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The primary difficulties i have with remote work are linked: 1. I usually wind up alphabetizing my socks at some point. 2. a lack of face to face contact and

The primary difficulties i have with remote work are linked: 1. I usually wind up alphabetizing my socks at some point. 2. a lack of face to face contact and the setting of being in my own space keeps me in a semi-permanent doubt/guilt cycle about my work quality and how my effort and reponsiveness is being perceived.

ben_jones 8y ago
2 just identified a strong guiding emotion in my life I didn't know how to describe but that I've felt for awhile. I'd append to it and say it also affects me outside of work in that I feel guilty being at the gym at 1pm instead of being at work, or being underdressed in basketball shorts during the day because I'm entirely at home or doing errands. American Culture in particular pushes a lowest common denominator of what it thinks work should be: 7-6 while counting commute, sporadic overtime paid or otherwise, and various other things that are entirely not to the benefit of the individual worker. It's crazy.
giantsloth 8y ago
This seems like a case of capitalist imposed enculturated guilt for not having a butt in seat for 8 hours a day (regardless of actual productivity). Rather than alphabetizing your socks, go to the gym or improve some other skill set interspersed with your paid work. Embrace the fact that you can build a schedule around you and your wants and desires and not that of your companies.
- giantsloth 8y ago
  I'm really curious why people are down voting this comment.
ryanSrich 8y ago
I’ve been working remotely for just a few months shy of 5 years. I’ve moved from coast to coast in that time. I’ve held 4 different positions in the same company. The _only_ thing that has worked for #2 is relying less on Slack and email and more on phone calls. It completely eliminates the guilt factor. I encourage everyone on my team to be more open to phone calls during the day. No real work gets done on slack. Call each other.
- stevoski 8y ago
  1) I don't enjoy talking on the phone, and yet 2) I've also found that talking on the phone makes remote work much better for me.
  - maxxxxx 8y ago
    Same here. When I was working remotely we talked over Skype all the time. I felt more connected to my coworkers than I feel now with everyone a few cubes away.
- creeble 8y ago
  I will second the slack factor. Semi-synchronous communications are a trap for distributed workers. It makes it feel you are more accessible (actually true of course), but it drives the discourse to the trivial and makes raises decision thresholds. I feel that if a decision needs consensus, either circulate an appropriate email, or do a skype/hangouts/whatever real-time conference. But this doesn't work well for junior team members who need more handholding. I'd say that's the one area where distributed teams don't work well.
- MrTonyD 8y ago
  I'm not somebody who likes or needs phone calls. They disrupt any flow I've got and require time coordination. So I definitely don't appreciate it when a manager forces me into them when that is something that suits his personality and management philosophy. Since I'm not forcing him to meet my emotional neediness, why should he force me?
  - allannienhuis 8y ago
    I've worked remotely for a little over 10 years. The approach I like is: start with IM (or sometimes email) and then move to voice if your real-time chat takes longer than a few minutes or a handful of back-and-forth volleys. At some point someone just sends: voice? (which is usually video/screen call). Depending on the problem worked on it means the person in the office (cubicle farm) may need to get up and grab a meeting room to avoid bugging their coworkers with the call. They might respond with a link to the video conference line/room, or with a better time in the future: 2pm? That way you're not bugging people with a voice call for what turns out to be easily answered questions. But the culture allows for quick transition to voice and you don't get sucked into long IM conversations spinning your wheels due to miscommunication. Not responding to IM until later with a 'sorry, was heads-down/afk/whatever' needs to be acceptable too, otherwise you get the problems of people expecting everyone's instant response all the time. That said, I miss the old MSN messenger feature of 'buzzing' someone, which would animate/vibrate their IM window and play a soft buzz sound. I sometimes use the slack call feature for this (just ring and hang up), but that doesn't quite relay what I'm looking for - something less urgent than an immediate voice call, but lets the person know I'm likely blocked waiting for their answer. There's always that game that plays in your head - if I get an answer in < 1 minute, I'll stay on this task; if it takes longer, I'll spin up a different task I'm not blocked on...
cagenut 8y ago
not being snarky here, maybe consider a therapist? both of those are in-your-head type problems. in fact, in general, maybe a regular therapy session should be considered a standard part of remote work. in-office we all use our coworkers as a social support network whether we mean to or not, so it makes sense that many of us would need an alternative to help cover that gap. I'm not even saying that it'd be a good thing (replacing a dozen interpersonal relationships with one) but its a hedge.
- JumpCrisscross 8y ago
  > both of those are in-your-head type problems The latter is valid. Face-to-face communication carries a lot more information than messages on Slack. If a company hasn’t developed a remote-first culture, feedback can fester instead of being communicated. Regularly-scheduled phone calls, one on one with critical people and team-wide from time to time, in my experience, alleviate this greatly. (Paired with occasional flyings out.)
  - cagenut 8y ago
    in-your-head type problems are perfectly valid! I never said or implied otherwise, I merely gave a possible solution.
malvosenior 8y ago
That's funny as it's the exact opposite of the problem I have. When I'm in an office I feel: 1. Totally unable to take care of home chores and errands. Often falling way behind on organizational or personal administrative tasks. 2. Fully exploited by my work place. I know I don't need 8 hours a day to be very productive. If I'm not working from home on my own schedule, I feel taken advantage of.
tejohnso 8y ago
It helps if everyone's work is public and planned ahead of time. That way everyone knows what you're supposed to be accomplishing and they also know whether it is being accomplished. There should be no room for doubt about quality if the work is peer reviewed. If having alphabetized socks keeps you happier in your space, then that's a good thing, right? :)
shortoncash 8y ago
I don't sweat the effort perception thing for one reason: My git commits are publicly visible for everyone to see and on a web site, no less.
xfitm3 8y ago
If you are feeling guilt you should talk to your manager. It’s part of their job to give you feedback.
- malvosenior 8y ago
  While this is a nice idea, I don't think you should tell your manager that you are feeling guilty for not working hard enough. A good manager might do something positive with that information but you're putting yourself in a good deal of risk saying something like this. If someone is having mental health, emotional or personal issues they should not look to solve those issues through their workplace and instead keep their personal life as partitioned as possible from their professional life.
  - tgroutars 8y ago
    If you don't feel like you could talk about it to your manager, I think you should find another manager.
    - ArrayList 8y ago
      Yeah because that's so easy to just grab another job. I totally agree with the parent poster - keep personal life personal. I never mention anything personal to anyone at work.
      - tgroutars 8y ago
        I've had 4 different jobs and never felt like I couldn't talk about personal issues to my managers. I'm not saying you should talk about it, it's still a personal preference. But a manager that would punish you for your honesty is not a good manager in my opinion. In this case, we're not even talking about personal issues, but guilt at work. If your manager can't help you with that, he shouldn't be a manager.
  - Heliosmaster 8y ago
    GP isn't saying that they are feeling guilty for not working hard enough. Is that they don't know how other people are perceiving their work. So in that case a "how do you think my work is going on?" doesn't hurt at all. If, like others said, you can't talk like this to your manager, there are other problems that need to be tackled.
jhall1468 8y ago
Working remotely does NOT mean working from home. I rent an office locally to resolve this issue (my company happens to pay for it), but the bottom line is, I don't like merging my personal life with my professional life so I avoid that. The second issue is a personal one, and not exclusive to those that work remotely.
- cmsj 8y ago
  The second issue is definitely a personal one, but it's also an important one. Not everyone is built to work remotely (just as not everyone is built to work in an office) and it's important to recognise that. I've worked remotely for about a decade now, and have been hiring other remote workers for about half of that time and in my interviews with people, I spend a solid chunk of the time pushing them hard on understanding what it actually means to work remotely - I want them to be damn sure that they are paying attention to their own need for things like contact with other humans, because I've seen enough people burn out on loneliness and quit because they're miserable.
  - buboard 8y ago
    > Not everyone is built to work remotely It's more like, cities are not built for everyone to work remotely. If remote was a lot more common, the support structures for it would be more common (some exist, like shared/coworking spaces etc). As remote work expands, cities will adapt to accomodate people working without commuting (which was the norm before industrial times anyway)
plodman 8y ago
I'm currently suffering a similar situation. My entire team are co-located and I work remotely. The timezone difference means there's no overlap unless I move my hours around. This leads to split shifts or longer working days. I also have to attend these meetings otherwise the lack of face-to-face means I lose out on a lot of updates. Due to other aspects of my personal life I feel like my mind is completely spiralling into a black hole. Lack of seeing my team/manager day to day means they won't see this happening, and I also find it difficult to bring up due to limited contact time between my manager and I. If anyone has any experience of suggestions, I couldn't be more open to them right now.
- Heliosmaster 8y ago
  I think the problem here is the difference in time zone. Unless you job is made in such a way to be completely asynchronous, that will lead to a very unhealthy life, as you are experiencing. My advice is to find something else within your timezone +- 2 hours (i.e. at least 5-6 hours overlap with other colleagues)
- wool_gather 8y ago
  Really basic suggestion is ask for (read: insist on) a weekly one-on-one with your direct manager. And when you have those meetings, be direct and honest about stuff like this.
- pdimitar 8y ago
  Sounds like a toxic workplace to me. You should change it. Very likely not what you wanted to hear but that's my immediate reaction.
chasd00 8y ago
I know what you mean, what works for me is going to a coworking location every so often. There i get some social contact with other professionals and it really helps. As for boredom, that's something i really have to stay on top of carefully. If I don't watch it, i'll end up creating work for myself and then when a bunch of regular work comes my way i'm overwhelmed.
pbhjpbhj 8y ago
Alphabetised by colour name, material, pattern, sock-type - sounds like quite the challenge? Sounds like you need some sort of 5D matrix do it properly.
- wool_gather 8y ago
  Knuth help you if you have enough socks to justify a 5-D matrix. YAGNI. ;)
arendtio 8y ago
> 1. I usually wind up alphabetizing my socks at some point. I don't get it :-/ Can someone please explain what that is supposed to mean?
- mkingston 8y ago
  GP gets distracted at home, to the extent of categorising their socks
- kbsletten 8y ago
  It's a joke about doing pointless things because he's at home. Nobody actually alphabetizes their socks, but he's saying he gets distracted and starts doing things around the house when he should be working.
  - ph0rque 8y ago
    To alphabetize your socks, you first have to name them.
    - breischl 8y ago
      Which is one of the hard problems. That's why it takes so long.
      - ben509 8y ago
        You always have a few pairs who disagree what their name should be.
        makapuf 8y ago
        You have pairs ! Consider yourself lucky.
dpkonofa 8y ago
>2. a lack of face to face contact and the setting of being in my own space keeps me in a semi-permanent doubt/guilt cycle about my work quality and how my effort and reponsiveness is being perceived. This seems like a personal issue rather than an issue with the concept of working from home. For me, personally, I don't care about when/how people work as long as they're delivering on what I'm asking from them. I may just be extremely fortunate that my team is very responsive but I never have issues with being available for my team or them being available for me and that kind of negates any kind of guilt cycle there could be.

ben_jones 8y ago

2 just identified a strong guiding emotion in my life I didn't know how to describe but that I've felt for awhile. I'd append to it and say it also affects me outside of work in that I feel guilty being at the gym at 1pm instead of being at work, or being underdressed in basketball shorts during the day because I'm entirely at home or doing errands. American Culture in particular pushes a lowest common denominator of what it thinks work should be: 7-6 while counting commute, sporadic overtime paid or otherwise, and various other things that are entirely not to the benefit of the individual worker. It's crazy.

giantsloth 8y ago

This seems like a case of capitalist imposed enculturated guilt for not having a butt in seat for 8 hours a day (regardless of actual productivity). Rather than alphabetizing your socks, go to the gym or improve some other skill set interspersed with your paid work. Embrace the fact that you can build a schedule around you and your wants and desires and not that of your companies.

giantsloth 8y ago
I'm really curious why people are down voting this comment.

ryanSrich 8y ago

I’ve been working remotely for just a few months shy of 5 years. I’ve moved from coast to coast in that time. I’ve held 4 different positions in the same company. The _only_ thing that has worked for #2 is relying less on Slack and email and more on phone calls. It completely eliminates the guilt factor. I encourage everyone on my team to be more open to phone calls during the day. No real work gets done on slack. Call each other.

stevoski 8y ago
1) I don't enjoy talking on the phone, and yet 2) I've also found that talking on the phone makes remote work much better for me.
- maxxxxx 8y ago
  Same here. When I was working remotely we talked over Skype all the time. I felt more connected to my coworkers than I feel now with everyone a few cubes away.
creeble 8y ago
I will second the slack factor. Semi-synchronous communications are a trap for distributed workers. It makes it feel you are more accessible (actually true of course), but it drives the discourse to the trivial and makes raises decision thresholds. I feel that if a decision needs consensus, either circulate an appropriate email, or do a skype/hangouts/whatever real-time conference. But this doesn't work well for junior team members who need more handholding. I'd say that's the one area where distributed teams don't work well.
MrTonyD 8y ago
I'm not somebody who likes or needs phone calls. They disrupt any flow I've got and require time coordination. So I definitely don't appreciate it when a manager forces me into them when that is something that suits his personality and management philosophy. Since I'm not forcing him to meet my emotional neediness, why should he force me?
- allannienhuis 8y ago
  I've worked remotely for a little over 10 years. The approach I like is: start with IM (or sometimes email) and then move to voice if your real-time chat takes longer than a few minutes or a handful of back-and-forth volleys. At some point someone just sends: voice? (which is usually video/screen call). Depending on the problem worked on it means the person in the office (cubicle farm) may need to get up and grab a meeting room to avoid bugging their coworkers with the call. They might respond with a link to the video conference line/room, or with a better time in the future: 2pm? That way you're not bugging people with a voice call for what turns out to be easily answered questions. But the culture allows for quick transition to voice and you don't get sucked into long IM conversations spinning your wheels due to miscommunication. Not responding to IM until later with a 'sorry, was heads-down/afk/whatever' needs to be acceptable too, otherwise you get the problems of people expecting everyone's instant response all the time. That said, I miss the old MSN messenger feature of 'buzzing' someone, which would animate/vibrate their IM window and play a soft buzz sound. I sometimes use the slack call feature for this (just ring and hang up), but that doesn't quite relay what I'm looking for - something less urgent than an immediate voice call, but lets the person know I'm likely blocked waiting for their answer. There's always that game that plays in your head - if I get an answer in < 1 minute, I'll stay on this task; if it takes longer, I'll spin up a different task I'm not blocked on...

cagenut 8y ago

not being snarky here, maybe consider a therapist? both of those are in-your-head type problems. in fact, in general, maybe a regular therapy session should be considered a standard part of remote work. in-office we all use our coworkers as a social support network whether we mean to or not, so it makes sense that many of us would need an alternative to help cover that gap. I'm not even saying that it'd be a good thing (replacing a dozen interpersonal relationships with one) but its a hedge.

JumpCrisscross 8y ago
> both of those are in-your-head type problems The latter is valid. Face-to-face communication carries a lot more information than messages on Slack. If a company hasn’t developed a remote-first culture, feedback can fester instead of being communicated. Regularly-scheduled phone calls, one on one with critical people and team-wide from time to time, in my experience, alleviate this greatly. (Paired with occasional flyings out.)
- cagenut 8y ago
  in-your-head type problems are perfectly valid! I never said or implied otherwise, I merely gave a possible solution.

malvosenior 8y ago

That's funny as it's the exact opposite of the problem I have. When I'm in an office I feel: 1. Totally unable to take care of home chores and errands. Often falling way behind on organizational or personal administrative tasks. 2. Fully exploited by my work place. I know I don't need 8 hours a day to be very productive. If I'm not working from home on my own schedule, I feel taken advantage of.

tejohnso 8y ago

It helps if everyone's work is public and planned ahead of time. That way everyone knows what you're supposed to be accomplishing and they also know whether it is being accomplished. There should be no room for doubt about quality if the work is peer reviewed. If having alphabetized socks keeps you happier in your space, then that's a good thing, right? :)

shortoncash 8y ago

I don't sweat the effort perception thing for one reason: My git commits are publicly visible for everyone to see and on a web site, no less.

xfitm3 8y ago

If you are feeling guilt you should talk to your manager. It’s part of their job to give you feedback.

malvosenior 8y ago
While this is a nice idea, I don't think you should tell your manager that you are feeling guilty for not working hard enough. A good manager might do something positive with that information but you're putting yourself in a good deal of risk saying something like this. If someone is having mental health, emotional or personal issues they should not look to solve those issues through their workplace and instead keep their personal life as partitioned as possible from their professional life.
- tgroutars 8y ago
  If you don't feel like you could talk about it to your manager, I think you should find another manager.
  - ArrayList 8y ago
    Yeah because that's so easy to just grab another job. I totally agree with the parent poster - keep personal life personal. I never mention anything personal to anyone at work.
    - tgroutars 8y ago
      I've had 4 different jobs and never felt like I couldn't talk about personal issues to my managers. I'm not saying you should talk about it, it's still a personal preference. But a manager that would punish you for your honesty is not a good manager in my opinion. In this case, we're not even talking about personal issues, but guilt at work. If your manager can't help you with that, he shouldn't be a manager.
- Heliosmaster 8y ago
  GP isn't saying that they are feeling guilty for not working hard enough. Is that they don't know how other people are perceiving their work. So in that case a "how do you think my work is going on?" doesn't hurt at all. If, like others said, you can't talk like this to your manager, there are other problems that need to be tackled.

jhall1468 8y ago

Working remotely does NOT mean working from home. I rent an office locally to resolve this issue (my company happens to pay for it), but the bottom line is, I don't like merging my personal life with my professional life so I avoid that. The second issue is a personal one, and not exclusive to those that work remotely.

cmsj 8y ago
The second issue is definitely a personal one, but it's also an important one. Not everyone is built to work remotely (just as not everyone is built to work in an office) and it's important to recognise that. I've worked remotely for about a decade now, and have been hiring other remote workers for about half of that time and in my interviews with people, I spend a solid chunk of the time pushing them hard on understanding what it actually means to work remotely - I want them to be damn sure that they are paying attention to their own need for things like contact with other humans, because I've seen enough people burn out on loneliness and quit because they're miserable.
- buboard 8y ago
  > Not everyone is built to work remotely It's more like, cities are not built for everyone to work remotely. If remote was a lot more common, the support structures for it would be more common (some exist, like shared/coworking spaces etc). As remote work expands, cities will adapt to accomodate people working without commuting (which was the norm before industrial times anyway)

plodman 8y ago

I'm currently suffering a similar situation. My entire team are co-located and I work remotely. The timezone difference means there's no overlap unless I move my hours around. This leads to split shifts or longer working days. I also have to attend these meetings otherwise the lack of face-to-face means I lose out on a lot of updates. Due to other aspects of my personal life I feel like my mind is completely spiralling into a black hole. Lack of seeing my team/manager day to day means they won't see this happening, and I also find it difficult to bring up due to limited contact time between my manager and I. If anyone has any experience of suggestions, I couldn't be more open to them right now.

Heliosmaster 8y ago
I think the problem here is the difference in time zone. Unless you job is made in such a way to be completely asynchronous, that will lead to a very unhealthy life, as you are experiencing. My advice is to find something else within your timezone +- 2 hours (i.e. at least 5-6 hours overlap with other colleagues)
wool_gather 8y ago
Really basic suggestion is ask for (read: insist on) a weekly one-on-one with your direct manager. And when you have those meetings, be direct and honest about stuff like this.
pdimitar 8y ago
Sounds like a toxic workplace to me. You should change it. Very likely not what you wanted to hear but that's my immediate reaction.

chasd00 8y ago

I know what you mean, what works for me is going to a coworking location every so often. There i get some social contact with other professionals and it really helps. As for boredom, that's something i really have to stay on top of carefully. If I don't watch it, i'll end up creating work for myself and then when a bunch of regular work comes my way i'm overwhelmed.

pbhjpbhj 8y ago

Alphabetised by colour name, material, pattern, sock-type - sounds like quite the challenge? Sounds like you need some sort of 5D matrix do it properly.

wool_gather 8y ago
Knuth help you if you have enough socks to justify a 5-D matrix. YAGNI. ;)

arendtio 8y ago

> 1. I usually wind up alphabetizing my socks at some point. I don't get it :-/ Can someone please explain what that is supposed to mean?

mkingston 8y ago
GP gets distracted at home, to the extent of categorising their socks
kbsletten 8y ago
It's a joke about doing pointless things because he's at home. Nobody actually alphabetizes their socks, but he's saying he gets distracted and starts doing things around the house when he should be working.
- ph0rque 8y ago
  To alphabetize your socks, you first have to name them.
  - breischl 8y ago
    Which is one of the hard problems. That's why it takes so long.
    - ben509 8y ago
      You always have a few pairs who disagree what their name should be.
      - makapuf 8y ago
        You have pairs ! Consider yourself lucky.

dpkonofa 8y ago

>2. a lack of face to face contact and the setting of being in my own space keeps me in a semi-permanent doubt/guilt cycle about my work quality and how my effort and reponsiveness is being perceived. This seems like a personal issue rather than an issue with the concept of working from home. For me, personally, I don't care about when/how people work as long as they're delivering on what I'm asking from them. I may just be extremely fortunate that my team is very responsive but I never have issues with being available for my team or them being available for me and that kind of negates any kind of guilt cycle there could be.