Ben HalpernThis came across my Twitter feed today:
Brianne is right to celebrate how awesome this situation is. If you have to be working, you might as well be doing so in a fabulous environment. From everything I personally know about her, she is living her best life here, and that's great.
But to me, this is not the ideal to shoot for in remote work. I'm currently working from my home office. My boring home office.
What is awesome about my setup is that everything is plugged in, and all my A/V works well and I have the same setup every day. The awesome part is that I don't commute and can really be as productive as I want to be. Remote work "from anywhere" is just hard to get right.
I have been able to dramatically optimize for the 95% of the time I get to be sitting at the same desk with the same peripherals all hooked up.
More on this "optimize for the 95%" here:
The 5% of the time I find myself away from this setup and still fully in work mode is a rather unideal scenario. It can be pleasant, but I try hard to make it a planned-for exception these days.
There are a lot of great posts about specific advice of getting set up remote:
A lot of them tend to touch on equipment and setup. Other advice typically revolves around communication and teamwork. Either way, it doesn't come easy and the consistent, optimized home setup seems key to me.
We have digital nomads in the community, and it's fascinating to see how they organize themselves:
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If you want to go this route, your 95% optimization is going to be a whole different approach. I'd advise against going half-way to this lifestyle if you want to get good work done.
Here is a good post on the important task of creating a great developer experience for yourself:
Words matter. We are a distributed team, as opposed to having remote workers. It's an identity for the whole team, even those who work from the office we keep in Brooklyn.
It's a great way to work, and it's pleasantly mundane. Happy coding.
