 Cool well welcome. I hope you mean to be here. And if you don't you should stay. We're up and running so that's a good sign. Anyways okay. Hi everyone my name is Lauren. I'm actually gonna go through and introduce the team or I'm going to have the panel introduce themselves starting at the end with Luke. Hi my name is Luke works. I am a solution architect at Palantir.net. Steve Perche lead developer advocate at Pantheon. Hi my name is Alosia Wosu. I'm a Drupal developer with professional services at Acquia. I'm Sarah Thrasher. I'm also a Drupal developer at professional services at Acquia. I specialize in front-end. Hi I'm Jason Inner. I'm the front-end lead and professional services at Acquia. Oh and I'm Lauren Burroughs. I'm a senior project or I'm a senior engineer and project lead at Palantir.net. I guess that seems kind of important. And we're here to talk a little bit about work-life balance and what that looks like in our lives. Time management, taking care of yourself, engaging in culture, working in teams, managing teams. We're we're here to celebrate humans and being human but I'm a firm believer in trusting in our robot overlords because we're faulty and they're less so. So we're gonna time box each of these topics. We'll have we'll go through I'm gonna set a timer that will tell us when we need to stop. And we'll go through each one of these topics talking a little bit and then we'll open it up for Q&A. So think of some Qs and I'll hope that we have some A's. So there are a lot of advantages to working remotely. A lot of employees are more satisfied because they can control a lot of things. You can build a really great work working environment remotely if you kind of know what you're doing and think about it. It reduces a lot of unscheduled absences for various reasons that you might normally need to take off. Sometimes you can kind of balance that out a little bit when you're working remotely. Going back to like that employee satisfaction it empowers us as employees to take control of our schedule and how we integrate that with our life. We spend less time commuting so less traffic, less headaches, less jams, less accidents, less CO2 in the environment. All good things. And it gives you a lot of flexibility of where you work, when you work, how you work. You know, you can work remotely for many words as long as you have internet access. So that might mean that you get to explore outside of work passions and availability. Before we really dive right in, I pulled this quote offline, I think it's awesome. But I kind of wanted to give a little backstory about the session before we dive into the panel, which is I have this idea and I've really been marinating in my mind. Since about last summer and possibly even a year kind of thinking about this is a topic that really spoke to me. And as I originally thought about proposing this as a full session by myself at Bad Camp and as I was sort of throwing around that idea last summer, I was talking to my husband about it, who when I told him the idea just looked at me really quiet and said, you can't talk about that, which I agree. He said, you have no right to get up in front of a room of people and tell them about work-life balanced. And I said, yeah, you're probably right. And I think some of my my panelists would agree that maybe they don't either. So I don't have all the answers and I'm not very good at this all the time. But I do know the things that we tell ourselves when we say it's okay to not take care of myself. It's okay to skip doing the things that I love because it's just this once or I just have this one deadline. And so I say that to give you an idea of where I'm coming from and to say that I'm not perfect and I'm definitely human. And I'm just trying to figure out the best way to do myself. And I hope that some of our experiences can guide you guys. I will start the timer at five minutes. And I will let Luke take over talking a little bit about some time management. Well, thank you. Yeah, I definitely resonate with what Lauren said, learn from my failures. And I'm happy to talk about them and some of the successes that I've found for myself and how they've worked for me. For me, I can't really think about time management without also thinking about space. Like space time is a whole thing if you're casual astrophysics fan like I am. But understanding like the context of of what it means to be employed for for me, I'm a full time employee at Palantir. That means I'm selling eight hours of my day to my employer and understanding that that's a time constraint. And with that context, not only is it important to know what are you doing with that time, but why are you doing it? And so for me, the answer to that question of why has changed over time. When when I first started working remotely before I worked at Palantir, I really saw a high degree of connection with my co workers. And what I wanted was a high degree of work life integration. So my office space, the space that I had to work in, it was right off of our living room. It was this lovely room that had French doors into into our living room. And at night, when I was done with work, I would move over and sit on the couch and spend time with my wife and work was still right there. And that was okay. My notifications were still on on my phone. And occasionally, I'd get a ping or an email from a co worker after our normal working hours. And that was okay for me. That's what I wanted at that time. And as as time progressed and our lives changed, we were expecting our first child. I realized that what I what I wanted wasn't necessarily a high degree of work life integration, but work life balance. And so I started renovating our basement so I could move my office space and have separate space where I could like, close the door and not see it and not think about it. Also knowing that there was going to be a tiny human being running around and I spent a lot of time on calls and imagining being on client calls and having having a small person tugging at my at my shirt or popping their head into into the frame of the video conference. It happens anyway. But apparently, I think anybody who's worked from home has had that BBC dad moment. It's a routine thing at my house. I'm just used to saying, excuse the Jedi who's walking behind me. He's only five. Don't worry. He's still in training. But yeah, so understanding as time as time progressed, like, what is it that I'm trying to get out of work? And what is it that I'm trying to offer? And how does that impact my relationships and my family and my physical space? And being okay to, to change that over time, but to really have that grounding in that context so that you can critically evaluate, is this working? Is am I succeeding? Am I failing? What do I need to change in order to feel so Luke, is it working? I think so. We're getting ready for a massive change in my family. We're giving up our almost 4,000 square foot house to live in a travel trailer full time and travel. So for people like, you know, 130 square feet, I described as a tin can going down the highway. But yeah, my, my relationship to the space that I work in is, is changing and it's constant conversation with us because I used to be a developer. I used to write code and work on tickets. I don't do that anymore. Now I write a lot of contracts and proposals. And when I'm not writing those, I'm talking on the phone, like five or six or seven hours a day sometimes. So I'm curious, when you're talking on the phone for five or six or seven hours a day, and assuming that you still have other work to be doing outside of that, how do you manage that without working 12 hour days? Hopefully. Yeah, so setting, setting reasonable expectations for yourself and being able to communicate those to the people with whom you're working is key, I think, like being transparent about your time and your availability that you have to work on things and being able to estimate, yeah, that proposal is going to take me half a day. That means I'm not going to be able to make this meeting. I'm sorry. And being able to communicate that and being okay, saying no and disappointing people sometimes. Speaking of time, you're at it. It goes by fast. See how I got you there. Interesting. Okay. Sarah, do you want to talk to us a little bit about taking care of yourself? That travel trailer anecdote, that's just like the awesome side of the remote. I've been fully remote for about three years now. And before that, most of the jobs that I had were like, I'm sure you can have like a day or two, you know, remote and like, that's always great. My first job, I spent about two years being fully remote because it was like a small startup and I had just started doing like design and development type stuff. And I was so anxious to like prove myself and like, you know, like, I don't know what I'm doing really like, I've got to work really hard. And like, you know, people say like, oh, you're working remote, like what are you gonna like sit there and play Nintendo? I did not sit there and play Nintendo all day. I sat at my desk. I would not necessarily have like the lights on because you know, I got in the morning, I would like look up and it's dark. You know, I'm sitting here still, you know, my boyfriend would come back and they're still doing it. Like I was doing a lot of things right. I was like, I have my own desk. I have my own office. But you know, in some respects, like that was catastrophically wrong. And I did actually get seriously burnt out. Well, so how did you know it was catastrophically wrong? I quit without another job. That's it. That's a sure sign. And this is this is like a pit early on in my career that I spent another several years digging myself out of basically like, we did a lot of things that were pretty cool in that company. But it wasn't like everyone else was remote, you know, but I guess maybe this was before like everybody had Slack, you know, there wasn't Hangouts, we didn't do a lot of like on site stuff. And I just got really isolated. I wasn't like communicating to people that like I didn't have you know, as much like actual interesting work to do as I could. And like I would just sit there and you know, try to do what I could do. But it was like sort of disconnected from what everyone else was doing. I was like, the designer and everybody else was sitting there doing Java. So this was like, one of the like driving things time that imposter syndrome talk that I gave last year. But like, you know, you can really do damage to yourself if you're in an environment that doesn't support doing this properly, which I do have now, you know, like we're most of my team is remote. Everybody's in different time zones and stuff. We have like Slack, Hangouts, Zoom calls, you know, people like checking on each other. A lot of our clients are also remote, you know, that doesn't hurt. So do you feel like do you feel like the constant like the Slack technology and a lot of the collaboration that exists now help like helps you? Yes. Yeah. And the robots, the robots are definitely like a thing like our robot overlords, you know, when you actually like make an effort to not do the thing I was doing to like get out, walk, talk to people, make meals for yourself, you know, I'm in like a totally different place in my career. I like literally everything now. Like even, you know, I have a three year old. So like all the stuff about being remote, being so much better, like, you know, like enabling you to like stay in your job or anything that that's all true. And then also when I'm on like, I have Slack on my phone still. But when my three year olds at home and like, I'm like checking up on somebody's messages, he's like, mommy, put the phone in your pocket. Okay, I'm gonna put the phone in my pocket. So it's really, I mean, it's not even your robot overlord at that point. It's your tiny human overlord. But like, it's just really important to have some kind of mechanisms to like make sure that you don't like get into this point where you're just basically like, you know, devouring yourself. So what does that look like for you? Like, what are your mechanisms to to keep yourself honest? I actually do, I think we were talking about this, but like, um, I have like an app that somebody on the Drupal Slack recommended Fatima, where like you actually do tracking, like, you know, you assign yourself like a number for your day. And like, it also like ties into like, you know, like, walking and things like that. And then it does little reports. That was like a pretty cool thing. But you can also like, write about it. Actually just giving yourself permission to like, you know, get up and do things, helps. And also like, I think this is kind of important for like that imposter syndrome or that whole mindset. When you're like, trying to look back at what you were doing and putting like your time sheet, if you're available or however else you like account for what you've been doing. Don't under report, you know, don't be like, well, you know, somebody else wouldn't have had to look that up. So I'll just get to put 15 minutes because that's like really what I would, you know, well, I'm curious. So I'm curious, as a, as a remote employee, do you ever, do you ever like, get up in the middle of a task and go answer it theoretically a line or, or switch over laundry or something else? Like, how do you accommodate for that when you're tracking time? Well, I mean, if you know, you can start and stop it and everything like that. But like, you should never like purposely try to trim it is what I'm saying. Like, make this your real time because like, your co workers and your boss cannot see you. You know, they don't know you're still sitting there. They don't know that you're like tearing your hair out. The only way that like your co workers or your boss will know that like you're getting overloaded is if you talk to them or if they like, see, you know, all right, you're putting in 10 hour days regularly, whatever. You got to have some sort of method for yourself and like other people to like dive in and go like, whoa, what are you doing yourself? And also like just maybe we need another person on this project. Like, we've got enough work for three people. We have two. So it's both like something you can like, attempt to regulate yourself and that that gives you like, you know, an opportunity to talk to your boss about like, maybe you're taking on 10 hours. Maybe I'd like to do some more like investment in my skills instead of like, you know, whatever I've been putting too much time into. That type of thing. Cool. That's where I'm going to cut you off. Okay. Alozi, will you tell us a little bit about engaging in culture while you're remote? Sure. So I think, well first like, I think defining culture, I'm thinking about the several definitions of it and like one of them being, you know, community, you know, whether it's the Drupal community itself, your work community, or your home base community, where you are. And then in addition to that, then I mean, culture as, you know, engaging with your hobbies, engaging with your interests and so forth. I think to step back to the community aspect of it and to lay the groundwork, like for me, it's kind of a contradiction for me to be sitting in front of a room because I'm a very shy and introverted kind of person generally. So I do have to make an effort to make sure that I step out and see other human beings and speak in front of other human beings from, you know, on regular intervals. So what does that effort look like to you? Like how do you keep yourself in check? I'll say that I've started watching my own internal barometer. And I know that if it's been a couple days since I've actually had like a full real conversation with someone face to face or someone like that, something like that, that okay, I need to step back and make sure that I'm having a bit more engagement at a person to person level. Or just kind of making sure that when I'm, I basically do try to check in with myself weekly. And I have, I essentially have like a little note pad, you know, with, you know, I use a Mac, so with the note pad app, I basically gave myself a little template for the week. And at the end of the week, there's a check in with myself little reminder. Now, so what happens, what does it look like? What does your life look like when you, when you don't do that, like when you don't check in with yourself? Right. Yeah, there are definitely, you know, there, there are the things that you wish, or you set for yourself to do that you aspire to do. And there's what you actually do. And what I notice is that, you know, sometimes it ebbs and flows, it can be in cycle, like, you know, I can really, you know, be on top of an intent, attentive to the self care aspects of my life. And then, you know, it might go a week or two weeks where I realize I've kind of been pushing that aside. So, you know, trying to, and even that is data in a sense, because I can, I could look back and see that, oh, yeah, I was really on top of checking in with myself there in the past, you know, and that last week, yeah, I didn't check in and, oh, because I was feeling stressed about, you know, XYZ or, or, you know, I had, I had this thing that I really had to finish or whatever. And I put that off and, you know. So, do you get concerned about how, how that comes off to other people when, or does it come off to other people when, when you're sort of pushing things back in the backlog of life? Certainly. I think, well, again, as an introvert, I think it's very easy to try to crawl back into your hovel and think, oh, you know, if I sit still long enough, no one will see, you know. So, yeah, that's, you know, and maybe that's true to an extent. However, you know, you kind of remind yourself, especially working in the Drupal community, working in Drupal, you know, it is unlike, again, unlike other software products, you're, you know, you work to be a part of a community. You, you start in it to be a part of a community. That's one of the benefits of it. And so I realized, you know, having that motivation to get into this work to begin with, I remind myself, okay, well, or I'm reminded that if I haven't been engaging, then that, you know, part of me that, you know, wanted that to be part of my life is not being satisfied. So, and I noted, and basically those things will come up when you find yourself at ends with yourself. And, you know, I think with those check-ins, you realize, okay, I'm kind of at ends with myself here. I don't know from what exactly. And then you kind of start going through the inventory. And maybe part of it is that you have an engaged with the community. You have an engaged with, you know, culture and sort of, you know, and those things that sort of, you know, feed the soul. And so I think in doing those checks, the self-care checks, one of those things that you do have to look at in addition to, am I, you know, drinking and drinking, you know, drinking water? And am I, you know, taking a shower every day and so forth is, you know, am I actually engaging with other people? Am I engaging with those things that are really of interest to me, you know, either culturally or community-wise? So. So we are out of time, but I have a question that's just been itching in the back of my mind. Sure. Which is, as an introvert and as somebody who works from home, what does engagement look like when you're not at DrupalCon? Like, how do you keep that engagement and culture fresh in your life? So when you can't be there? Yeah, when you can't be there directly, I know one of the things that, again, I live in Providence, I'm based in Providence, Rhode Island, and we have a local meetup, Drupal PVD, that then we meet once per month. So I, you know, look at my calendar and realize, yeah, I've missed a few times, so let me go in and see some familiar faces and you know, and some new faces and make sure that I'm talking to people about that. There are also local community organizations that either, you know, work in, you know, art related space which I'm interested in, or as well as the technology spaces or their intersections there. So, you know, making sure that I'm adding that to my time to engage with them as well. And, you know, sort of, and in general, just trying to find those kinds of things that are either available locally or trying to find them. Awesome. I have an accountability trick. Go to your local meetup and volunteer to speak once and I'll keep pestering you to see if you want to come back. Yeah, that's a great one. I'm going to pass it over to Steve to have him talk a little bit about what it's like to work with teams that are not fully remote. Sure. So, again, I work at Pantheon and Pantheon is based in San Francisco. That's where the majority of the company is. But for the team that I'm on, developer relations, it's a seven person team, most of whom are not in San Francisco. At this point we have like one and a half people in San Francisco, one person splitting his time. So, as a team need to operate remotely, but of course we visit the San Francisco office somewhat regularly. And what we do, our goal is not so much to have a balanced day. If I'm only in the San Francisco office for three days out of three months, or really in the last year, I think maybe four days out of a whole year, I need to make that time as valuable as possible. Our developer relations team can be somewhat set apart from other parts of the company and I wonder like, do those other parts of the company remember that I exist? So those days in the San Francisco office might be nine solid hours of meetings with a bunch of different departments and I would not want all of my work days to be like that. That would be terrible to have nothing but, you know, morning to night meetings. But I find it acceptable for a couple days out of the year to go to the San Francisco office, meet with as many people as possible, remind them that I exist, make sure that I'm bringing the appropriate energy, make sure that I'm bringing a positive attitude so that for those few days a year that those people see me at that may not be traveling to conferences as well and see me there, that I make a good impression for myself. And then for our developer relations team, we occasionally have our own retreats and lately I think we've realized that we need to rethink what is the purpose of that time together, if we're going to the San Francisco office and trying to meet with as many departments as possible, sure then it's okay to have a jam-packed schedule with a bunch of different topics. But if we're coming together as a team, the best usage of our time might not be to try and get through our whole backlog of topics that we think we need to talk about. We have an internal backlog of like, no, we should really talk about the way we're doing these kinds of trainings. But we don't necessarily need to get through a giant backlog of an internal topics for those two or three days that we're on a team retreat. I find it more helpful to think of those team retreats as an opportunity to practice the way we want to work as a team when we are remote. Like often being in an office gives you nonverbal cues. You can do all sorts of things to work more efficiently as a team if you're in the same physical space. When we're working as a remote team, that's often working on a bunch of different things at once. Sometimes it can just be hard for us to function as a team. So I now think of those a couple days a quarter that we're in the same place maybe doing a retreat as an opportunity for us to practice how we work together with all the benefits of being in the same room. Rather than we only have two days together, we need to get through all these topics. We only have 15 minutes on this one topic, get through the whole agenda. I don't think that's all that beneficial for us as a team. So how does that in-person FaceTime translate? Like how do you keep, how do you take that practice that you have in-person and bring it back to being offline and in-person? Yeah, so one thing we started doing recently is just scheduling long video calls for co-working on a specific topic. So it used to be that the only times we would see each other would be on very specific meetings that were time boxed and felt like we had to get through an agenda. Now we're more likely to do meetings where, well, yes, we still have those agenda-driven meetings, but we'll have some a two-hour block to co-work on Pantheon for Trainers or to co-work on our DrupalCon presentations. And they feel more like a casual working relationship you might have with a person in the cubicle next to you. But the time boxing is nice. It's not all day of drive by cubicle interruptions. It's two hours for you and your co-worker to work on either the same thing or work on related topics and maybe have 15 minutes of silence where you're just on the video call, both typing in different sections to Google Doc and then ask questions as needed. That's been a really nice thing for us in the past couple of months. Do you guys ever have any problems as a team where you have some people in office and some people not? Do you guys ever have any problems like managing that communication and making sure that everybody is sort of kept in the loop? Oh, absolutely. Yeah. There's stuff that gets passed around by word of mouth in the San Francisco office that we just don't hear about until later. And I don't have a great solution for that. Other than I would point people towards the four kitchens blog, four kitchens, a Drupal agency. They've been very public about the way they're switching from an in-office culture to a remote first mentality. One of their specific tips is if you're doing video calls and some people are remote and in video call isolation then everybody should be. There are two people in an office. They shouldn't be in a big echo-y conference room on a video call with four other people in isolation. Everyone should have their own video streaming networks much better that way. Thanks. I thought I'm going to cut you off. All right. But I appreciate the tip. Jason, do you want to talk to us a little bit about managing teams and being managed? Sure. Absolutely. Hey, everyone. I've actually been working remotely for 11 years straight. And I've made a lot of mistakes, especially at the early beginning. And what I try to do is now that I'm managing, six different people remotely is try to use the mistakes that I use to help other people and try to identify warning signs. Kind of like Sarah said, I think a lot of times where it's hard to be transparent, especially if you're working from home remotely at the beginning, as far as communicating your struggles and things like that. So initially working from home, my one goal is to keep working from home. So a lot of it was just, no matter what it took, just keep working. So I ended up in the emergency room a couple of times and was like, I need to change what I'm doing. And like we all discussed earlier, not to deflate what we all do, because it's all impressive, but we don't work in an emergency room. No one's going to die if the dev floats the wrong way. Intinities aren't merging. I don't know if you talk to my clients. Yeah, well, maybe express. So a lot of it is just about not only that, but just communicating expectations, right? And also being a good person to manage, like communicating to your manager, if you're struggling, suffering in silence is just, it's rough, right? So we only have our body and mind for the long call and it's not a sprint. So we need to preserve our mental stability and things we go through. And just communicating, just being super transparent, beginning I was like so worried about, like not being transparent and just, like there'd be weekends I would just work because I was stuck, because I was too embarrassed to ask for help. It's just, it's stupid, right? So like just clearly communicating, I'm struggling. You know, I need help. Can I just show you this? I think that's key. That way you don't feel is disconnected and siloed, like you're just suffering by yourself. As a, you know, as a person leading teams, do you, are there ever any signs that you see on your team where you're like, I have a bad feeling about so-and-so and I need to make a point to reach out to them? Absolutely, yeah. And I think that comes with, you know, meeting regularly, video chat and just catching cues, right? Because, you know, we're all humans. We're all scared. You know, it's just, we all go through like different levels and pitfalls. So like without me implying, you know, it's okay to like ask, how are you doing? Are you running into things or are you frustrated? Like, you know, our job is very frustrating, right? And if you have someone to help just, you know, review code with you or talk through things, it helps honestly a ton. So just having that cadence with people and understanding what it means to like communicate for their style, not for your style, because we're all so different and we all have like really different backgrounds. So just communicating for that person's style, because your ultimate goal is for them to be successful, right? Like I care more about being a teammate than whatever job we're at now, right? So I think that's important to kind of keep in perspective as well. So how do you send that message to the team that you're like, you know, I'm here to lead you, but like I don't want you to feel like you can't come talk to me. How do you, how do you send them that message that you're there to really empower them and help them at their job? Yeah, just, I mean, essentially communicating that I want you to do well. And if you're stuck or frustrated, just come talk to me, right? Or we can get other people to help. But like, you know, we're a team, especially like a front end team, we're all gonna be confused, frustrated, get stuck, like just have a bad day. Like we have bad days. So like having other people to help like jump in, you know, and it doesn't have to be a lot of time. It's 15 minutes here, 15 minutes there. It goes a long way, you know, especially for people that, you know, have more trouble speaking up and saying, you know, like I'm running into this or I'm having this issue. Is that my time? Yeah. Sorry. Sorry. Yeah. Teamwork. Yeah. Teamwork makes the dream work. Do I have something on here? Yeah. I was gonna say, so would you do have somebody who is less vocal and less likely, you know, to come to you or maybe this is their first time working remotely? Like how do you encourage that conversation or do you ever find that maybe somebody's not likely to talk to you because you're leading them? Yeah, but also I think people can tell if you're a transparent person, right? Like they can tell if you're like, listen, you're gonna have different jobs in your life. You're gonna have different projects. Like I don't even remember the projects where the code I wrote 11 years ago, but, you know, so like it's okay to say I'm frustrated, I'm running into this. And even if they're like, yeah, that's fine, but they're like a little bit hesitant, just keep, just keep open the door. And eventually, you know, like when they're comfortable, they'll talk to you about stuff. Metaphorical door. Yeah. Emporical door. Yes. Awesome. That actually is that time. So I wanted to leave most of this open for Q and A, and I would invite anybody up to the mic if they do have questions for anybody on the panel or just all of us in general. And if people don't start talking, I will. What are your thoughts on co-working spaces? So I've worked at a co-working space before, and I currently am in a situation right now where I work for Palantir.net and we're a fully distributed firm, but for the sake of the client that I work with, I'm in our client's office two days a week. And so in comparison to co-working spaces are great, but they're great if you go consistently. And I find the same thing, you know, one of the things I struggle with right now is, I have everything set up at home the way I like it, but when I have to go into the client office, like I get thrown off my groove, and it takes a little bit to adapt to a new environment and a new working situation and a new laptop setup. And so my answer on co-working spaces is always, you know, whatever you're gonna do, do consistently, because it's easier to keep yourself going on that momentum. I don't know if any. I was just gonna say that about a decade ago, I worked at what you'd call a startup incubator. I don't know if it was called that at the time, but as a more introverted person, I find that it didn't really benefit me because it didn't have a mechanism for encouraging interaction. So it felt like I'm surrounded by these people, but I don't know if I should be chatting them up. And it felt more alienating. It was kind of like the worst of both worlds, like the distraction, but not the social benefits. Yeah. We have access to one in my area. And like I find that usually when I'm going there, it's actually to meet up with coworkers. Like we'll go, we actually have like a space in there for, it's kind of like the office, but not really, but it's mostly our sales team. So we do occasionally make arrangements to go there. And I think that's great, you know, because sometimes you do want to like break out and actually talk to people and get out of your house and put on pants and like all that stuff. Can't serve overrated. Definitely do that every day, you know. But like it's just good to be able to see people. Yeah. Oh, see the line. Just to say, when I started working remotely, a few friends of mine, you know, peers, but not at who didn't work at the same company, said, hey, I have office space, come on down and join me there. And I, you know, didn't take them up on their invitation for a while. And then finally, you know, caught one of them, you know, you know, on the, you know, just going out that day. And he said, hey, you know, if really, if you want to come through, you know, it could be nice to just have another body in the office just to hang out with because he had an office space that was just him. So I started doing that. And I really, you know, from time to time, that was actually really nice to just, even though we weren't working on the same stuff and just to be in that space together to, you know, talk about, you know, Drupal in general, because he's also a Drupaler and just to, and to just talk about, you know, whatever, you know, that was part of the having face time, having, you know, getting out in the community and getting some culture too. Kind of like we're doing here. Kind of like we're doing here. So yeah. Cool, yeah. I was wondering if you guys have any experience or advice for workers who are trying to get their organizations or companies to either include some remote options or transition to have a full remote option for their workers. Yeah, I mean, I would say, I ran into this early on in my career as far as like how it was being perceived as remote worker, like thinking, okay, I know you wanna work remote, wink, wink, you know, but you're like chilling out, playing Diablo and then we'll catch you eventually. So I think a lot of it is just, you know, to showing that there is a shift to people that can manage their own time remotely. And for me, I get way more done working remotely than I ever did in an office, right? The distractions, being able to manage your time, communicating clearly, I get distracted super easy. So for me, it worked really well for me, but it's not for everyone. I worked with a lot of people in an office that they worked remote and it did not work out well. It wasn't a good fit maybe for their personality or where they are in their life. So I think just communicating that remote work isn't for everyone, but a lot of people find it more effective as an employee to work that way. And in addition to saying remote work isn't for everyone, it might not be for you right now. Like I was telling all of them earlier, my first job out of college was fully remote and I hated it and I thought, I can never work remote. I can never work for a remote team. I can't, I don't have the self-discipline. I don't have the dedication. I don't have any, I can't work in that environment. I can't feel siloed and left alone and still be responsible. And you know, what I learned was it wasn't right for me then. And that doesn't mean it's not right for me ever. It just means things change and your life is gonna change and you're gonna have different peaks and valleys and you're more human and where you're more career-oriented and where your focus is different and that'll play a role as well. Yeah. I think if it's something that you're trying to introduce into an organization that may be predisposed not to support remote employees, I had an experience in my first job out of college. I worked at the University of Cincinnati. I didn't, at the time, offer any kind of remote options. And I knew that remote work would be a really good fit for me. I actually did remote schooling as a kid from second grade all the way through 12th. I used VHS tapes and watched school on TV. So I felt like I was preparing to be a remote employee my entire life and then boom, my first job out of college. It's like, show up in the office and wear a tie. So I actually used a series of terrible snowstorms to my advantage and I lived at the bottom of a very, very steep hill and we had campus closures one year which is very rare in Cincinnati. We don't get all that much snow honestly but it was a particularly bad year and so I would email my boss and say, I don't think I can make it up the hill. Rather than take a PTO day, you want me to keep working from home and try to hit these deadlines that we have and that sounded okay to him and from there, the proof of the pudding is in the pie. Like show, demonstrate effectiveness and it certainly didn't introduce monumental change across the 18th largest public university in the country, nothing like that but it did within our team demonstrate like, hey, this could work for some people. Maybe we should be more open to it. Yeah. Hi, I work for a fairly small agency. We're about 10 people in the Boston area and we are in the office around three days a week and then remote two days a week. Standard days are Wednesday and Friday and my previous job wasn't like that. It was in an office and working remote was kind of just whenever you have to take your car into the shop at 11 in the morning, you could work from home that day, that was fine. I'm adjusting to it fairly well but I'm wondering if you have any advice or if you could speak to trying to balance both working in an office and working remote, the context switching that's involved in that. I would ask, do you change what happens on those days? Like, do you use the time in the office to have more meetings or do you the kind of work that functions better together in the office and do the work that's better done alone when you're at home? Even the days that we are remote, we still do have meetings. We just do them on go to meeting or Zoom. We have one employees basically remote every day except one day a week. So it's a balance. We don't really change things too much if we have client meetings and that will be a day where people are in person. If we need to change the day, that's fine. We have a weekly company meeting on Monday when we're all in the office. But generally, it seems like the work remote days are more or less the same. Okay. Yeah, I think my main recommendation would be to figure out are there types of work that are better for one environment to the other and then alter the schedule accordingly? Yeah, I would agree with that wholeheartedly. As I said, I'm in with our client two days a week at their office and we have dedicated Tuesday as one of the days that everybody comes in regardless and that is our dedicated meeting day and it's a lot. It's a long day, but it's really effective for us to just have committed that every Tuesday is like we're, not that we don't have meetings outside of that, but every Tuesday our focus is gonna be getting people in a room and collaborating. And then we're flexible outside of that. I will say just as a general pro tip, one of the things that I've learned sort of having to go back and forth between is duplicate everything. I have an extra copy of all of the things that I need except for my laptop and that all of the extras stay in my backpack and my backpack is always ready to go. I've done the same thing. I have the same keyboard, the same mouse and a monitor, but even a little thing like that can really mess me up. Definitely. It's having a different work environment, so. 100%. Yeah. All right, thank you. Thank you. So I have two semi-related questions. The first is how do you fight the urge when you're, say, trying to take some time of yourself watching TV or whatever and then all of a sudden you get that spark? Like, I know how to fix that problem now. My laptop's in the other room. I could do this and binge watch the latest Marvel show for three hours instead of taking care of myself. How do you fight the urge to do that? And my second question is if you wake up in the morning, you're not feeling well, if you worked in an office, you might take the day off, but I can just sit on my couch and work for eight hours. So how do you fight the urge to work when you really should be taking care of yourself in those situations? Yeah, I would say, yeah, it's hard because so much of it is problem-solving, right? And we have these moments in the shower, walk of the dog, you're like, oh, shit, I'll remember now, right? So a lot of it is just, okay, that can still wait till tomorrow, right? And the day will start off easier than it normally is because I already have things kind of progress. A lot of it's just having that routine of saying, okay, I'm not working right now, I can handle it tomorrow because what I've found for myself is, yes, you may have gotten farther, but sometimes you go down a rabbit hole, right? So you're like, I'm gonna jump back on at six o'clock and suddenly it's nine o'clock and you're like, what happened? I'm basically spending my wills and then you're burnout for the next day. So I think that's a lot of it too, is just having those general rules and just kind of following those guidelines too. I think you should still take that sick day. It's not equivalent to the snow day thing. Like, you really need to like sleep and recuperate and like actually get better and like, I also know that I'm like a little bit ill or whatever, you know, just like, all right, I can't get on Zoom right now, I can type to you, but like my sinuses are clogged or whatever, but like you should definitely like actually still take sick days and things and recuperate, have soup, sleep, you know, don't push through that stuff just because you can get to your laptop. Like, just make it worse. Yeah. And just talk directly to, you know, your project manager or manager and say, hey, I'm not feeling well, I'm gonna do some easy stuff for like two hours and I'm taking a nap, bye. You know, like just communicating on that level, saying I'm not feeling well enough to do the hard parts of my job, but I'm gonna do the easy parts until in the suit of fat or whatever kicks in and you know, and then just give yourself that time to pace because I mean, once again, for longevity, you want to pace yourself, right? And if you're just hitting it hard all the time, you're sick, you're like, I'm still gonna grind through it, it wears you down like it really does. Go ahead, Steve. Also, I don't think it's too bad to follow that spark of inspiration even if it comes outside of your normal working hours. If it doesn't become a habit, I think it's okay. I'm still thankful that about a year ago I had a similar spark at, I think it was like eight PM, well past when I normally wanted to work and I followed that spark until four in the morning and I completed a coding task that I'd been thinking about kind of how to do for a while and like the spark of inspiration hit, I just followed it, I got into like that fun flow feeling of productive coding. I don't, I very rarely stay up until four in the morning coding, but if you're doing it every once in a while, I don't think that's too bad. I did not then attempt to work like my normal hours the next day, I don't know. Yeah, and that's what I would say. You know, like time box it. Whatever you're comfortable with, whether that is like I'm willing, like this is important to me and I'm willing to commit the next 10 hours to it or this is not important to me and I'm willing to commit the next 30 minutes to it. Pick what time box fits for you when that spark hits and then accommodate for it. Like you just worked a 12 hour day, guess what? Like that means that tomorrow is gonna be a half day and you're gonna sleep until noon to accommodate for that. Like communicate that to your team and make sure that, you know, A, you're sending them the message that, yeah, every once in a while I'm gonna work till four in the morning but when I do, I'm gonna be transparent about that and I'm gonna expect my team to hold me accountable and if they see me in the office at nine a.m. the next morning they should send me a snarky message and tell me to go home. So. I'm just gonna jump in. One of the things you also wanna watch for, like if you make sure to schedule things, you know, that are sort of your self care things, routines, whether it's making sure you get to the gym a few times a week or making sure that you're having dinner with the family or at least, or dinner with friends. If you can schedule those kinds of things and make sure that even if you get that spark of inspiration, it doesn't necessarily impinge at least you're not sacrificing those things then. And then, yeah, jumping, if you wanna jump on it because you know it's gonna really make you excited and make you really feeling good about it, great. But if it's more that, but I guess the other thing I was gonna say is that sometimes if you, one thing I've learned with writing is that if I set aside an hour for myself to do some writing and then I realize I still have some ideas that I wanna write them down before I lose them, even sleeping on them, they sort of percolate and they're still there in the morning when I get to it and you almost get to the page or get to that activity, that project with a little more vigor knowing that you have a solution that you really wanna work on and that's gonna make you jump out of bed and really get to it. So I just wanna touch back on the sick day thing, which is listen to your body. Like listen to yourself the way that you would listen to a friend. Treat yourself the way that you would treat somebody who reports to you or to your best friend. Like if your body's saying I'm sick and I need a day off, take a day off. You're not doing your team any favors by wearing your self-tooth in and you're not doing yourself any favors. Like you're not gonna get better that way. And so one of the things that makes me really happy right now is you can see all of these people have water in front of them. And listen to yourself, drink water, take breaks, go out for a walk, get outside. If your body's saying I need to stretch, go stretch. If your body's saying I need to take a nap, go take a nap. If you wanna watch that Marvel show. As long as you're getting your eight hours in that's kind of the benefit to your employer too. From like, it's like, all right, you know, whatever, I don't have a commute. I can fill that with something else. And as long as you're getting your work done you can be doing it in a trailer for more ever. Or like, you know, you can go to France like just as long as you're keeping your hours in, like you're communicating with people. I actually had a personal one with the gym thing. Like for a while I was doing like couch to 5K and I was keeping up with it really well and I've lapsed again. What happened was like I would be going out in the morning make sure I get it in first thing in the morning and then like my scrum changed because I got on a new project. And you know, you suddenly it's like, you know, three months later when really like there's no reason I can't go do scrum, you know, and then go out like 10 or 11. But you know, if you let yourself feel guilty like I should be on my desk, you know. You can really just tell your team I'm gonna go run and then come back. And as long as you're getting your time and your responsibilities and why the hell not? That's like the benefit. Yeah, definitely, definitely. I think one of the huge advantages of being able to work remotely is having the opportunity to ask yourself the critical question, am I able to do my best work? And being honest with yourself and asking yourself that question like, I'm feeling a little under the weather. Am I going to do my best work today? And if the answer to that question is no, do what you need to do in order to be able to do your best work because that's what probably your employer wants, right? That's what your team wants, that's what your client wants, right? To whomever you're accountable. And just being really honest about asking yourself that question and responding appropriately goes a long way towards solving those like self-care dilemmas, I think that for me it externalizes it from like, am I being selfish to, am I doing the best thing I can? Thank you. Thank you. Hi. It's easy I think for us to say relevant in our projects, but like how do you stay relevant either outside of your department or in the company as a whole? As a remote worker you're not always seen by everybody. So how have you guys had some success in either communicating with other teams, other departments in what you're contributing? I think as a manager, speaking as a manager, it's up to the manager to help promote or raise visibility as to other efforts, right? Sorry, as far as to your reports efforts. So I think that's key too, as far as like the different personalities don't like to be raised up as much, right? But you still have someone annoying like me saying, hey, no, I'm gonna embarrass you. And that's okay because you're still being a proponent for that person and still communicating that and being an advocate for that person. So I think that's really important just to communicate with your manager what you're doing because as managers we love to brag on our teammates. They're not our reports, they're our teammates, so. Pantheon does a weekly all company 15 minute like Monday morning kickoff meeting and it's common for the team I'm on to do like a one minute slide talking about something. So when that happens, I make sure that like my video call situation is good. I've got the lights turned on. Even if I'm working from home, I'm wearing a nice shirt. I've got the Pantheon sign in the background. I've practiced, I have practiced my like, if I expected a hundred people to listen to me for a minute on our Monday morning kickoff, I wanna make sure like I have practiced what I'm going to say and I'm making a good impression because for some people in the company they only see me once, they see me in that one minute every eight weeks or so. Yeah, I would definitely agree with that. I know one of the ways that I try to keep engaged with my teammates is I have a lot of like one on ones that with people that I really wanna learn from and when I don't know the answer to a question if a problem comes up on a project, I make it a point to pick on somebody that I think might know the answer and say, hey, can you spare 15 or 20 minutes to sit down with me? And usually we'll spend 15 minutes talking about the problem and then another 10 minutes talking about how things are going on their project and sharing our experiences together that way as well. I think Slack really helps with that. Like I mean, at Acquia we have like a lot of different topic and region channels. And some of them are not work-related which like obviously, if you have a lot of people who are remote you can have a different offset, change the conversation and engage with the company that way. Yeah, we have a lot of, at Palantir we have like a food channel, we have a lot of people that love eating and cooking and so we try to again leverage some of the tools that we are already used to keeping contact with people outside of just like Drupal and technology. Yeah. I've been working at home for 34 years now. Not all with the... Do you want it? Yeah. I'm not sure if that's applause worthy or not. It is. I've been doing websites for about the last 10 of those years and I think a lot and read a lot and talk a lot about work-life balance and just as you said that your husband said you had no right to be telling other people about it. I still really don't have any right to be telling other people about it. So I always have good intentions and I have all these methods and some of the things you've talked about. And then I start to slip and usually I don't notice until either someone in my family feels really neglected or some of my friends feel really neglected or my personal wellbeing just isn't what it should be not enough sleep or not enough exercise or whatever. So I want you all to say honestly how well you feel that you do maintain that balance and what would you say to us when we slip as we all will? I think one thing that's important is you didn't fail. You know, you may need to make a little adjustment but so what, how do you feel you're doing and what do you suggest for us? Thanks. Can I just say thank you. That's like the perfect question to end on. So thank you so much. I'll go down the row. So we were talking earlier. I have a planner that I try to use, sorry. I have a planner that I use every morning as like a bullet journal and there are some mornings I don't do it. There are some weeks I don't do it and occasionally there was one month. So that's where I am and it's not great but that's data, right? That shows like when I'm slipping and failing and that's how I know to think back and think what were you doing? What was distracting you and how do you pivot back to get on track? Oh, we don't have to set up for the next session. Sorry. Thank you all. I saw her and I just started hearing like that. Oh, that's my computer. The award show likes to play all of you guys. Is this your phone? Yes. Oh damn, thank you. Oh, sorry. Sorry, thank you. I'm really sorry. Yeah, it was well. Enjoyed a good time. Yeah. What did you say? What's up? Why are you this... Oh, yeah. How do you know you're all... No, I'm just kidding. I give it 8. Yeah. I know. I like to play all the time. Right. Yeah. Oh! Yes. That's a point. How do you deal with region? I'm tired, I don't feel like we'll escape any more. We'll talk real soon. Well, somebody wants to be figured out.