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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
