am more productive on my worse day at home than my best in any office.
I now love walking to work as much as I used to love working from home and I don't see myself going back to a home office anytime soon.