Remote work practices

I never thought I was the kind of person who’d enjoy remote work, but COVID has shown me otherwise. Yet, sitting up in a bedroom all day does get more monotonous than time at the office, and I’ve had to figure out some ways to adjust. It really boils down to watching your proverbial energy meter in a way that you don’t have to when you have more novelty in your environment. These are some things that work well for me; maybe they’ll work for you too.

Put your phone out of reach.

The smartphone: the flow-sapping demon of the twenty-first century. Programming work is filled with little pauses (rebases, compiles, deploys, server startup…) and if your phone is ready-to-hand, then unless you’ve got the willpower of a god, you’re going to end up checking it during most of them. It destroys concentration, and also probably saps your mood reading about the crisis du jour. Turn on the ringer, and put it way across the room. Everything will go better.

Actively manage your calendar.

The further you go in your career, the more meetings you will have, and unless you carve out focus blocks for yourself a week or two in advance, your calendar will become Swiss cheese. The toughest days aren’t the ones completely full of meetings, when you can kind of throw your hands up and go with the flow—they’re the ones half-full of meetings, when you don’t have more than an hour to work in between, and so you keep starting but never finishing. This is even more demotivating somehow in a remote situation.

In other words, getting work done is less a function of free hours in a week than the number of contiguous hours in a week. Your clients or bosses are paying you for the work, so carve out the time to do it right. Getting into a flow state takes significant time, and even a whole hour isn’t usually enough to really make headway on a task. Try to get blocks of at least three.

People will put meetings on them anyway. That’s OK—you can’t be a hardliner about it. Just putting the focus blocks up will mean your time will be more protected than if you hadn’t.

Get fresh air.

When you’re working remote, you’re probably in a smaller room than you’d be at the office. The air will get stale by the afternoon. Opening a window can make a serious difference in vibe. If you can get a cross-breeze going by opening two opposite ones, even better.

Pay attention to lighting.

Apart from air, I mess with the windows and lamps to maintain good light levels throughout the day. It’s a subtle mood destroyer to start off with good light in the morning and then look up to find that you’ve been sitting in a dark cave by afternoon. Sunlight helps (my day always starts with rolling up all the shades), and then round it out with even lamp light as it flags (especially in the winter months).

Calm your magpie brain with noise.

Possibly not for everybody, but I find a source of white noise, like rain noise, helps me focus tremendously for those periods where I really need to knuckle down. It puts random thoughts beneath the noise floor, so to speak. And there’s a whole cottage industry of people putting this stuff on YouTube, plus sites with generators like mynoise.net if you want to save bandwidth, so it’s easy to find.

Caffeinate thoughtfully.

If you drink caffeine, know your rhythms and keep the intake predictable. For me, it’s one cup of coffee in the morning with tea for the rest of the day in order to avoid getting totally twitchy.

Change something when you run out of gas.

Engineers I mentor have sometimes mentioned just hitting a brick wall of unconcentration at times during the day. It happens. For me, this is often a mental trigger to go do something physical, like take a walk, do push-ups, or play the guitar for a second. Or you can often get some momentum back by switching to another task.

Recognize and manage your energy levels.

This is the meta-advice undergirding all of these things: you have to take an intentional look at how your energy (mood, concentration, whatever) is doing throughout the day that you often don’t when you’re in an airier space, away from home, surrounded by other people (and this from a relative introvert). For me, whether it’s the caffeine wearing off or whatever other reason, I hit an energy slump in the afternoon. It’s tempting to throw more caffeine at it, but that’s usually not very restorative. It’s better to blunt it with the kinds of tactics above, and then to choose tasks that match where your head is at throughout the day.