Constraints, Boundaries, and Restrictions in Remote Work

This is Building Better Developers, the Develop-a-Noor 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. Hello and welcome back. We are continuing our between seasons and one-off episodes. This time we want to talk about constraints, boundaries, restrictions. This is something that's actually very important for us if we are doing this, bleeding our work life into our personal life, into the rest of our life. It is a bigger, I think a bigger issue these days when we have a lot of people moving to, at least more people moving to fully remote kinds of jobs where you do have work at your home. You don't have an office you go to. You don't have these naturally occurring cutoffs that have been blurred. I agree, they've been blurred in the last years and decades. These natural cutoffs of you get up, you go to work, you go to an office, you do stuff, you come home, and then you're not at work. Now, yes, we have our phones and email and all this other stuff that make it a lot easier for us to do work when we're not at work. Now you add on top of that working from home and it really, really starts to blur the lines. The first thing, and this is just some things I've learned over the years. I have, again, just as, I don't know if I've mentioned it as much, but I have done remote work on and off for actually nearly about 20, I guess over 20 years now, including full-time remote for long stretches of times, months, and even multiple years. Most recently, I've been, I haven't had to go into an office regularly, I think for five or six years. I have worked from home, even though I've at times had places to go, but generally worked from home for quite a while and have learned quite a bit over that time. Not only from my own experiences, but from trying out things that have come from other people that I've read about or talked to, things like that. I want to talk about the boundaries because it is way too easy for us to get completely lost in work. It just sort of goes back to the idea of pacing and things like that, that it really can be detrimental to us in the long run. We need some way to split things up so that we aren't effectively working through every meal and skipping all these things in life to work. Now, if you make it, no pun intended, work for you, then you can open up a lot in your life. There's a lot you can do when you take away that commute time and the getting ready for work and winding down from work and things like that. Even just dead time, I'll call it dead time, but just time that we would normally have that is not terribly productive when we're at work. We can find a way to make those things and switch those to our benefit when we are not at work. We've covered some of these in the past, so I don't want to go too deeply into the productivity as much as some ways to make sure that we're setting boundaries. This is not only remote work, but whether you're consulting or doing side hustles or things like that, is making sure that you don't, in your effort to squeeze everything out of every minute and every hour, that you don't end up skipping life as well. First off, workspace. I think and have found that you are best off when you have an actual workspace that you go to and you leave, even within your home. The worst possible thing you can do, the worst time I think that I had in dealing with this kind of stuff was when I worked in my bedroom. When I first did full-time remote, I had a desk right next to my bed. I literally could roll out of bed and be at work. That was a mistake. I had young children at the time, so it was not uncommon for them to cause us to wake in the middle of the night. They didn't have really good sleep schedules. It was all over the place. Then you had some in school and some not, things like that. Life in general was not the most structured. Getting work into the bedroom was just not good. It was way too easy to work late into the night and then just collapse into bed or get up really early, particularly if I had notifications for email or something like that. Something would go off. Next thing I know, I'm up. I'm doing work. Because the team that I worked with was essentially working around the clock. We had people all over the world that we regularly interacted with. It was not uncommon to get phone calls or emails or something or have work from the one guy that always got up early that was a couple hours ahead. It was effectively, I'd get calls at 5 or 6 a.m. Then there's a guy that worked late at night and it wasn't uncommon to end up having calls with him at midnight, 1 a.m., 2 a.m. Those things start to wrap around and the next thing you know, one, you're working a 24-7 schedule essentially. Weekends were okay, but most people worked through weekends because we were a startup. That stuff happens. It was seven days a week. It was rare and it literally was I would leave the house to get away from work if we went out for dinner, which didn't happen often enough, or the kids sporting event or something at school or something like that. What's worse is that there was a, in my mind I think or my body did not recognize a difference between work and sleep. If I laid down to go to sleep, it usually took quite a while to go to sleep because it was just too easy to switch into thinking about work. This is something I've seen from a lot of people that this is not an uncommon recommendation is to not work where you sleep. In this case, I had a desk and it was ergonomically set up pretty well. It's even worse if you're going to just, if you essentially lay in bed, which is easy to do these days, you grab your laptop, you can sit there in bed and you can work as long as you want to. What ends up happening though is if you don't have some boundaries, which bedroom is a good place to have a boundary of no work in there, what ends up happening is you'll work until you essentially pass out. You get too tired, you rest your eyes, you fall asleep. The next thing you know, you've been asleep for four or five hours, you wake up and you're right back into work. You don't have any real, it's not even downtime, it's even rest time at that point. That can happen anywhere. That's just probably the worst place because we have to sleep. Probably another place, well, two other places that are probably equally as bad is either a family room or common room or something like that where you've got a lot of traffic. You don't have probably a very good setup as far as ergonomically, you're probably on a couch or something, which is not necessarily the most healthy way to sit for hours and hours and hours or at a dinner table or something like that. Because then you're always, it's really easy to work while you eat. This is not just working at these places, but if you're where your work area is, it very, very useful to have a work area that at least has a door or doors that you can shut for two reasons. One, so that you can work without interruption and let other people, assuming you have roommates or family or something like that, so they know, hey, I'm working, door shut. Or you can even put a little note on the door if you want to. Or the other side of that is so that you can, when you're not in that work area, you can shut the doors and just sort of say, hey, I'm not in there. Or at the very least, don't go into that room because that sort of helps you set your mind to things like, hey, I'm at work or I'm not at work. Now another area where we run into a lot of boundary issues is the whole email thing. It used to be that if you were unlucky, you would be on call and you'd have a little pager or beeper and if somebody needed help, they'd get a call and then you'd have to dial in and email somebody or whatever it would be or give them a phone call back. That doesn't happen anymore. We're basically all on call. It is way too easy for people to send us emails at all hours of the night. And depending on how we're set up, we may actually get notifications and wake up and try to deal with those. There's some cases, but I think it's very few, where we have to. It may be part of our contract or something like that. In that case, you need to do what you can to set some limits within that. Make it reasonable so that you have time off, that you have days that you're not on duty for 24 hours at a time or cycle it among team members or whatever you need to do. But most stuff, most software now and devices have quiet times or plain mode or do not disturb or something along those lines. Something along those lines that allows us to shut it off, even if it don't have it actually turned it off, but at least turn off the notifications. For myself, one of the things to do is my phone is almost never not on vibrate. That means if it's not really close to me or in my pocket or something like that, and even sometimes when it is in my pocket, I will not know that the notifications come across. There's a lot of applications and stuff like that that I don't have notifications turned on. By default, a lot of them will. As I install them or the first time I run them or whatever, when they verify that, I'll shut that off. I'll say, no, I don't need to be notified. I don't need stuff popping up on my screen all the time. This is probably the worst part of things like social media and stuff like that. If you've got Instagram or Snapchat or Facebook apps or those kinds of things, Twitter, I think all of those have ways to pop up on your screen, to beep, to do something to let you know that, hey, you've got a text or a like or whatever it is. That distracts us. Now this is, I don't want to make this a general tirade against those things because we're thinking about work here. This is the work side of it. If you've got these notifications based on work, then you're going to be notified. You're going to be interrupted by those. Work I think is an extra level of that because we have things, at least I know I have done this where, for example, email, I will not turn off notifications of email because I sort of feel like I should see if an email comes across. The benefit of that, the way I've got it, is I'll have a tablet sitting around somewhere and it'll screen a light up if an email comes across. I can see a quick title or subject or something like that. My phone's the same way. I can do a quick glance and see is this something that's work related or not, which is really something I shouldn't do. This is one of those things that do as I say, not as I do, I guess. It depends. I fully get that there are going to be some situations where you have people you work for or with that you need to be able to respond quickly to them. Ideally, you should get away from that as an email thing. Email should be not instant. Text probably sort of the same. It depends on your boss or your customers or who you work with. Text or phone would be, ideally phone, would be your, I need to talk to you right now. We have an emergency kind of thing. Texting, it can be because there's some people that's just, that's the easier way for them to get a hold of you. They can text you and say, hey, system's down. Or you have automated systems now that will say, hey, application's down. that you have your alerts or whatever and that you sort of monitor those. And you should, I think it helps a lot to make that limitation or those channels that people can get a hold of you consistent in the work and the personal world. Now, if you've got a work phone and a personal phone, that's awesome. Then you know how to set up, you can easily set up those two differently. If you have a phone or a device that is, that you combine work and personal life, then whatever it is that you allow as channels to get a hold of you personally, it's probably good that those are sort of the same. You're flowing, you're sort of making communication flow through those same channels for work. So if you have kids and you tell your kids, hey, if you need me, text me. That should be the same thing at work. Hey, if you need me, text me. Now, you can give a different number. There's all kinds of different things you can do, which the more you can split those up, the better. But if there's a certain channel that you're monitoring in a sense for communication, then it's probably going to help for that channel be the same regardless of whether it's personal or work. So then it's a, hey, if I get something on this channel, I need to take a look at it. It's just, and then shut off the other channels. Find ways to maybe relegate some of the other things to different places. Email is nice like that because you can set up email with a couple of filters or rules and fairly easily route stuff so that work doesn't show up. You don't deal with work unless you're during your work hours at your workplace, your work location, and then personal stuff you can monitor as you need. But in all of those cases, it should be something that is done in batches, not real time, all the time. If you find yourself constantly responding to emails immediately, then you're probably overdoing it. This is something that I have a challenge myself that I've had to go back and adjust some of my email tools so they don't check email as often. I had them down to like, I don't know, every five minutes or some of them it's like every minute or something like that. I think most of them it's like every five minutes. I pushed them I think all back to at least once an hour or at most, I guess, once an hour as my phone goes off in the background there, something coming across. There is a lot of benefit to not immediately responding to, you don't treat email like texts. They should be things that you take a look at it, you spend some time with it, and it should not be used for an immediate response. To be so off, I mean you will get those things, you know, emergency, this app is down, you know, something like that that you get via email. But even then, if somebody needs to get you immediately, you should have a different channel of communication, you know, text or something like that, phone call, something to, basically something to help you easily differentiate. So the things that are not urgent do not fall into your urgent response. Think of it as like having 911. You don't call 911 when you want to get the weather or if you want to know the latest movies at the local movie theater or something like that. It's for emergencies. You should have some similar sort of process or filtering mechanism or channels of communication that allow you to, at the right times, completely ignore stuff that are outside of certain communication channels. When you blur this stuff, it becomes, there's so many things that it does that are negative as far as your general mindset, your timing, the interruptions in general. You don't want to be interrupted when you're, I don't know, you're in the middle of a marriage proposal and then suddenly your phone goes off and you're like, oh wait, I got to take this and you find out, no, nobody's life is, you know, it's not a life or death situation. It's somebody just told you that, hey, I'm going to be late for the meeting tomorrow, you know, something like that. You need to be able to essentially compartmentalize some of this stuff the best you can. And there are tools to do that. There are, the applications are getting better at providing us with things like that, filters and rules and all that kind of stuff. And on and off times, I mean, some of these things will, there's even mail clients, I think now that maybe have been for a while, that will just not check mail, will not do anything with mail for certain periods. So you could essentially turn it off from, you know, whatever you want to do, 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. It just doesn't check mail. You know, at 6 a.m. then it pops up and then it checks mail. You can turn mail off. You don't have to run mail all the time. Slack is another great one. I know a lot of people that turn off notifications on a regular basis. For certain times, they sleep or snooze or whatever it is, the notifications. Personally I actually got, so I turned off sound notifications because it was driving me nuts. And so you got to find some way to differentiate what life is and what you're working on and what your focus is at a given time. And this is more difficult for us when we are doing these extra things where we're extending work into other parts of our life so that we can be more effective and more productive or that we can invest in our future and things like that. We still need to be able to have opportunities to shut a door, to turn something off, or to somehow not be in work mode. And it's something worth thinking about, which brings us to our challenge of the week. Assuming that you have some sort of a remote setup or that you have ways for work to come into the rest of your life, take a look at the tools that you use, whether it's email, text, stuff like that, and your availability. What have you provided to your coworkers, your boss, your customers? Maybe you need to make some adjustments. And you don't have to go extreme right away, but I think there are definitely some gradual steps you can take. Things like don't check email every so often, once an hour, once a day, twice a day, whatever it happens to be. And then maybe just let people know. Or maybe have an auto-reply on your email that says, hey, I only check email X time at certain times. If you need me in an emergency, this is who you need to contact. If you want a good example, call your local physician. Call their office. If they're not too small, and actually most places now because of availability stuff are not too small, you'll call a number and then they'll have, hey, if this is an emergency, do this. If you're a drug rep, do that. For example, I worked with a guy for years that he had a phone number that went to everybody, whoever wanted it, that was his phone number. And it's a phone he almost never answered because salespeople got the number, stuff like that. And then he had a desk phone that he would do for work, and then he had a personal phone that he kept for personal calls. Things like that will pay off in the long run. And so that's your challenge. Just give it a try. Make a couple adjustments and see, particularly if you feel overwhelmed at any portion of your life, and give it a shot. See what happens. I bet you will find that it's something that you want to do it more or better as you move forward because there is a really good payoff for it. And that being said, I hope you take this and some of these suggestions and they improve your life a little bit and you are able to go out there and have yourself a great day, a great week. And we will talk to you next time. 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 today is still progress. So let's keep moving forward together. One more thing before you go. 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