Working from home – things no one talks about(timo-zimmermann.de) |
Working from home – things no one talks about(timo-zimmermann.de) |
I doubt stores have appropriate stocks for the change over.
Most people just don't have the discipline to work remotely. I think productivity will be reduced overall and it might prevent remote working in the future.
With my current job we started doing 1-2 days of working from home a week over the last year or so. Doing it part time has given me a chance to develop the skills and space needed to be successful and now that we are being pushed into it full time I feel a lot more prepared for it.
I do agree, though, that for most people who aren’t used to it or haven’t had a chance to develop the skills needed it’s going to be a rough transition and productivity is likely to decline, at least temporarily. Some of that may be due to working remotely, but I’m sure at least a part of it is just due to the general circumstances and anxiety surrounding it.
For me working from an office or working from home is literally the same thing. I’m on computer with headphones on and talking through slack.
It really varies by personality. Some people do a lot better by themselves. But if you hire me? It's worth paying for the office space.
- Keep a morning routine and a regular schedule
- Regularly check in with my colleagues, and post progress updates.
For my own personal anxiety, I'll not allow myself to feel guilty if I'm being slow or unproductive, (even in the office, sometimes the energy's just not there today) but I will allow myself to feel guilty if I'm failing to keep regular contact with my teammates. Without doing this, it's far too easy to slip into a rabbit hole researching something interesting, but ultimately not work related. Or, y'know, refresh the HN homepage for an hour and get nothing done.
I'd phrase it differently: most people don't start with the discipline. However, it's something you can learn. I don't know if everyone learns. I don't know if everyone learns in the same circumstances. I don't think nearly as many people will learn under exceptional circumstances (virus pandemic) as they would if they were starting to do full time remote permanently. And yes I'm concerned that a lot of people/companies will draw the conclusion that remote can't work because that one time we had to do it, there were problems...
What works for people without that discipline ?
Why can't the boss just tell at them over Skype ?
Amphetamines. Seriously. Prescription, of course. Coffee is a distant second. Thiobromine can be better for some people - you can get supplements it you can buy brewing cacao if you want to experiment with a potentially tasty drink.
Yeah, sure, there are behavioral interventions but for a guy like me, if I can just do it with a reasonably pill I'm willing to take the risk. Your risk tolerance may vary. Meditation is a good alternative but it takes time and, ironically, discipline.
Incidentally it may be the reverse, that people who are good at meditating are those predisposed to having good discipline!
In reading the comments below, this seems to be wildly unpopular. I can understand where they're coming from. Being available may be very appreciated by others, but it really hurts when you're deeply involved in something. I manage this by marking myself as busy when I know I'm about to dive deep into something, but you can't always see it coming, and I can understand the resistance to this approach.
Regarding headphones, this is not an issue once you move into a dedicated office space in your house. One thing I use to hate is taking headphones on/off every time there's a call. Regarding set hours, that's totally a preference. I work late at night sometimes because I feel like it. WFH means flexibility and not commuting means sometimes I get a jolt of inspiration to work off hours. I don't mind because the trade-off is I get to take time off during the day to attend school events for my kids.
Remote work is a lifestyle change for sure. More loneliness, more discipline, less water-cooler gossip. It requires the right mindset and personality that some of you don't have, and I'm sure you're itching to get back to the office.
And yeah, not everyone might have a dedicated to office area in there apartment, and this still would not prevent any typing noise.
yes, but not everybody has to do deep work all the time.
for example, part of my job is to be available to colleagues for consultation. it might be something to which i can quickly respond "ticket or gtfo" or "busy right now, could you ask me again in 10-15 minutes?". But it could also require me immediate action (some production environment is failing).
As a company culture it is important to empower people to tell "not now", to educate people to only tell "not now" if you actually can't right now, and to train yourself to write "not now" without losing focus.
Managers should be looking on results of someone work not what you type or when. This is one of the things that piss me in the tech industry, Incompetent managers using tools like the end of year feedback, number of hours spent in office or culture fit to decide if someone is perfoming well.
managers who think they are kings are kind of the problem
If your managers mistrust you so much that they feel the need to check up on you like a child, switch company quickly.
I don't send anyone "be right back" messages -- I will set my IM status to unavailable if I intend to be unavailable.
Have a look at Gitlab's remote working guide for lots more insight on how they address this situation: https://about.gitlab.com/company/culture/all-remote/guide/
As if everyone isn’t anxious enough.
That way you can be responsive in scheduled times, and unresponsive in focus time.
Perhaps you are reinforcing poor behaviors that make people feel dependent on micromanagement.
This idea that people at work should always be available is not a good standard that we've set ourselves up in. If you're in support or some job then yeah, this model won't work for you. If you're coding then it makes a big difference.
My (admittedly limited) experience with education is that no, you don't have to study that much. Pay attention during classes/lectures, do your exercises during the breaks and that covers most of the stuff. Maybe do an hour here or there at home.
Then there's the one off course that has you do more work than you can pull within these limits; dread the deadline and slack on. Pull an all-nighter before the deadline. That's how it goes.
I'm watching a close relative attend university and I feel like they're studying even less than I did.. they attend lectures maybe 1-3 times a week, sometimes watch a video lecture... mostly just stay at home, play games and slack on. Jeez! Seems to translate to something like 10-15 hours of work a week? And not particularly demanding work. In for a shock when they need to be at work 8 hours a day and actually try get some stuff done every day (every hour even).
I was home schooled for K-12 but I did go to college and I was actually pretty effective at working on my own. But I think the nature of the work you’re assigned in college is different from that of the workplace, at least in most situations. For example, college won’t necessarily teach you how to communicate effectively with a remote team, how to stick to a schedule even at home, how to set up a space so you can take calls, etc.
I also think I sort of unlearned the skills needed after being forced to come into the office between X and Y time of the day for several years after college, so when I was suddenly left to my own devices again it was a difficult shift. Had I jumped straight from college to a fully remote job I may have done a bit better.
Now that I’ve relearned those skills I much prefer a mix of working from home and being in the office, that way I get a good balance of focused time at home and social time at the office.
If anything, I'd say it's especially good at teaching the opposite if you dormed on-campus - how to fit work in between randomly-timed socializing.
Personally I had no problem working at home on things I was finding interesting - but if I was studying something I was less passionate about I was liable to get distracted unless I distanced myself from distractions like browsing the internet.
I worked from home for ten years, then back to the office for three, now back at home. I can tell you that what works for one person does not work for everyone.
For example, I am most productive in the morning, and wake up motivated and ready to work. For that reason, I don't take a shower until lunch, then use the afternoons to sort of wind-down with less productive things like meetings, reports, and such.
My father worked from home in the 80's. He was the opposite. He was better in the afternoon. Because of that, he had to force himself to take the mornings seriously. He did that by getting up every morning at 6am, doing the full getting-ready-for-the-office thing, and even went down to the corner store for coffee every day as a sort of "commute."
He would end up at 8am sitting in his home office in the laundry room in a full suit and tie ready for for the day, while I'm still in my sweatpants until after noon.
(Equipment-wise, from working home in the 80's was very different than it is today. Think a big desk with three rotary telephones, filing cabinets, a VFD calculator, and a Telex machine.)
Or worse: they don't like being at their own home, so the thought of staying there is terrifying.
That's at least what I've gathered from those I talked with.
I mean, if someone is saying that a 40min commute in high traffic still doesn't tip the balance in favour of remote work, then they apparently either really like being in the office, or really dislike staying home. Parents come to mind for the latter, but most of the people I've known who have 4+ children work remotely, so this doesn't add up.
There are certain types of communication that are vastly superior to do in person that can get quite tedious over text or phone. A 2 minute quick talk can save tons of time.
Now if my colleague is working from home I get the that same disadvantage from working from home - even when I'm still in the office. Many of the downsides people list here with working from home will be shared by those who are still in the office.
Working from home changes the relative value of certain skills. It make sense why people would be resistant to their own devaluing.
The work place is competitive and no one likes to see the rules of game change in way that disadvantages themselves.
For example, a lot of people will be like this or that operating system is trash and you shouldn’t use it. And I am ashamed to admit that years ago I used to be this way too.
While I understand where people are coming from when they act that way, it is still frustrating and I wish it wasn’t like that.
Yeah, that makes no sense. I don't like working from home, but I want as many people as possible to work from home. That makes my commute so much better!
'Stick to some schedule' is pretty portable advice. It sounds like you and your father both did that.
But since I been WFH for a while (thanks for the COVID-19), surprisingly I found if I took 30 mins nap both at noon and dusk, I would extend the motivated period to the most of the day! It's a game-changer for me, and it's not much a loss because I can sleep less at night because I trade to the day.
I'm a ADD person, it feels like the dopamine would exhaust after hours, and a nap would reset it for a while.
Did you read the article? Because that's one thing he emphasises.
Here's my tips.
1. Use mute, often
2. If it's meeting, it's a meeting. Don't have everyone looking at their screens rather than listening.
3. Get some light-weight headphones that you can wear for a long time. I have the classic Sennheiser px-200. You can't seem to buy similar headphones anymore, particularly not wireless.
4. The "watercooler" always-on vidcon idea is a good one.
That were the days. Much later in the 90s this changed to be allowed to be on CompuServe in the evening for a half hour. I can still remember going to GO MAXIS :)
Given that changing faces real time in video is doable now, wouldn't it be trivial to fake business dress? Or even (Dog forbid) shaving.
However, once everyone is WFH the experience turned out to be less than ideal to say the least. I found that I worked more, worked more at overtime hours and have been more stressed out than usual.
I think it really had nothing to do with my habits and preparedness. I already had everything set up (multiple displays, standing desk etc which I've had for a long time) and had almost no productivity drop on my side. However, now all my colleagues are pinging me, the video meetings take longer to finish since people are talking over each other and now I'm asked to write much more documentation and communications for rather trivial matters instead of just talking to someone face to face for a couple of minutes. People (management) also have less respect for normal work hours.
In the end I think if your company doesn't have the preparedness and more importantly the systems ready for remote work, you won't be ready for full remote work either.
I just hope people will begin to adjust to the new normal better as time goes on.
At the end of the day send your manager a quick email of what you did and things that happened. You shouldn't spend more than 5 minutes and there's never an expectation of a reply but it's a great way to fill them in and augment the in-person conversations that happen in the office.
It gets better after that.
Edit: obviously, the recent events would be an exception, but i'm just saying in general.
However, there's one thing missing: Track your time, say in 10-15 minute blocks, with short notes about what you're doing. That can be integrated with your calendar.
I consulted for many years, simultaneously for multiple clients with multiple projects, so that was essential for billing. But I can imagine that it'd also be useful if you're dealing with managers with little experience of working remotely.
The idea of videoconferencing from home creeps me some. It's a privacy issue. And I do love working in bathrobes. It's comfortable, and makes for less laundry.
I've read this advice a lot, but quite frankly I don't believe it. 10-15 minutes block is too short, and it would probably take too much in terms of overhead (at least at the beginning).
Plus, it's known that 10-15 minutes is what it takes for the average person to "get in the zone" as in "focusing on something".
If we're talking pomodoros (25 minutes) that could work. I used to try 45-minutes pomodoros, but always stopped at around 30-35 minutes (focus lost, got tired/distracted, took a break).
I'm sure there are also other alternatives out there but Toggl is the only one I have experience with.
What worked for me:
Sleep till noon
Checking mail/chats
2-4h creative work (design, coding, writing) interleaved with mail/chats if the flow won't hit
Checking Mail/chat
<30h work weeks
only <4 meetings a month
See that you have to find time for work and not for life.
I work for a company where their policy is that you try for video chat first and degrade to voice then synchronous text then async. It keeps it as close to the feel of being in an office as possible.
I was pretty sceptical at first but the proof for me is when you meet a colleague in real life and don't realise you hadn't actually met them before. That doesn't happen with voice.
10 years on, I'm back in an open plan office at the moment temporarily and finding it painful that you can't just have a one to one chat across the office, that post its suck compared to online tools for certain meetings, that you can't see someone a couple of rows away doesn't want to be disturbed.
And I have to commute for an hour each way for this degraded experience.
What's wrong with text?
Maybe it's more difficult for people to focus on the conversation if their eyes have nothing to focus on?
This heavily depends on the company culture, tone of the meeting, participants, etc.
Basic savoir vivre still applies, interrupting someone to loudly admire a pet (or whatever) would simply be rude.
But if the discussion stalls and if it’s not a meeting about personnel reduction, I see no harm in saying that Mr Fluffy Paws looks especially nice today.
This is the most important one. I sign on at 8:30, I sign off at 5:30, and I turn off my laptop and phone until 8:15 the next morning to give time to hook everything back up. No exceptions.I take a 1 hour lunch where I might continue a slack conversation but also do some yoga / Ring Fit.
Like what everyone already said here; it depends on the person. For me that does not work.
I start work at home when I wake up, which can be 3 am or 1 pm and I work until I do not feel like it anymore, which can be 1 hour or 20 hours. Been doing that for 25+ years (not sure what the average is but I would say around 7 hours), works fine.
Not having the eight hours back in my week was life changing. Habits, health, relationships have all improved.
It feels like there are always going to be roles, teams and companies that must work together face to face, if we can culturally shift away from going into an office, it could really improve quality of life for lots of people.
For many others it may hurt them as work is a big social outlet. That’ll have to be taken into consideration.
I think we’ll see a big shift culturally over the next year as much more of the public potentially gets used to what it’s like working from home, companies may find it really helps(or hurts) their bottom line.
This could end up hurting as productivity will be terrible if everyone’s distracted with news on covid and employers associate that loss due to being remote.
Ultimately, post-crisis, expectations around how people work will significantly change.
Traffic, expensive everything, too much focus on work - no
If so far you used public transportation to get to work or just walked and otherwise didn't do any exercise - start. 30 minutes of mild yoga is enough.
Remote work often comes with a double whammy of less exercise and increased snacking - both will make you put on weight.
I've put on 15kg over the four years I've worked remotely and now after two months of office work already lost 4kg, because there's this hill(20m height) I have to descend every day to get to work.
You keeping your balance in the bus every day really adds up over time.
In the long run, working-from-home will only be a win, in so many aspects of society: reducing daily traffic and the associated stress, reclaiming the space taken up by office towers and parking lots, all of which will improve overall public health and increase leisure time, which would boost local economies and even travel industries and so on.
Why would you not know that if you're working at home, if you knew it while working at work?
Or, if you didn't know when working at work, why would you start caring when switching to working from home?
Despite all the bad things I want to say about the Macbook Pro provided by my employer, its speakers and mic do a pretty good job during videochat.
It would be fine if your team is used to this and understands mute buttons and whatnot. Not fine when its an employee who doesn't mute and types at 100wpm on the same macbook.
And there shouldn't be a lot of typing involved unless I'm in a 1:1 pair debugging/troubleshooting session, and even then it's not exactly reaching 100 wpm.
I can't say I've been bothered much by background noise, that's actually more often an issue in the office. In the following weeks there will probably be more of it due to kids being home, but we have no choice here.
Here's how I deal with this:
The work computer lives in my office, which I close up and leave at the end of the work day. None of my other devices have access to work email, and none of them receive any form of work related notification ever.
If you ping me about something after I've signed off for the evening, you'll get a response in the morning after I've had my coffee.
Everybody else is free to work around the clock if they like. If they need me, they can catch me while I'm at work.
I also felt comfortable turning off Slack notifications for a few hours to focus, and so on. Now, we(my manager for the team)'ve established a rule that we have to prioritize responding to pings (leaving Slack on all the time) so I feel like I've lost that quiet concentration time. I'm thoroughly not enjoying WFH for days at a time, but I appreciate that my company is letting me wfh to stay healthy. I also appreciate that I got this data point, so I can seriously think about this if I ever want a remote job.
Update: Another problem I faced is lacking awareness in family about your work. People thing you'r sitting idle on laptop and end up doing errands for them.
However it's not a bad idea to keep a worklog for yourself. Just jot down a sentence for new tasks and then a rough time frame. Just so if anyone does ask next week what you did last Monday you've got some idea. (General advice, not just WFH advice).
If your manager can't evaluate your performance based on what you do not what you say, it may be better to change the manager.
on the flip side, regular reports on a more reasonable schedule can be good for the employee. sometimes I'll spend a whole week hard at work investigating/testing different approaches to fix some bug and end up submitting a one-line change. without the backstory, it might look like I sat on my hands all week and started work friday afternoon.
Family life is mostly about sharing the events of the day
Working home is pretty uneventful and that aspect can be stressful
I worked home for 13 of my 23 years career, loved them and still do it, but my best years have been the 3 years I left all my jobs to go touring around Europe as roadie
Being part of a team that shares a common goal but also solves everyday mundane tasks together like finding a place to eat that's ok for everybody or fixing a flat tire gives a lot more meaning to what one does
There’s a project called TiddlyWiki[0] Would work great for this.
[0] - https://tiddlywiki.com/
The option to pursue an exciting and highly rewarding goal for a few days without having to think about what the Joneses think about the particularities of my dressing habits or adherence to a schedule can be a great gain.
In my case, when I was in college, there would be days on end where I wouldn't leave my dorm. I'd hang around in pjs doing pretty much the same thing all day long: get in front of the computer, do whatever, eat in front of the computer, continue doing whatever, get the laptop in bed, fall asleep. Repeat the next day. After a while I really had the impression of "doing nothing" or of "always doing the same thing".
Nowadays, when I work from home, I get up, make the bed, put my workout clothes on, do my workout routine, take a shower, eat a protein shake, get dressed "for work" (ie put on a clean tshirt so as to be presentable on a video call), get in front of the computer, start up Teams and get to work. I try to take a break every hour or so to move around a bit (do some push-ups / pull-ups), drink a glass of water, look out the window, then get back to work. Around 6 PM, when the office hours are done, I finish up whatever I'm doing then quit Teams, quit the mail program, and I'm done for the day.
Now YMMV, but I find that the days when I go straight to work and just do the work part, sometimes still in my pjs as in college, I really get the feeling that I've accomplished less. I find that for me, breaking up the day with some activities helps to not perceive it as being monotonous, just doing one thing all day long. At least for me it's important for whatever breaks I take to not just be in front of the computer, like browsing hn or whatever. That's why I like moving around a bit and looking out the window.
This is something that I'm not as likely to do in the office. There are more distractions, even though I'm not in a proper open space, so it takes me more time to "get in the zone" and I'm also less inclined to break it whenever I'm in it cause I never now when I'll be able to get back. Also, I enjoy calm during my breaks, so people on the phone or talking to each other and other random noises are more likely than not to stop me from walking around outside the office.
It's multifaceted. It might be fine if you own a large enough home that you can have a dedicated working space, with a door.
Even without kids, I find it extremely difficult to work from home without a dedicated space. If I try to work from the living room, I end up doing living room things (like playing video games).
For some people, though, the idea of engineering your environment to change your behavior is either impractical or unheard of, which is what I think gives these people the general impression that "working effectively from home is impossible."
I love my kid crawling on me while I work, she sits on my lap and watches around or hug me a bit.
I work in the living room, my wife is there, my kid too. The desk is equipped for work, to be clear (good chair, screens etc.), I occasionally play games on it in the evenings (not often, to be fair) and I work in my "home clothes". Been doing this for over 10 years now.
I have my rules: if I don't work enough or I see I lose focus often, I'll work more hours. If I work too much, I'll work less the next day.
The other day I was even shocked realizing how much time people spend chatting at work, my day seemed more intense at home than their at the office.
To everyone its own. My style has been working great and a hug or cuddle from wife/kid is a great boost to my productivity!
For those types, maintaining their position means endlessly manufacturing superficial validation. It's a game of perception.
I see where they're coming from because it's still somewhat surreal to me, but I want to go home.
Which brings me to another point: there's something off about this. Most of the cost of living compensation appears to address the cost of real estate, which is artificially inflated in the first place.
Why do companies still do that if all they achieve is pumping the local housing prices even more?
But there are some who have allergies, and it can be easier for them to choose a vegan restaurant to be certain there's no lactose / egg contamination.
Remote work will have to become much more common in the future. It makes absolutely no sense to waste so much time and energy on commutes.
Maybe I just spend too much time listening to the radio and podcasts? Maybe it was growing up in an era where voice phone conversations were more common than texting and facetime?
Perhaps you don't like having a record? :)
Voice tone, pitch, pauses, irony, sarcasm (both easier to misunderstand in text), etc.
And in person or voice chat have the highest signal-to-noise additional data stream that is body language. "The mouth says yes, but the eyes say no."
Why should other people come in just because you need entertainment?
Maybe make some relationships outside work?
We spend the majority of our lives at work -- spending that alone in my spare room/coffee shop/wherever just sounds like a nightmare long-term.
I think as long as humans are social animals, remote working will stay niche and optional at best.
Maybe eventually people can find a group of friends/acquaintances with which they can also hang out and have a coffee, while each tends to their own work?
Ultimately I think we're all responsible for our own morals & I generally don't get worked up about people having different ideas (notwithstanding such that deny my right to exist, such as antisemites).
I'd always thought the primary difference between vegetarians and vegans was ethical, rather than dietary. That part of the ethics of veganism is opposition to the mechanised slaughter of individuals that should have the same, or similar, rights to people.
Maybe this is more of a fringe belief as vegan options become mainstream?
The funniest example I know is a guy who will first call people then when they say NO in no uncertain terms and hang up on him he drives there and asks exactly the same thing. He frequently describes how both him and the prospect pretend the rude phone call never happened.
He one time needed 100 plants for a stage of a theater performance. On the phone the grower refused to rent them to him, he didn't want to name a price, just NO. In person he immediately agreed to do it for free.
Personally I would look for another job.
I love being able to work from home, when I'm recovering from being ill or if it somehow makes life easier on a particular day. Will probably come in handy during this crisis as well - so I'm very thankful of it.
But 363 times out of 365 I much prefer to work in office. And that is with the assumption that I won't be alone...
Taking this into account, along with the undeniable time and energy benefits of remote work, I think companies should start preparing for, allowing and offering remote work. It should become normalized, so that people who want to work from home on some days should be able to.
Importantly though, I don't think it makes sense for most companies to try to completely switch to remote work. Eventually, I think this will lead to a stable equilibrium of some significant percentage of people working from home and a significant percentage coming to work, on a given day. Except for companies which deliberately want to be remote-only, I doubt it would ever result in no one coming to the office.
This seems like a win-win. It reduces the burden of commuting for those that do not want it or cannot manage it on a given day, it gives people more free time, it lessens energy expenditure, but there's still an office to come to and socialize, interact directly and do immediate in-person business, just with a bit less people than usual.
I know this has happened with me and others I know. I wouldn't mind going into the office a day or two per week if it were useful but between travel and people working from home and people who aren't in the same office, there won't be a lot of people I work with circulating around if I do. So I don't bother.
But we're a pretty remote friendly company in general--although the degree to which people who have an office come in varies by team.
Like talking to a room where people are actually present and to 20 people each from their laptop, with the mic muted and the video turned off
It's much harder to 'read the room' and much is lost
And I certainly love working from home and don't fancy socializing much when at work
But technology made a lot of work-related things harder or worse
In fact, things like making the room easier to read despite using a camera is exactly what I was talking about. It is definitely the case with today's systems where you simply have a camera on the lid of the laptop and display many individual images of people on the screen. This does look very unnatural.
For instance, one very distracting aspect of this is that it is impossible for two people to be looking into each other's eyes as they are communicating, since the image and the camera are not aligned. Solving this would at least make addressing a single person over a video call much more natural. Perhaps we could somehow place a camera behind the screen? Will volumetric display technology make it easier once it is more widespread?
And this is just one problem that we can identify. I'm sure there are many other subtle cues missing from a video call which could be identified and then hopefully fixed.