 Hello, I'm Rick Puffke, I'm with OmniTI, and this is my first time doing it at night. This is actually my first time talking at a conference period, so we'll see how it goes. Just a warning here, mine's nowhere near as funny as Ken's was, so deal with it. So today I'll be talking about tips to be an effective remote worker. This is something I've been doing for a relatively long time, and just recently I found out that remote workers don't last too long. Generally you'll find the longest remote worker succeeds for is about five years and then they burn out, so I'm apparently an oddity in this particular field. Part of this is our general misconceptions about what remote workers actually do when they're home working. Games, candy, ignoring your coworkers, things like that. Just standard run-of-the-mill stuff. It's not actually what remote working is all about. One of the ways that you can combat these perceptions is to actually start and segregate your day. So get up in the morning, take a shower, get dressed. Pajamas are not necessarily appropriate. Work gear, eat breakfast. After that, take a look at your upcoming schedule. Get an idea in your head about what's coming up during the day. Go over your task list, your to-do list that you left from the day before. So you have an idea of what you're going to be doing. And just kind of get in the mindset for what's going on. I know that the view on the left there, working from your bed, is a great place that you could consider working for, but to actually be productive, while you can move around from bed to couch and chair and all that, actually have a workspace set aside for working from home. The next thing is don't be Mr. Invisible Man Waldo there. Say hi when you get in in the morning. Give yourself a voice to your coworkers. It's especially important because they can't see when you get up and start partaking. Another part of this is textual communication. This is actually something Bridget talked on earlier. So I'll be touching some of the same points there. But texting or just general like IRC and Slack chat is a great way to miscommunicate. Very easily. The way around this is use the seven C's of communication. I can't actually go into all these here because that's a complete presentation on its own. But be clear, be concise, and be courteous. That's a very important one. This is another one of slides that could have just slipped right into Bridget's discussion earlier. But since a majority of our actual nonverbal cues are very important to our discussion, video conferencing is important in this regard as well. So be prepared to get on screen and use headset and microphone. Use mute. The other thing here is equipment breaks. It really breaks when the only headset you have available for video conferencing is busted and now you can no longer participate. During the day, take a break. Get up, get away from your desk. Walk your pets. They've invented Pokemon Go for a reason. So just get up, get away. It allows you to reset and recycle and then get back to it and be effective again. As an addendum to this while you're taking a walk, there's plenty of great sandwich shops, coffee shops, not going to name names, but they have a place that you can sit down, have a little bit of work space. They have Wi-Fi so you can connect when you need to from a different location. At the end of the day, stop working. Working from home is not a means to work 24 hours a day. That's actually a great way to burn out very quickly. So set end times, make notes when you're done and continue. For this to actually work though, you need both organizational and management buy-in. Organizational because things like the water coolers and hallway communications aren't visible to remote workers. So this is where things like a water cooler channel on your Slack chat become extremely handy. The next thing you need to do is report your progress. An extremely easy way to do this. For most of us in the room, we participate in daily stand-ups, or at least a good chunk of us do. So report your progress there. Email and chat updates are also acceptable. But take it easy. Don't go overboard because if you start sending 80 emails a day, people aren't going to read them. They're going to get filtered and then you're going to go back to being invisible. So don't overdo it. Another way to build up a rapport with your coworkers is to put your face on your communication. So in Slack, use a headshot for your little Slack icon. Use a headshot for your Gmail icon or whatever system you're using. Gives a way for them to see your face and associate a name with who you are. In addition to that, visit the home office every once in a while. Attend a company picnic or a holiday party, something like that, just so they can put a face to the name. And then just in general, this is kind of what I've already gone over, but set up a routine, communicate, let's see, a report, take a break, stop working at the end of the day, and make a face for yourself so that they can realize that you're a person as well as not Waldo.