00 | cause

I have been working remotely at my current company (Yikuai) for nearly a year, and I have learned a lot in this year. Recently, another colleague decided to go away for family reasons. A book from your direct manager to talk about telecommuting firsthand.

01 | to have remote work from the point of view of the points made in the reading

The following is a purely personal perspective. The work environment and home environment of each remote worker are different and not representative. They are for reference only. The thesis is relatively neutral and unbiased. Try to explain the problem as clearly as possible.

Point 1: Why can’t YOU work in an office?

This point of view mainly emphasizes that there are too many distractions in the office, such as meetings, temporary problems to be solved, review problems, etc., and it is easy to interrupt my time for deep thinking. Programming requires a long time of continuous thinking.

These are some of the problems you can see in the office, but also in remote work. After working remotely, it is easy to be interfered by family members, which may be:

  1. The lover asks to pass something
  2. Mom doesn’t know how to use her phone
  3. Power outages, water outages, network instability
  4. Pet cat runs to the keyboard
  5. Do housework at home
  6. There are visitors

Advantages of working remotely over an office:

  1. I get up early in the morning and get up at 5-6 every day. I can be ready to start my immersed work before 8 o ‘clock.
  2. 8 am to 12 am is a long time, and the work efficiency is relatively high, while in Beijing, 10 am to 10:30 am in the office, only enough for a meeting in the morning.

Idea 2: Stop spending your life commuting

No doubt, an hour commute is normal in Beijing. Working in Beijing, the morning rush hour subway can be exhausting.

Telecommuting perspective: No commute, but family chores, chores, and breakfast. Here emphasize to do housework. Recently, my wife had a minor operation, and it was not convenient to walk. Suddenly, I felt the housework increased suddenly. You have a dishwasher, but you have to clean the breakfast machine, grease on the stove, and clean the kitchen. Water the flowers feed the cat and mop the floor.

Second although there is no need to crowd the subway, it brings another problem that one may seldom go out in a day. There are enough vegetables in the refrigerator at home, so I don’t go out to buy breakfast and vegetables in the morning. I just stay at home. Spending too much time indoors can make people irritable and bring their emotions to work.

By comparison, a one-hour commute in Beijing, with noise-cancelling headphones, allows you to listen to music, read books and watch TV shows, and have a little time to yourself.

So working remotely, you can take a little bit of time out in the morning, go for a walk in the park, go for a walk to the beach, and enjoy morning exercise as a time to energize your day.

Point 3: It’s technical, stupid

The idea is that the working environment can be made accessible by technological means. It seems that this problem does not exist in our company, and there is no communication problem hindering work. The plan on my phone is unlimited data, unlimited calls. Have a problem with colleagues after the appointment, telephone direct communication. Wechat voice and so on are convenient enough, but at present, the call quality of direct phone is better.

However, distance will reduce the sense of team participation, and the problem is that the conversion of their own value is not as direct as the encouragement in face to face. For a long time, I will doubt myself slightly, and I will lack confidence in my achievements at work.

Face-to-face communication is easy to generate emotion and cohesion in a team, while remote communication “focuses on things rather than people” makes me feel that I always lack some people’s care.

If you are going to start remoting, there is another important question to be aware of: how supportive is your team of remoting? For example, if you are on a team that is half remote, you will have relatively good documentation and development support. But it’s hard to feel “eye contact” when you’re the only one on the range. Some need to encounter problems and you need to go through the clearance, more energy. These are all technical management issues and the maturity of the team, which have some impact on themselves.

Point 4: Escape the 9-to-5

The idea is that fixed working hours are a constraint on people. This problem is relatively free in the flexible working environment of Internet companies.

Talk about time management for remote work,

The first is the work schedule. After working remotely, it is easy to adjust the work schedule. Now, I go to bed at 10:00-11pm and wake up at 5:00-6pm the next day.

Get up in the morning, wash, do breakfast, have breakfast, clean, do housework, basically till 7:30 or so, cook dinner at 12 o ‘clock, to 1 o ‘clock. Rest for half an hour. PM to 6pm and after 6pm is gym/dinner/family time. 8 PM -10 PM, work study/family time.

The second is time management in the work process: strictly follow the Pomodoro technique, focus on work for 25 minutes and rest for 10 minutes. Work about 14-16 tomatoes a day. Effective working hours per day output above 12 tomatoes per day is highly guaranteed, and 6-8 hours of effective working hours are difficult to achieve in the office.

At the end of the day it’s all about synergy, and remote is even more about synergy and family time. My wife is a university teacher. Apart from attending classes, she spends most of her time at home preparing lessons, reading literature and preparing topics. Half a remote worker. Two people at home one working and the other watching TV, playing video games, eating snacks and lying in bed. The workplace side will definitely be affected. After setting up tomato time with her, the two try to minimize the impact on each other during focused time. Take care of a few things during downtime. There are also some small blocks of time, like going to the gym in the evening, going out to the gym, coming back, cooking, eating, cleaning up the house maybe until 8 to 9 PM, if two people go to the gym together, keeping the rhythm in sync, they don’t have to wait for the other person to eat, so the time is much less.

Point 5: Why all in big cities

People who work in Beijing will joke that there is no life in Beijing. Every morning, they get up and take the subway to work. At night, they get home at 11:12 and go to sleep. Sleep in on weekends, go to the shopping district for dinner and a movie.

After the distance, there are also some life problems:

  1. It’s hard to fit in as a “small-town kid” and talk about topics that interest you. You want to talk about the Internet, Silicon Valley, anxiety, logical thinking. You might be talking about opening a restaurant, opening a pedicure shop, going fishing, going to the countryside on weekends.
  2. Baptized by the strange outlook on life of relatives and friends.
  3. Public resources may be low, such as a long distance to go to Starbucks, a movie, a hospital and a bookstore.
  4. Service industry service consciousness and time concept is relatively poor.

Small-town life also has aspects that big cities can’t match:

  1. Home close to the sea, in the morning evening can go to the seaside boardwalk, relax.
  2. After the remote community environment scenery, home scenery, much better than Beijing.
  3. I could drive back to my parents’ house on weekends and go to my grandparents’ whenever I wanted.
  4. Fitness and life support is very convenient.

The above are external environment, but this is not the focus, do not leave life to the first-tier cities, often is whether you are an “interesting soul” and how much enthusiasm for life. Life is all about poetry and distance.

02 | some Suggestions to the remote workers

Take care of your health

Disturb is less, if you immerse yourself for a long time, easy to cervical spondylosis and lumbar muscle strain. Taking my example, I went to the hospital for CT examination at the end of May, which confirmed that there was a protruding compressed nerve in the cervical spine of my left shoulder. The symptoms were numbness in my left hand and numbness in my toes. Serious time, the left arm pain, especially when writing code to type the keyboard, not the store pain, sleep at night, the foot will be like a needle pricking pain is difficult to fall asleep. Western medicine has no way to solve the problem, but surgery, and the risk of surgery is great. Conservative treatment is traditional Chinese medicine treatment, ultrashort wave + wax compress + acupuncture. I don’t believe in TRADITIONAL Chinese medicine and I’m quite resistant to it.

I have experienced that fitness is better for mental health than for physical health when it is available in moderation. Remote workers tend to stay at home for a whole day and become irritable. Every time I go to the gym, I come back feeling like a psycho. After anaerobic strength training, the soreness in your muscles makes you feel like you’ve torn yourself apart and rebuilt yourself. After aerobic training, you sweat through the sweat, and the sea breeze on the way back from the shower is so refreshing.

There is also a very key is to pay attention to mental health, long time alone, it is not good to control their own pressure, the same pressure in the office team will be much smaller, when they solve the problem will be a lot of pressure. Poor pressure control, easy to deny and doubt themselves.

Enjoy yourself appropriately

The chapters in the book are about making your work environment more comfortable, which I agree with. Programmers, not to mention how good the code is, how many bugs are produced per unit, still have geek style, comfortable working environment, can concentrate on writing code here. I used to be reluctant to invest in the office, but now I’m in my own workspace and can do whatever I want.

Another tip is to make regular plans to go out and avoid spending long periods of time alone at home.

After writing for three or four hours, I will write so much temporarily. I feel that there are few suggestions. If there is an opportunity, I will talk about the topics related to working cooperation and working methods