7 Tips for working from home after Telecommuting for 15 Years

For 15 years I telecommuted from Flagstaff, AZ to Silicon Valley, CA. I worked as a software engineer and managed people remotely. Given that a lot of people are working from home now, I thought I would pass along some tips I learned during that period. Even if only one tip helps you, its worth it for me to pass it along. If you're a software engineering leader, feel free to pass this article along to your people. I've numbered the tips, so you can mention a specific number if you think there's something they need to focus on in particular.

#1 Structure your day and space with good boundaries

When you're driving into the office every day, your boundaries between work and home are defined from your location; office means work, break room means lunch. But if you're not working in the office, you need to provide boundary and structure. Working from home shouldn't be a 24-hour marathon in your pajamas, that's burnout from home. Get up. Make breakfast. Take a shower. Go to your "work space" and start working. Stop at lunchtime, consider going for a walk and take a break. Stop at a reasonable time in the evening and have dinner and interact with your family. Just because your commute is now walking between places in your domicile, doesn't mean you should drift through the day. You're using the clock and your physical location to define your work/life boundary. This is hugely important for your sanity and productivity. Recently I've been starting my day with equipment free workouts from DareBee.

#2 Keep a daily work log and share it with your team

When you're working remotely, its much harder to have conversations in the break room about what you're working on when you're getting coffee or a snack. It can also be demoralizing to be working by yourself all day. The solution to this is to keep a work log and share it with your team, and your boss. Some people can this an "I did this" list in contrast to a "to-do list".

This is actually a good work practice even when you're not remote, because then your boss knows what you're doing and how its going, and it saves you the 5 minutes a day of getting felt up by your boss about your various tasks. You're out of sight while remote, you can't be out of mind too. It's much easier to keep your boss happy about your telecommuting if they can skim your email and find out what you're working on.

Because I've done this for years, I've got it fairly optimized and simplified into a low effort low friction process. I just start a new blank email at the beginning of the day, leave the "To" field blank, and fill in the subject with [CI] and the days date. To log something I just click the email window forward, and type a new bullet point. It's fairly trivial.

#3 Replace any Mandatory Serial Status meetings with a mandatory Email

Serial Status meetings, where everyone goes around the table and talks about what their status is have got to be the worst. In a face to face meeting, they're bad because everyone knows they don't have to listen until their turn to talk, so you have N bored people and 1 person talking. They are excruciating on a remote meeting, because not only do you have a bunch of bored people, but there isn't any social pressure to keep the bored people from clicking away to play Tetris during the meeting. In fact, if people look very attentive in the meeting, they're more likely to be playing Tetris or reading Facebook than focused on Zoom. You can replace this meeting with everyone emailing you 1 sentence once a week and give everyone back an hour or more of productivity.

#4 Invest in a good headset

You're going to need a headset. It's worth spending some extra money on a headset. Your headset will be your primary interface to your company. Can you wear your headset for an hourlong meeting without your ears starting to hurt and it making you grumpy? Can you wear your headset all day? Can people can hear you well? I had bad luck with Bluetooth headsets when I first started from home, and ended up investing in a Logitech Wireless USB headset, like this one: Logitech Wireless USB headset on Amazon, but Bluetooth headsets are much better now so your mileage may vary.

#5 Project/Share Agendas and Meeting Minutes when you're in a meeting

This isn't strictly a telecommuting tip, but something I saw a great program manager, Amy Raferty at Chegg, do with a bunch of remote stakeholders when we were working on a project with many moving parts across two companies. She would in the meeting, start an email of the meeting minutes, which she would project and share with everyone. Essentially the meeting became a collaborative writing exercise where the action items, decisions and questions raised at the meeting were instantly documented. At the end of the meeting she would go back to her desk, spend about 15 minutes cleaning up the email and send it to all the participants. I use this technique as process to keep people focused in face-to-face meetings, but it works even better in remote meetings; its ultimately just good meeting hygiene.

#6 Pomodoro Technique for the Win

Look, sometimes, work is boring. That's why they call it work instead of happy happy funtime, and its why you get paid. If work didn't suck sometimes, we'd call it "play" and you wouldn't get paid to do it. Your home has Netflix, the best snacks, and the best toys. There are going to be times when you need to knuckle down and work. Pomodoro has you set a kitchen timer for 25 minutes of work, then a 5 minute break. There's a bunch of science that explains why it works so well. Its a good way to get over the hump on a tedious task. There are several apps to help you with this, I'm using one called Be Focused Pro.

#7 Instead of Facebook, Love on your Dog

We're all prisoners of our physiology, and we are social creatures. If you're telecommuting, you're not going to get the serotonin and oxytocin (the two social networking hormones) you normally get from interacting with other people. This will have terrible consequences to your mood and health. Instead of going to Facebook, give your pet some love, because its a proven thing that interacting with your pet will give you those two hormones and make you healthier. Plus getting a Like on Facebook is just a maybe, while loving on your dog is a sure thing, your dog always "likes" you. Which means my most important piece of home office equipment is not my laptop, or my webcam, but this: