Tips for working remotely

We’re in weird times right now. A lot of the world’s population has suddenly found themselves working remotely. I thought I’d jump on the bandwagon and write yet another post about how to work remotely. I recently worked remote for a whole year, so hopefully this is of some use to some people. These tips aren’t a holy grail. They may not help you at all, they are just what worked for me and the job I was doing at the time.

Tips for you

Keep a routine, but experiment with it. If I had to give a singular piece of advice it’s this. For me, keeping a routine is the main way I can stay productive whilst working from home. It keeps structure to the day and puts your brain in work mode. That doesn’t mean it has to be the same as the routine you had in the office though. One of the upsides of remote work is having more time to play with in the day now that you’re not commuting. As an example, this is what I settled on when working remote:

• Get up at 6.30. Shower and all that jazz.

• Start work straight away. Usually at 6.45. I’m a morning person and this is my most productive time.

• Have breakfast at 8.30. This gives me a nice little break for 10 minutes.

• Work until 11. Again, this is my most productive time.

• 2 hour lunch. Most workplaces won’t like me for this, but give it a go if you can! By 11 I had usually clocked up at least 4 hours of work. I found 2 hours at lunch was the perfect reset. Enough time to exercise, eat, maybe play a little xbox. 1 hour never seemed like enough of a rest for my brain. Due to the early start I still got 8 hours in, I just shifted time I would have spent commuting to the middle of the day.

• Work 1-5. The 2 hour lunch made this time a lot more productive than it would have been otherwise

• Stop working, don’t let it bleed into the evening. Relax. Set yourself up for the next day. Keeping a routine means not sacrificing your work time or your personal time.

Separate your work space from your living space. I have a (very messy) desk in a corner of the apartment. This is my work space. It’s not in the bedroom and it’s physically separate from the living room. I found it helped kick my brain into and out of work mode when I needed to. When I was at the desk I was working, when I wasn’t I was relaxing.

Exercise and get out of the house. When your commute is about 10 steps, you’d be surprised how little daily exercise you do. In times of quarantine this may be difficult to do, but try the best you can. It doesn’t even have to be going to the gym. I used to go to the supermarket every day, just to get in a bit of a walk. I was pretty bad at keeping it up, but sometimes I’d get into the habbit of going to the gym frequently. Those were my happier, healthier and more productive times. Remember though: following local health advice is more important.

Keep social. I’m a massive introvert, but even I need some human interaction. These don’t have to be in person, but should be a video call at least. Whilst working remote, the majority of my company were on a 12 hour time difference. It was lonely to say the least. There was one other person working remote from Canada though, and our days overlapped by a few hours. At least once a week we’d sit and chat abot all sorts for 45 minutes. No particular aim to the chats, just somebody else in the company to gossip and build a friendship with. If it wasn’t for this I think we both would have had some minor mental health issues. Now we’re both working for separate startups in actual offices, but we still try and make time for this once in a while.

Tips for working

Set up expectations for communication, and embrace asynchronous communication. Email, slack, teams, whatever your company is using. Set up clear expectations for each form of communication. One of the advantages of remote working is having fewer distractions. If you’re not careful, chats can become an even bigger distraction than an office. Most messages don’t require an immediate reply. Set your notifications to be relatively strict, and even mute for periods of time. Only answer messages once every half hour. Whatever works for you as a team. Just make sure you have a way for people to contact you if there actually is something urgent.

If you do need to talk one on one, try using video chat. The social aspect is what suffers when you’re a remote team. “Face to face” communication brings with it a lot more nuances than text. Tone of voice, body language. All of these help to convey messages. Restricting yourself to just text can lead to all sorts of misunderstandings. Being more social with your team also leads to better team cohesion and with that more productivity in the long run.

Have a way to communicate your “status”. Out to lunch? Don’t flood a chat channel with “I’m off to lunch”. Slack has a feature for setting a status emoji. That can convey all sorts of things relatively easily and lets people know your availability for communication.

Have dedicated social meetings. One of the things I’ve experienced before is forcing large stand ups on teams of 12+ via video conference in order to keep larger social interactions going. Personally I think this ends up giving you two things: a shit standup and a shit social interaction. Don’t try and lump meetings with a purpose and social interactions together. Manage your meetings well, and put a separate 20 minute “social chat” into your calendar each day. Then if people feel like being social they can just jump in, closer to what they would do in an office environment.

Hopefully this all helps! Please comment if you have any further thoughts. I’m intrigued to see what other people do.