Working remotely

This is Building Better Developers, the Develop-a-newer podcast. We will accomplish our goals through sharing experience, improving tech skills, increasing business knowledge, and embracing life. Let's dive into the next episode. Well, hello and welcome back. We are continuing our season where we're looking at the bright side of things. Looking at the positives, the silver lining to our black cloud, looking at the things that should bug us or maybe do bug us, or it's understandable that they bug us in our daily work, and finding an upside to it. This episode, we're going to look at working remotely. Working remotely is, I think, sort of divisive in itself. There are some people that love it and some people that hate it. And there's some people that are in between as well. I think there's some that can take it or leave it. Some of that focus, some of that view, from that point of view, I think is based on, one, your desire to be productive in a work day. Two, your ability to be productive either at work, at an office, or working remotely. And then I think another one is just sort of understanding what remote work really is. Is really embracing it or not, I think, is going to impact how you see it. And so hopefully when we're done with this episode, you'll have a little more positive view, maybe be able to make it work for you better than it has in the past. Now the first positive out of remote work, and I'm going to talk about the negative side of it as well, because this is one that's important, is the ability to, to some extent, depending on what you're doing, own your own schedule. Your schedule probably is going to be different when you work remotely. Not completely, because you're probably, if you're normally in an office from, let's say, 8 a.m. to about 5 p.m. is sort of when your work day normally runs, well, that's probably when you're going to be, quote, working, doing your remote work. But that's not necessarily true. Where you may need to be available during that time. There's nothing that says, depending on what you're doing, there may not be anything that says you have to do your work during that time frame. So it may make sense if you've got, let's say you've got a lot of paperwork to do, or maybe you've got a spreadsheet to review, or you've got some code to write, or something like that. You could do that from 10 to midnight, 10 p.m. to midnight, instead of 2 to 4 in the afternoon. If you're not doing it with somebody else, and if there's not a deadline necessarily that day, then you're getting the work in, you're just doing it at a different time. And I think this is a huge positive, because it allows you to do surgical replacements of your schedule all the way up to possibly completely flipping it. And by completely flipping it, that may mean that you really don't do much during the day, or you do work-wise, and you work at night. You could do that. Or you could, maybe on Friday, you can't get, you just have too much going on, and you said, okay, well, I'm not going to work on Friday, but instead you work on Saturday. Or you can surgical replace things where you, for example, you take a longer lunch and go hang out with the family for a little bit, or you've got a doctor's appointment or dental appointment or something like that. You can do that during the day, and you can come back at night, or you can get up early. If you've got a flex schedule, then remote is just going to allow you probably to flex more. So that's a positive, is that there is a lot of power in being able to control your own schedule, but that doesn't even touch the value of some of the other ones we're going to hit on. The next one is the time saved, and this is huge. Take it from somebody who has gone back and forth between the remote and the non-remote world multiple times over the last couple of decades now. So you're going to be spending out your daily commute, whether it's a short 15 minute commute or an hour and a half each way, and then the time spent commuting to work and getting set up. If you take a lunch break at all, then going to lunch and then getting lunch and then coming back from lunch. There's a lot of time that is just travel time in a regular day that disappears when you go to remote work. If you think about it, if your day normally runs eight to five, and you've got, let's say you've got about a 45 minute-ish commute, that basically means that you're going to leave the house at 7 a.m. every day and you're not going to get back until six. Now that's an 11 hour day, but if you're remote and you work from eight to five, now you're down to a nine hour day. You've just added a couple hours and literally adding a couple hours a day to your life. A good example of how that is a huge positive is I spent quite a while taking my daughter to school every day and then going into an office, even though I could work remotely. And so I would do that and that was travel time. It was a work time, but it was stuff that I had to do. But when I stopped, when she was back, when she was birth, first they were out of school and then there's remote school and just during summer breaks and stuff like that, I can replace that time with a very solid morning walk. I can get really good exercise, like over an hour of exercise every day that would have been instead sitting in a car. Now, I don't do that every day. There's some days that I get to end my day early or I can work some extra other work in or other hobbies or other things I want to do. That time adds up really, really fast. I mean, think about it, an hour, let's say an hour and a half a day, five days a week, that's seven and a half hours a week that you're getting back. And time is an incredibly valuable commodity. So that is a huge plus. If you do it right, again, you've got to make sure you're getting your work done and things like that. Now, it's a sort of ancillary or a tangential thing with that. When you're normal job, you're sitting in the office and doing stuff. In an eight hour day, there's usually a lot of time that's spent just doing random, grabbing some coffee, going to the printer, get caught in some water cooler discussion, just all kinds of stuff. So typically, you're going to get, and this is, you can see a lot of different surveys and things that have done this, but I figure most people get, I don't know, between five and six hours productive hours done in an eight hour workday. Now, you will find if you do it right, that remotely your productivity is going to skyrocket. You're going to get closer to eight hours of productive work in an eight hour period. If you sit there for, if you do eight hours of work a day, your productivity is going to increase. So you could actually, if you're, particularly if your job is based on getting things done and not just, you know, button a seat, then you're actually going to find that you're going to be spending less hours a week and getting as much done. Or you can spend the same amount of hours and get a lot more done, depending on what your point of view and what drives you and all of those other things. So time is a huge gift you get when you work remotely. And I want to piggyback on that for yet another positive. When you're at home, when you're actually, when you're able to work remote, you don't have to necessarily work from home. Let's add that. Because you work in remote just means you're not in the office. So you could be at the Starbucks, you could be at your house, you could be out on the lake somewhere. It doesn't really matter. It could be snow scan and depending on what your job is and stuff like that, remote could be very remote. From a general things that have to get done in life point of view, remote work is going to allow you to get hours back as well. Simple things like doing the dishes and laundry and running errands are a lot easier to do when you're at home. That's maybe part of why, and not only why you do those things on a weekend, they may actually keep you at home on a weekend. Maybe you've had that situation where you said, oh, yeah, I'd like to go river rafting with the crew, but I got to catch up on laundry so I got to be here to run the laundry through. Well, laundry really doesn't take time. It's just, depending on how good or bad you are, maybe it's just throwing stuff into a machine and then throwing it into a dryer or it's not that much more time consuming to if you put them into their proper piles of colors and whites and all that kind of stuff. It's mostly just being around for the thing to run. So it's really easy, particularly depending on how many loads you have to deal with, it's really easy to get up in the morning, throw stuff in the laundry. Mid-morning when you go to get a cup of coffee, throw the stuff from the washer and the dryer. When you come back for lunch, maybe that's part of your lunch routine then is on that day, you just fold your clothes or put them up or whatever you need to do to get them out of the dryer and you're off and running. Dishes are the same way. You can throw stuff in the dishes when you get up in the morning and when you sit down for lunch, put all the dishes up. It's just simple. If you've got to run an errand, if you've got to go pick up a gallon of milk, you can that part of your routine instead of a lunch break where you go out and grab something to eat or you've had to make a lunch and pull that out and eat it. You can go run an errand. You also don't have to worry about the whole making a lunch. You still will, but you don't have to make it and pack it and all that kind of stuff. If you want to do essentially a box lunch or sack lunch to work and save some money, you just leave everything at home and you just got it all there. Your costs, and we're sort of slipping into yet another positive, your costs of living, your costs of work, maybe, probably go down, but it's a maybe because there may be a situation where you're not, some places will compensate you to some extent for expenses, work expenses have to do at home, which may mean a better, higher grade internet connection. Maybe you have to buy office supplies that you normally wouldn't like a printer or paper or something like that. Maybe your company helps you out with that. Maybe not. But when you think about it, if you normally, even if it's two or three days a week, you eat out, eat lunch out because you just don't want to be bothered making your lunch every day, that adds up. And mileage on your car, that adds up. Or if you use public transportation, all of those bus tokens or whatever you use to do that, that stuff adds up. Not to mention laundry costs. If you're, depending on what your dress code is and stuff like that, some people still dress up nicely for working remote, but you're probably not going to get in a full suit. If you do, kudos to you, but you just typically, you don't have to do that. So you can actually save on laundry costs. Even your normal clothes, you can lounge around a little bit more. You can work your schedule more to things that are suitable to be done at that time. It's like you don't have to get up and jump in the shower first thing. And then, especially if you're a workout person in the middle of the day, I know a lot of people get up, shower, go to work. They do a lunch thing. They work out. They shower. They go back. So they're having to take a couple of showers a day and go through a couple of things of clothes and then wet clothes have to sit in a bag for a while, all kinds of stuff like that. That just goes away because you can do that and not take that first shower. You can be a little grimy when you go to work out, get yourself all cleaned up after you've worked out and then you're off and running. There may be tasks that you normally would be very challenged to get done as well. Errands like, let's say mowing a yard. Weather plays into that. So maybe if you struggle to have non-rainy weekends, there's nothing that says you can't take a lunch break during the middle of the week and go mow your yard if it's a nice day out. Which leads us to another huge positive is that you can actually enjoy the outdoors, I think, a lot more if you work remotely. It's a lot easier for you to set up a place in your, hopefully, where you live, where you have a window and natural sunlight and maybe even you can throw windows open and have actual fresh breezes and clean air and stuff like, well, fresh air anyways. I don't know how clean it is, but there's just little quality of life things that you can get that you're not going to get working from an office. The levels of stress is another big positive, I think. This works for me. This may be a little more personal, so I'm going to throw this out there, but this may not be the case for you. For me, stress is a lot less when I work remotely and I don't do it incredibly. There's a lot of things that I should do better, but general stress, because I don't sit in traffic for however long I would have to sit in traffic, I don't have to worry about getting up at the right time to beat traffic and then get everything ready and make sure that I've got everything packed or in my bag or whatever so I can get to work and then get everything set up at work and then get everything from work and then come home. It's added stress. It's not like I'm quivering in a corner, in a ball in a corner, but it's more stress. It's just more stuff that's just frustrations and annoyances. You may have that at home, but maybe not. Maybe like me, it's nice to just take a little bit of extra time and do some exercise, go for a walk. I can spend a little more time drinking my morning tea or just other stuff. I can enjoy life a little bit more putting in the same hours of work, but all of that travel time and all of that other just sort of BS time that shows up in typical work days, I can avoid that. Meetings are a lot easier to deal with, which is probably another positive in itself, but another time gain is you may have figured this out. If you're sitting on a Zoom meeting and you're waiting for people to show up, it's a lot easier to do all kinds of other stuff while you're waiting for them to show up. You can still socialize and do stuff like that, but if you want to be productive, if you want to reduce dead time, it's easier to do that because you can just mute yourself and go whip off an email real quick or something. Some people do that anyways, but it's something that you can do. I think it's healthier in all. It's a lot easier, particularly if you have a, I don't want to say strict, but a complicated or maybe actually more to the point, a non-popular diet. It's a lot easier to stick to your diet to eat the kind of foods that you want when you're at home. It's gotten better, but if you look at, you go back a little ways probably now 10 to 15 years back, if you're a vegetarian, especially if you're a vegan, there were not a lot of options. Even if you could work around, like if you're trying like an Atkins diet or something like that, but if you needed gluten-free, there's just a lot of stuff out there. There's a lot of diets for health or religious or political reasons or whatever that are sort of complicated to do that and eat out. It's a lot easier to eat in because you know the quality of the foods you've got. You can get the right stuff. You can avoid the things you want to avoid. I think it generally makes you healthier. You're not as likely to put together a big bacon cheeseburger when you're eating lunch at home. Now maybe you do. Maybe you go and use a bunch of frozen pizzas or something like that, but you're probably more likely to eat a little better, a little less fried foods, maybe a little less fat stuff. You're probably not as likely to have somebody at the office that brings in dozens of donuts that day or something like that. You may do that yourself. You may also may have snacks laying around the house, but you have a little more control over that. So you can, again, as I started out, you can make it work for you and make it work pretty darn well. Remote work is a hot topic. It has been for a while, but there is definitely a push, a steady drum beat of more and more people either being pushed to do that or pushing to be able to work remote. So I think that at least the opportunity for that is just going to increase as technology and other things improve. And so I think it's worthwhile to actually be intentional about how you do remote work, about setting up a good office environment or work environment so you're not just sitting on your bed or at the kitchen table or on the couch with the TV on and kids bouncing all over the place. There's a lot of normal things in the house that are not conducive to a good work environment. Take the time and invest a little bit. And I think you'll find that when next time you have to do any remote work, that you'll be able to lean more into the positives here instead of maybe some of the other negatives that are also sometimes associated with remote work. So I'll leave you on that positive note. And the challenge of the week, where is your remote office? Do you have a space that is your remote work? And is it nicer than what you have at your office, wherever you go to work? At least as nice, preferably nicer. Maybe it's not the 50th floor of some incredible building or something, but I mean like the general comfortable chair, decent workspace, good lighting, ability to listen to music if you want to listen to music, all that kind of stuff. All the things that make it comfortable. And if not, make a list and start working towards building a better workspace for yourself at home or wherever remote is. I mean, like I said, it doesn't have to be really home. It's just your office away from the office where you can work to customize it so that that hopefully gets to a point where that is the place that you can be the most productive. And that being said, I'll let you get back to it, whether you got to get to the office and deal with your coworkers or whether you get to hang out at your favorite remote location. However, it is go out there and have yourself a great day, a great week, and we will talk to you next. Thank you for listening to Building Better Developers, the Developer Noir podcast. For more episodes like this one, you can find us on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Amazon, and other podcast venues, or visit our site at developernoir.com. Just a step forward a day is still progress. So let's keep moving forward together. There are two things I want to mention to help you get a little further along in your embracing of the content of Developer Noir. One is the book, The Source Code of Happiness. You can find links to it on our page out on the Developer Noir site. You can also find it on Amazon, search for Rob Brodhead or Source Code of Happiness. You can get it on Kindle. If you're an Amazon Prime member, you can read it free. A lot of good information there. That'll be a lot easier than trying to dig through all of our past blog posts. The other thing is our mastermind slash mentor group. We meet roughly every other week, and this is an opportunity to meet with some other people from a lot of different areas of IT. We have a presentation every time. We talk about some cool tools and features and things that we've come across, things that we've learned, things that you can use to advance your career today. Just shoot us an email at info at developernoir.com if you would like more information. Now go out there and have yourself a great one.