Developing A Remote First Mindset!

Evaluating how working from home has been for me and trying to transition to a remote first mindset

In my time working thus far, I have had the great benefit of being able to work from home. Being in the office is normally my first preference. I have found lately with needing to work from home all the time, I do miss the people, the banter, the free coffee. Initially, almost a year ago when I started as a Platform Engineer, I came into the office all the time. It worked out fine, I was also living somewhat closer to the office at this time and had the advantage of a work colleague living literally down the road, so I was able to carpool with them. Eventually I needed to move back to the family home which increased my commute times. It meant earlier starts, leaving the house early to get in to work early and leaving the office in the evening to deal with traffic on the way home. It was fine, it was to be expected as normal life I suppose, but it was taking a toll. I found with my new job that I needed a heightened sense of focus to keep an eye on everything going on (we support a lot of infrastructure) which was draining, but manageable before. Now it was just the long commute making things a bit worse.

So, I tried to change to a working from home schedule where I worked remotely Monday to Tuesday and Thursday to Friday. Wednesdays were the day my colleague and I decided to both come into the office to catch up in person. It worked alright for a small bit, but the problem I found was that my space for work was my bedroom. I think this is one of the great sins in remote working practices and I very quickly flipped things back around to coming in to work all the time. Due to the geographical nature of my team being spread across Ireland, East Coast and West Coast of the US, meetings were running a bit later. This was a bit of a pain on Fridays when our daily stand-up was at wrap up time and leaving late on a Friday is the worst. So, I decided to just work remotely on a Friday all the time, with the odd day here or there where I worked from home because I wanted to. I was still working from my bedroom, but I felt the impact was far less in terms of my ability to turn off from work.

Flash forward to early to mid-March and after a bit of sick leave, I find myself like many others needing to work from home all the time. I knew the areas I needed to improve from before in terms of my working environment, but I also knew I needed to change my mindset a little bit. I found myself just a bit sick of it all very quickly, just yearning to get back into the office to do proper work. But it became apparent that we would not be back for a long time, so I knew I needed to lock into this and try to make the best of it. One of the things I am super grateful for being able to have is a dedicated office in our home now. I separated work from personal and I noticed the improvement almost immediately. I took this a step further and even began to dress as if I was in the office and established a “daily commute” of about 20 seconds. I took some advice from one of our leaders a step further and I pack away all my work gear into my work bag at the end of the day, unpacking it again the next morning. It is something that I find just closes the door on my work thoughts for the evening and then opens it again the next morning when I set up for the day. Some other bits and pieces that form a more positive remote first mindset for me include –

• My workflow works for me and the business – I have my own process when it comes to my workflow. It is something I have developed and learned over several years that ensures I meet my own productivity goals and caters to my uniqueness as someone with Dyspraxia. While I will not necessarily call it fragile, it certainly does not work very well in an office environment where distractions (while welcome at times) are incredibly common. Remote working the way I am has led to me being exceptionally productive and actually acknowledging to myself that I am productive as just a nice way of giving my mental health a boost.
• Distractions and breaks are perfectly normal – For ages I found myself feeling bad for getting distracted by something or taking a random break in the middle of the day. It just fed into this sort of negativity machine around remote work and how my performance has been lately. But at some point, I must have forgotten that it was perfectly fine in the office to have the odd break here or there for a few minutes to get a coffee and chat to someone or what have you. So, what was the big deal with essentially having one of those breaks at home that I was getting so worked up over? I did not know, so I strove to eliminate those negative thoughts and to take a break when I felt like I needed one. Which is generally after one of my focused work sessions that form my workflow.
• Notification bombardment should be avoided – I’ll preface this point by saying my role invariably requires some form of notifications to make it through to me, so there is a need for me to be reached at a moments notice at times. But I have found that the value I get out of tools such as Slack and MS Teams has shifted from valuable work insights to essentially notification bombardment tools that at times can consistently interrupt my thoughts. It is like that episode of The Simpsons with the dodgeball coach. Or a broadcast storm in networking where all the devices end up clogging the network with moot traffic. I see more and more works being published around asynchronous communication and I think that movement must pick up more traction. I genuinely prefer my email than Slack / Teams at times because it is far slower than the aforementioned tools and gives me more time to think of a response.

Ultimately, I still want to return to the office. But I have found that I enjoy remote working quite a lot, provided I have the right tools and environment to take advantage of it fully. I may be in the office for a week or two initially, but I think I’ll find myself back home or in some other space where I can work in a way that suits me and suits the business in terms of getting things done.