This came across my Twitter feed today:
Brianne is right to celebrate how awesome this situation is. If you have to be working, you might as well be doing so in a fabulous environment. From everything I personally know about her, she is living her best life here, and that's great.
But to me, this is not the ideal to shoot for in remote work. I'm currently working from my home office. My boring home office.
What is awesome about my setup is that everything is plugged in, and all my A/V works well and I have the same setup every day. The awesome part is that I don't commute and can really be as productive as I want to be. Remote work "from anywhere" is just hard to get right.
I have been able to dramatically optimize for the 95% of the time I get to be sitting at the same desk with the same peripherals all hooked up.
More on this "optimize for the 95%" here:
The 5% of the time I find myself away from this setup and still fully in work mode is a rather unideal scenario. It can be pleasant, but I try hard to make it a planned-for exception these days.
There are a lot of great posts about specific advice of getting set up remote:
A lot of them tend to touch on equipment and setup. Other advice typically revolves around communication and teamwork. Either way, it doesn't come easy and the consistent, optimized home setup seems key to me.
We have digital nomads in the community, and it's fascinating to see how they organize themselves:
Article No Longer Available
If you want to go this route, your 95% optimization is going to be a whole different approach. I'd advise against going half-way to this lifestyle if you want to get good work done.
Here is a good post on the important task of creating a great developer experience for yourself:
Words matter. We are a distributed team, as opposed to having remote workers. It's an identity for the whole team, even those who work from the office we keep in Brooklyn.
It's a great way to work, and it's pleasantly mundane. Happy coding.
Top comments (21)
This is an amazing post Ben and I need to spend a bit more reading all those posts that you have linked.
When I see remote workers and travelers showing how awesome their setup is I always wonder how real is it.
I know that some travelers just show how amazing their life is but in fact spend a lot of time inside hotels working. I’m going to guess this is the same with remote work devs, also a good thing to point out - working outside in the balcony is amazing for the view but the glare of the sun would kill my eyes haha
I also work from my boring home office 95% of the time. But it's an office with a door and has everything set up just the way I like it. It's comfortable.
Sometimes I'll grab the laptop and work in another part of the house (or outside in the summer). Today my view is not very summer-like:
Here's my post on remote working tips:
What I've Learned After Working Remotely for 10+ Years
Haha yes, that is not ideal today.
I'll soon be moving to a place that's walking distance to nature and also walking distance to the center of town. I'm really excited about the chance for quick escapes into a different environment. (Depending on the weather, of course)
I'll also be commute distance to our office.
As a company that is full-fledged distributed first, it's still useful to maintain an office for different reasons. But I can't see us ever expanding to a bigger office, even if we grow. We'll offer more budget and options for work-from-home and co-working.
Thanks for the shout out, Ben!
I agree my "working from paradise" post isn't a sustainable option...
I'm more productive in my boring home office! :)
At home, I try to standardize as much as possible.
Some things that work for me:
Setting priorities for the day using importance/urgency mapping
Standardize as much as possible with pre-planned lunch and scheduled breaks.
Remove distractions by turning off Slack notifications, phone on silent, etc.
Find a productivity buddy! I recently started using Flora App for this :)
itunes.apple.com/us/app/flora-focu...
I work remote for 3 months in the winter so I can show horses in FL. During that time I live with my parents and I teased them recently about putting me in the garage. Honestly, though, I have my sit/stand desk, monitor, great wifi, and no distractions. It's not glamorous but it works for me perfectly!
Lol a desk right next to the boiler. At least your hand will always be warm.
Yaas 🙌
This is 100% true. It is not uncommon for some to get the impression because remote, then being at different latitude and longitude each blessed day would make one productive.
In fact, it can be very unproductive. Having more like a home office with a consistent setup for work is really comforting.
Once in a while work from the coffee shop, or at the beach is fine. However sticking to a fixed workplace (home office, in this case) routine would hugely improve one's productivity
Work from home is super cool but could be tricky if you don’t use the essential tools like VPN for establishing connections with work network from anywhere. I use PureVPN for remote work which works fine for me. They are giving discount of 88% on holiday season.
As usual, I'm decidedly slacking on being optimized. On my work from home days, I work from my couch. My dogs piled up against me. Spotify or Google music streaming to my lower-power, Home-enabled speakers. I tap away on my 3+ year old HP laptop. Crunching away on service deployment-automation.
And, weeks like the most recent ones, where I've been having to actually go into the office to attend to a high-urgency project, I'm reminded why I prefer working from home - even lacking optimizations. It's noisy at the office. The woman diagonal behind-and-right of me seems to only have one volume (LOUD) and screechy (wife called me at work one day, I held my phone way from my head, and upon returning it to my ear, my wife was saying, "that's who you've been complaining about? OMG: I'm so sorry for you"). The woman across the cube-wall to my left apparently only bathes on Friday nights and I can tell whenever she sits down at her cube or walks away by the intrusiveness of the "natural musk" oozing over the wall. Our standardized desktops seem to be different every time I come in: one day I have Firefox, one day I don't (similarly with Chrome and other applications I need) ...and even when present, all of my settings vanish with regularity - inclusive of bookmarks (bonus, GPOs prevent use of profiles/syncing so can't get shit back or use stuff like LastPass). Oh... And the connectivity: there's a few thousand people on our campus and the campus supposedly has a couple 10Gibps connections to the Internet, but by 09:00, it feels like I'm sharing 9600BAUD MODEM. Given that the environment I'm coding for/in is AWS, that slow-down means that making progress is nearly impossible. But, that's ok, when I'm in the office, fires inevitably come up (today, I came in to find a message from the maintainers of our primary yum repository, sent at 16:47 the day previous, notifying that they were changing the access-URLs for the repositories at 15:50 today ...immediately binning my plans for the day as I rushed out new yum repo-def RPMs for the hundreds of systems that were due to be impacted by the change).
It all makes me long to be back home where I can work without interruption — or even meaningful distraction — and over a nice, reliable, 50Mbps FiOS connection. Yeah, mundane, but at least (most days) I can get the shit done I actually had planned for the day.
Yeah, I think your lifestyle really nails it. Set yourself up for consistency with computers and the right environment for happiness in other things.
For others, this is Theodore's last post, discussing this further:
How to write code and snowboard every day
Theodore Bendixson
Couldn't agree more! I've described my full-time remote job as "The good kind of boring." And I wouldn't have it any other way!