Ask HN: Remote Working I'm a senior engineer at a small company, and for family reasons I'm going to moving to a remote part of the country soon. My company have been accommodating and want to keep me on board, but it will be a culture shock working from home full-time. What is your experience with long-term remote working? What strategies and technologies do you find helpful for beating the feeling of isolation and staying productive? |
The best plan is to have your office be in a separate building from your house. A shed out in the yard, a room over the garage, even a rented desk in town. Whatever you can do to avoid being anywhere where anybody can walk past and casually interrupt you.
Barring that, you'll need to set your boundaries well. If it wouldn't have been important enough to call you at the office to ask about before, it shouldn't be important enough to ask about now. No, you can't watch the kids for a few minutes. No, you can't look up the dates when the in-laws are coming out. You're at work.
Sort that out up front and everything else will go smoothly.
Working remotely rocks, by the way. That was the last on-site job you'll ever have. You just won't be able to consider going back to that after tasting this.
Good luck!
Working remotely has been great for me. I've been able to watch my daughter grow up, see my wife more often, and gave me the flexibility to support my family when my father got ill. Be prompt with communications, stay involved with your colleagues, get your work done, and you'll have no problem.
Good luck!
1. have good collaboration tools with your co-workers. Whether this be IRC/HipChat/Slack, a good Kanban board, daily standup, a Hangout etc..
2. Carve out a quiet space in your house with a door. Make a Stop/Go placard to hang on the outside. Stop means you are busy and not available. (a call, middle of debugging something nasty, etc..) Go means your kid can come in and show you the awesome thing they just drew.
3. Have a clear start time, lunch, and end time. These can flex just like if you were in the office, but routine isn't just for you but for your family and work like balance too.
4. Just because you are remote, don't be afraid to step away from your computer for 10-15 minutes to get a breath of fresh air, stretch and reset. Surprisingly you spend a lot more time at your desk remote than in an office. You aren't grabbing a conference room with a colleague for some ad-hoc white-boarding to hash something out. It's all happening through this glowing screen and perhaps a telephone.
5. carve out some time to get face time with others in your company monthly or bi-monthly.
Organizing work. Personally, Emacs 'Org mode' has been of tremendous help in this regard. Key thing was sticking to it consistently for about 7 months -- it has now become an almost reflex action to break down work into manageable chunks. Not 100% diligent at this, but I'm reasonably happy so far.
Also, having a fast communication tooling setup (my environment on Linux: 'mutt + offlineimap + postfix' and IRC) that works smoothly over intermittent network connections can be quite handy. Especially so when you need a change of scenery -- working from coffee shops with feeble internet connection, or from a park near by, to shake up the day-to-day humdrum.
Most other points here about work/life balance seconded.
And, yes -- remote work is great, warts and all!
My gf is working in shifts and hence sometimes she's here when I'm working and I have to remind her that I'm working, although I'm around.