— Software Engineering, Work from Home, Remote Work — 4 min read
This is indeed quite a leap year, isn’t it? I was absolutely amazed to observe how world transformed within last 2-3 weeks because of the COVID-19 outbreak. Same with the way we work now. Lots of the companies have switched entire workforce to be fully remote and it is quite a shift. I was working from home before, but quite sporadically. I just did it when it was required due to some private arrangements. But now I have to do it constantly and I can tell you it feels very different(disclaimer: in a bad sense).
I live with my wife in 1.5 Rooms apartment and we both have to work from home now. Also, we do not have a well prepared office environment at home so far. I believe, with such a setup we are representing a massive slice of modern specialists, so I thought that it might be useful to share some of my tips on how we manage this situation and stay productive when working from home long-term.
Basically, it is about skill I was always advocating for - do not get used to tools and environment too much. Learn to use tools efficiently when you have those, but be prepared to live without them. Now is a good time to practice it. So the advice here is that instead of complaining about chair being uncomfortable, or monitor being too small(or lack of monitor at all), spend some time to understand your current environment and figure out how you can keep working in this situation long-term. For example if you do not have a nice table and chair at home, maybe it is a good time to learn what standing desk is. Typically one can build a standing desk out of stuff you have at home. If you do not have an external monitor and feel like your laptop is exploding with an amount of opened windows, maybe it is a good time to learn how to manage this situation (adding some browser extension to better manage tabs or reducing an amount of parallel tasks). So, the message here is to learn to accept constraints and see how you can fit in.
We are two professionals working mostly from the same room and believe me it is challenging! We also have to conduct online meetings(couple of those on a regular day), so we were kind of forced to switch places frequently and later on observed that it is a pretty good technique actually. Look, if you do not have an ergonomically perfect setup, you really do not want to sit on the sofa entire day. Well you can do it for couple of days, and you might even enjoy it for some time, but man, sooner or later your body will tell you that it is enough. It simply does not scale! And you really do not want to add back pain to the pile of problems you are dealing with already. I typically switch places at least 2-3 times a day. Something like, sofa -> standing desk -> FatBoy bag -> Bar table.
It only gets slightly problematic when you need to do meetings - like, you know, you do not want to conduct a meeting with some weird background. This is hard, but there are tools to help you. E.g. in Zoom app(video-conferencing software) you can set a virtual background, so that your person will be rendered on top of some neutral background, which is absolutely appropriate for any kind of remote activity.
After the first couple of consequent work from home days we observed that our schedule is completely messed up. We start working in the morning (actually earlier than usually because you do not have to commute), then we have a late lunch and keep working much longer than we do in the office space. But you know what? It does not scale too! You need to keep maintaining you work-life balance, especially in such a stressful situation world is in now. So, here are couple of hacks:
Both of us quite addicted to sport, so, we decided to bootstrap our mornings with a sport routine. As I discussed before in my blog post about morning sport, it is frequently a commitment to other people that make you do sport in the morning. In my case it was a commitment to my partner. If you live alone, you can make a sort of remote commitment to your friend and do workouts using video conferencing.
Another thing we are practicing is a remote dinner with friends, which might force to you stop working in an appropriate time. I will not lie to you, remote dinner felt a little weird at first, but it was totally cool after first 10 mins or so. Can definitely recommend this experience.
Make sure you get enough fresh air. Open windows, go to the balcony if you have one… Do all what you can to breathe some fresh air. It is insanely important to how you feel, how you sleep and consequently affects your immunity.
One more hint I practice it to dress differently than you typically dress at home. I am not saying you should put on a shirt and stuff, but at least let your brain know that you need to switch into working mode, by putting some different clothes on. Obviously, when you are done, switch back to your home look.
Respect privacy and personal space. In some professions, there is also a feeling of “flow” which is super important and should not be interrupted, ideally. My advice here would be to shutdown any sound-based notifications and replace it with pop-ups, haptic feedback or just put headphones on. The bottom line is try to maintain acoustic comfort as much as you can. Again, may sound picky and boring, but when we are talking long-term remote work, such things do make a difference.
This is our short code of conduct :) The key message it that we have to acknowledge a situation we are currently in and try to extract benefits out of it (like reducing our dependency on tools and environments, doing more workouts and learning how to do it at home, catching up with people remotely). Hope you will find it useful and will apply some of our practices.
We all together in it, so let’s go through this situation as effective and as disruption-free as we can! Happy working from home, everybody!
As usual, if you want to discuss the content, tag me on social media and let’s chat!