The Remote Work Weekly #2

Welcome to the second edition of The Remote Work Weekly!

In this week's edition, you will be introduced to a new remote work related term that has been trending recently, find reports about over-employed remote workers, and read the summary of an experiment about restructuring calendars with the goal of helping remote employees to feel better at the end of the day.

Have you Heard of Office Peacocking?

I think your answer is most likely "No." I just heard of it very recently in this article highlighting trends businesses use to lure remote employees back into offices. And that is exactly what the term is about.

At first glance, this whole office peacocking thing sounds like the classic trick failing startups use to convince employees to spend long hours working in toxic work environments. After giving it a second thought, it looks like a step in the right direction for hybrid employees. Seeing companies start to care about providing comfortable office space with good amenities to replace the depressing cubicle environment is a good step forward.

Thinking about Having Two Full-time Jobs?

Over the past few months, there has been a stream of articles on Business Insider featuring stories of "millennials" and "gen-Xers" working multiple remote full-time jobs at the same time. One featured over-employed professional was earning $225,000 a year by working on-site at a company while working remotely for another. Another worked 80 hours per week while getting just three hours of sleep. And a third who is successfully paying off debt, but the article didn't specify what kind of jobs he does.

I find these stories, if they are true, really disturbing. I can understand doing contract work or freelancing alongside a full-time job. Only the idea of working two full-time jobs at the same time made me feel anxious. The articles mentioned issues that those remote workers faced, like the level of stress when the workload increased at one or both jobs, living a double life trying to hide the other job from each employer, and the almost non-existence of work-life balance.

I can relate to some of these issues from my early freelancing days as a full-stack developer. Back then, it happened that I accepted multiple projects or tasks with significant workloads, thinking I could finish and deliver on time. This kind of work overload might sound doable for a freelancer rather than a full-time employee, but it did more harm than good. Initially, everything used to work until an issue arose in one of the projects that required working extra time; then, life turned into a firefighting situation for months.

Make Time for the Work That Matters

This is a summary of a recent Atlassian's "Team Anywhere Lab" research. Team Anywhere is a team of behavioral scientists running experiments to solve challenges of distributed work.?

Starting this week, I will be featuring and summarizing some of their research results that you can make use of to improve your remote work life.

The goal of this week's featured experiment was to find "ways of working to help Atlassians make faster progress and feel better at the end of each day." The approach to achieve this goal was asking the participants to design their workdays around their top priorities instead of around attending meetings and reacting to notifications.

The experiment included fifty-nine participants split into two groups. Both groups were given instructions on how to design their calendars, but only one group was also asked to track their progress.

The participants followed these five steps:

• Edit existing meetings by declining non-essential meetings and grouping the rest to free up focus time.
• Schedule "not available" time by blocking off time for personal tasks like lunch or appointments.
• Schedule "open collaboration" time by allocating 10-20% of the week for collaborative work.
• Schedule "focus" time by blocking 30-40% of the week for deep thinking tasks.
• Schedule "respond to messages" time by setting specific times for handling messages to avoid constant notifications.

The experiment lasted one week, with calendar and survey data collected before and after to assess any long-term changes.

The result of the experiment showed that intentionally designing your workday helps you make faster progress on high-impact work, improves goal clarity, and is more effective when you also track your progress.

There was also a notable difference between the participants who only restructured their time and those who also tracked their daily progress. The participants who tracked their progress had a 26% larger boost in goal clarity, a 30% larger increase in how sustainable their workload felt, and a 31% larger boost in top priorities progress.

The following chart shows the difference in results between the two groups:

The full experiment report is published in detail on Atlassian's blog. You can find it here.

Wrap-up

This wraps up the second edition of The Remote Work Weekly. I hope it was informative, insightful, and entertaining :).?

Due to the lack of time, there is no featured Tool of the Week in the edition, but I will feature a new tool next week.

To receive notifications about each week's edition, feel free to subscribe.

If you'd like to share your thoughts or suggest a useful tool, I'd appreciate it if you could let me know. Feel free to reach out to me directly here.

See you next week!

Amr