I have a great deal of experience working from home. Or, not just home, remotely. I worked in any imaginable situation, in planes, on boats, in trains, in cars, on a beach, in a café, you name it.
Background#
I work remotely since the early days of my computer time life, my high-school.
- I helped some friends to do funny things in Photoshop,
- I helped some university students to write their diplomas in Turbo Pascal and C++.
I’m on the internet since before Tim Berners-Lee the early 2000s, and it’s some wonderful epoch, when the internet was still very young.
I managed all my communication via the internet. Friends, extended family, school mates, college mates, work mates — I’ve been present in internet chats too heavily.
I have a separate story on that.
Office Not Required#
I’m honest with you, I never understood the requirement to be in the office for the folks like me. I count the start of my career when I actually joined office, because working from home wasn’t a serious work.
But hey, I was still a teenager, and I had WarCraft on my for-work — for-everything actually — computer.
Later, I joined a corporation that took extremes and even ivented some fines for being late at work. Five minutes late, and I needed to explain to a CEO why on Earth I was late!
You bet it, that was the reason I left these folks and never came back. But before that, they actually issued me the exception, I was constantly 10 to 15 minutes late, due to the public transport situation and frequent traffic jams at that time of the morning.
I won’t call them idiots, even though sometimes I thought they were, at the time. But these days’s I’d just say what if not everyone in the office has to follow the strict rules of being on time, if nothing in their work and the work of others would change.
Pre-covid times, there was a wide-spread belief, that people are unable to work from home.
They’d Facebook their day away! Yeah, haha! Now everyone got their Pro Max smartphones, eat this! They can constantly scroll their Facebooks from their smartphones, if they want. Cannot they, huh?!
Thanks to the epidemy, many business realised that actually, working from home does not hurt productivity, and actually boosts it! Who could predict that right?
As if various coders were smart people, they would tell others the remote work isn’t a bad idea, right? /sarcasm
Smart people could predict that. Those were working from home early on. Those were hiring people based on their talent, not their location.
My favourite example in that department is 37signals company. They made Basecamp, project management software, email service HEY — I recommend to give it a look, it’s free for first 30-days. (I’m not affiliated.)
They work remotely early on, and their products are still good, and they are still profitable.
They wrote a book about that, Remote: Office Not Required, among others.
My favourite is It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work
Travelling#
I worked remotely most of my career for two reasons:
- I could get a better job, with more challenging projects, by working not on a local market, but globally.
- that time I lived in a third-world autocracy that has no local market and no proper jobs for skilled individuals, apart from outsource projects
- I could travel freely
While the first reason is too obvious, you just can get a better payment and better work opportunities to actually not visit office, travelling part was super-important to me. I couldn’t stay in my homecountry, at first it was a subject of aesthetics of living in a depressed land, then it was a subject of my own physical safety. So, instead of sitting in Belarus, I travelled the world. While also working.
The folks like me are usually called digital nomads. In short, those are the people who travel and work simultaneously. I lived for over a year in South-East Asia, and to me that’s an absurd idea, to travel there for a couple of weeks. It’s too little! I was lucky to have plenty of time to explore Chiang Mai, Bangkok, Hong Kong, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, among other places. Same goes for European travels, I spent months in one location, before moving to my next adventure.
Working on the go was quite easy for me, a manager, web + UI/UX designer. But also I did a for-print-publishing work from my MacBook Pro (was harsh!), and even rendered countless of motion design videos in After Effects (was less challenging than printing work, by the way). All I had is a $2K MacBook Pro, circa 2011. Then the one from 2014, and it was as capable.
Modern day computers are much more powerful, so this situation is getting even better. Modern computers can work full-day from their batteries, so it’s real to work wherever you want.
There are various life-hacks and advices for those who wish to go this path. I’m not going to cover them here, all I’m saying is that having a modern laptop and even less modern smartphone is plenty to do most of computer-related work via the internet. In some scenarios, if you lucky enough to have a team with well-established processes, you don’t even need a constant internet connection. You can work offline from jungles or mountains, then go back to hotel’s Wi-Fi, and then sync your work with others.
Why someone decided that leaving routine behind is less effective is beyond me. Actually, I’ve never been more productive than while travelling. You’re super motivated to finish all your job quickly, so you could go explore the new place. If you’re lucky to work for the company that does not pay you for being online 24/7 in crunch-mode answering endless meaningless Slack chats, this life-style is a blessing.
Remote or On-Site#
These days there are various ways to work remotely, I’d highligh just two approaches:
- working fully remotely
- working semi-remotely, also called a hybrid approach
I’m productive working from home, but I’d prefer a hybrid office any time.
I think it’s an ideal setup, when you have this luxury to stay at home when you up to it, and go to office when you want.
- My preffered ratio of home-to-office is 3-to-2, considering it’s a 5 days work-week.
- Sometimes I work 6-or-7 days a week. Sometimes it’s less hours during the Monday-Friday timeline, so I compensate on weekends.
- Being at office twice or thrice a week is my ideal balance, if I have this choice.
If I have the luxury of it, I would visit office no more than once a week, or even less than that. A couple of times a month could be an ideal schedule, if you’re too busy with work. I see office as not a space to actually work, but socialise with your co-workers.
Technically, I see no point in any office, if you can meet somewhere downtown and sip your favourite beverages together.
Devices#
One of the very good approaches to work effectively is to separate devices.
- I have a work computer that I never use for anything non-work. I never watch any TV from that (I use TV or iPad Pro for watching videos, be it YouTube or TV). I have zero issues to concentrate on work from that, as I never non-work there.
- I might want to separate my /uses story to actually separate hardware devices into its own story. One day later.
- I have a MacBook that I use for work either, I have no issues to scroll the internet from it.
- I have iPad and iPhone for that. Those are cursed devices, I mostly use them for scrolling the internet, and I have a separate big iPad for watching TV-shit with my wife.
- I have Kindle for reading. Or paper books, but I don’t like paper books.
- I have a separate computer and netbook for Rostymo farm, I manage the whole entity from them. They both are located at farm, but I can access everything from any internet-connected device that I have.
- I have a separate iPod Touch for running only.
- I have a separate Android phone (with minijack! But I abandoned all my non-bluetooth headsets), for YouTubebe interviews, lectures, news, podcasts, audiobooks, everything related to listening to voices. I have my separate bluetooth headsets just for that.
Separation of devices works wonders for me.
Office Space#
But not just devices, I have a special office space, that is also used for Rostymo city-farm. It’s a separate apartment I work from. Nobody lives there, so I can concentrate and work uninterrupted. That’s a blessing for those having kids!
I started having my separate office space since circa 2015. Usually that’s just a separate room for work. I highly recommend having your separate space to work, even if you work from offices, but sometimes you want to work from home.
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