So you wanna work remotely
Share my 1.5 years experience with you
Hello everyone! 👋👋
Today I want to talk about remote work and to give some advice about how to do it effectively.
Before start, I want to say that I worked remotely for the whole of 2017. Then I tried working at the office and left this hell after 2 months so I’m a remote guy again 😎
So, let’s think why many people switch to remote work and don’t want to switch back
Benefits of remote work
🏢 No need to go to the office
The long way to the office is often so boring. Especially when you use public transport and see many evil people who are apparently unsatisfied with their work or life or I don’t fucking know why they look so terrible. Overwhelming hoards of people in a peak hour really tires. As a result — you come to work and only want to die. After wasting 8 hours in attempts to work you go to your home the same way. You come home and just fall on the bed without any desire and energy to do something else. I’m not even talking about the fact that the whole trip might take up to 1–2 hours.
Instead of this shit, you can just wake up, go out to the balcony, happily meet a new day, pour in the morning coffee, play music and smoothly start your work.
For organisations it also means reduced rent cost because there are no need for a large office. I’m currently working in a company that doesn’t have any offices at all.
⏰ Set up your work schedule yourself
Are you 🦉? I am. And I felt pain when I was even allowed to arrive by 12 a.m. Because it means “wake up at 10 a.m. because your way takes ~1.5 hours”. But I feel OK when I wake up in 12 p.m. Some people will say that I’m a naughty kid — fuck these people. No more annoying alarm clocks at 6 a.m.
The biological clock plays a very important role in your performance. Bad feeling — bad work. So, remote work allows you to choose your work hours yourself.
🌇 (suddenly) Remote work
You don’t need to go to office… so why not to work for a German startup while living in Russia? Choose your road and show your talent to the whole world, not just a town with 50 000 people.
🤷 Live for yourself
You can do whatever you want because you have much more time and you are free from office control. Of course, I don’t mean that you should forget about work and just chill out. But you will feel relaxed even if you’ll work more. Trust me 😉
Now I want to give some advice about things that I realized during my remote work
How to work effectively
⏱️ Use time trackers on start
At the beginning, you might get a lots of distraction that you can’t handle. Time trackers help you see how much time you are wasting. I use RescueTime for that. It shows your productivity and time spent in each application:
When I started using it, I was getting 20–30% of productivity. I got angry, turned off all social notifications, removed Steam and started hitting keys.
After a month, it became a habit and I don’t need a time tracker now to control my productivity.
P.S. Pro version of RescueTime also has funny alerts that troll you when you’re getting distracted a lot
🗓️ Define your work schedule
The most common mistake of people who tries to work remotely — they open their favourite code editor (or design app or smth else) and sit all day on Twitter. They keep their editor opened for a whole day but work only at the end because “I lost enough time, now deadline comes”. Thoughts about work don’t leave their brains as if they work non-stop.
But you don’t have to do it. Instead, you have to define the hours when you can concentrate on work. For me there are 02:00–04:00 p.m. and 12:00–04:00 a.m.
And don’t open code editor in the rest of time 😄
😴 Leave unfinished tasks for tomorrow
Well-known fact — we are very lazy in the morning. And if you’ll start some task at the end of day and leave it for tomorrow, it will be easier to start next day. Because you will think:
Wow, this task is almost done. I will finish it now
Instead of:
Fuck, there are so many tasks. Which one should I start firstly
I was already used to starting something in the evening and finishing at the morning.
☕ Take a breaks and change your places
I often have a discussions with people about work. Many of them think that remote guys are doomed to work all day and stay at home for a long time.
I strongly recommend you to take breaks and go for a walk at least 2 times a week. My time tracker detects a large productivity decrease when I don’t leave the house even for 3–4 days. When I was ill and sat at home 2 weeks, I was getting 80% distraction time. It really matters.
That’s why I often visit some time-cafes and go to the bar each Friday (is somebody from Saint-Petersburg reading this post? 🙈)
Also, don’t forget to talk with people. If you don’t have friends (anything may happen), you can start streaming. It really helps lots of people to overcome their loneliness.
👔 Have a side projects / another hobbies
Routine is annoying. Maintaining side projects, doing open-source software or just playing d&d will keep your mood and desire to work well because you probably will be bored of a monotonous life. This, in fact, is applied to office workers too.
I hope this post will help you at least for a little. Now I’m going to starbucks 😉
