 Right, good morning. How are you all? I never know how to open up these sort of sessions, whether it should be I, I'm Anthony, I do Drupal, or whether it should be more like Stadium Rock SCREAM FOR ME DROPALCON So anyway, good morning. Delighted yous are all here Anybody make it to the Frostlebox party last night and feeling a little worse for wear? Yeah, well, we'll muscle through so I'm gonna be talking about working remotely. I work from home and It's about the challenges that I found when going from a nine to five desk job in an office to Work in your, you know effectively your own hours and your own setup in your own place looking after yourself and I'm not trying to tell anyone how to live their life This is the stuff that I've discovered and the stuff that's been working for me. So take any nuggets you like call bullshit on the stuff that you disagree with and We'll have a good time, I hope so So my name is Anthony I work for Irish Development Shop AnarTech I've been doing Drupal since Drupal 5 Yes, yes, 5 And I've been working doing Drupal full-time for like five years and Yeah, I trained as a civil engineer, but that was crap because there was too much rain and too much mud So a nice indoor desk job, but no heavy lifting suits me a lot better So, um, I Used to work as I said in a nine to five office job I Live in Cromland, which is about five miles that way and The office was in inch core, which is also about five miles that way So it was a 25 minute walk ten minute cycle nice short commute Now it's great But then The office moved into town so city center and everyone's really excited all city center brilliant older You know restaurants and shops and buzz of town. That's great So that meant took ten minutes more to get to The office and ten minutes more to get home from the office and doesn't sound like much when you do the maths Twice a day ten minutes each time five days a week 48 weeks of the year it works out at about 80 hours No, not 80 hours. Yes, 80 hours, which is About five waking 16 hour days effectively gone from your year Which is kind of scary and irritating when you think about it so But you're busy why I hate wasting time commuting It really pissed me off. I don't you know, it's been so long since I've been doing commuting now I came in on the bus yesterday. I was like This takes forever So that sucks, but anyway Combine that with the curveballs that life throws you like like kids start at school and School starts at 10 to 9 I had to be in the office at 9 and it's a 20 minute journey on the bike So that just isn't gonna work and then for the first week They finish at like 10 30 and then the next week they finish at maybe 11 30 and the next week They finish it maybe 12 30. It's insane My wife joined the board of the school and stopped all of that. So that made me happy, but But you know having to be in one place at one time It just makes the rest of life a lot more difficult so Joining AnarTech was a real game changer and working from home and Like think about it. You're you're moving from a situation where you know, you're in a crowded office People sneezing on you and stuff as happens pulling at your screen. You're dealing with you know, a four-year-old Windows knockoff trying to make it work Windows networks held together with spit and glue and hope and Noise distraction craziness all of that stuff and then you're moving to an environment that you control with your own kit and Your own Your own setup you can basically work when you want how you work or how you want When ever suits your body whenever suits your sleep patterns When choose to work when you're working best or when you feel most productive And it's it's huge It's yeah, it's it it changes your life so Now obviously there's no commute and I can drop the kids to school and that's great And then I'm back in time for like we've got a daily stand-up meeting every morning say hi Shoot the breeze share problems and solutions and all the rest And it's amazing so When I started working from home my wife was worried about Isolation You know you're going from a packed office. That's full of people and lots of busyness and then you're going to Sitting with your laptop on your knee in your on your couch nobody about and she was worried that I get yeah, well isolated worried like I Couldn't go insular. Oh, no crap. I can't I can't solve these problems There's nobody here to talk to all of this and I'm tech was a lot smaller back then there was in Effect three of us. There's what 14 15 now so That's amazing in its own right, but so originally there was Stella and Alan and Edward Stella was going on maternity leave So I was hired To cover that maternity leave with a view to staying on that was great We planned to have cuz Stella lives in Rath Farnham, which is like three miles from my house So nice 45 minute walk And we'd plan to have two Are those Twitter notifications turning up on the telly there? Oh good And Yeah, we plan to have two weeks working side-by-side in Stella's office So that I could learn the ropes, you know get up to speed with getting drush and all of that good stuff and the day before I was due to start My god a call from Dermot her husband tomorrow is cancelled the baby's coming early Good luck So Yeah, our carefully planned onboarding two weeks didn't work So instead my three mile trip to the office turned into a hundred and twenty five mile commute over to Galway to visit Alan So that was fun We just contracted two weeks into two days and right run along. Here's some projects work away So that was fun So we used Skype for communication Skype was like our boardroom Back then and we'd have an open Skype chat channel, which was basically the lifeline You know you have a problem you throw it into Skype You hope that someone's going to have All right, stop tweeting Hope that someone's going to Have solved the problem be able to put you in the right direction but I actually had to learn Like a protocol around that like you can't Be hacking away and then Alan comes online first thing in the morning you go Alan help me with uberkart Because the response was at least say hello Remember we're people and I haven't had coffee yet So yeah, we had to learn protocols of of chat and you know the way you can't really get Sarcasm properly in tone into text chat. So Occasionally when you read back through that, what's the term scroll back? If you haven't been necessarily following the conversation you're reading back you're going ooh, ooh, that's a bit off in it But it mostly works mostly works HTML style faux markup to impose tone can be nice Um, but so yeah at the at the start it was a bit of a baptism of fire, you know, I was Expecting to be doing site building straight off and that quickly turned into development and the Byzantine depths of uberkart and dribble six and that was nasty, but it was you know, it was fun It was entertaining, but you know imposter syndrome quickly sets in And you're going on when are they gonna figure out I'm making this shit up as I go along Then I was I had a call with Alan on uberkart and I said so how do you how do you do this? And he goes, I don't know you know more about uberkart than I do and I had this kind of almost fearful hero worship of Alan and And when he reckoned that I knew more about it than he did it made me realize, huh? Maybe maybe either everyone's making it up, or I know more than I think I do So that helped a lot with with the imposter syndrome So I Was that was cool first few months that it see but they were fun but in terms of Where I was working like you know, I was in my house. I didn't have an office per se So it rove around the house, you know, it's laptop on the couch Move to the kitchen sit at the kitchen table go to the comfy chair Comfy chair is gorgeous, but the arms are a little bit too close to your side So you can't get your elbows into type so that sucked and took me ages to figure out when my shoulders were hurting doing But So, yeah, I needed an office. So the coup de gras was to kick my kid out of his bedroom So moved the two boys in together with bunk beds and I scored an office. So You need an office a lot so Like you you need to be able to set up your environment that's conducive to being productive and conducive to You need to want to be there has to be pleasant place to go, you know Some people like offices because it'll offer a way of having a boundary in between work life and home life like some people like to be able to Get up in the morning, you know Get dressed in work related clothes, so they're already in the work mindset go to the office shut the door. I'm in work Open the office shut the door. I'm not in work. They need that sort of physical boundary I'm a lot more fluid like I'm still happy to occasionally wander down lie on the cage laptop on my knee, but The boundaries between work life and home life are important and the office can help that because you can shut out the rest of the world Um whilst I'm fluid about my office My boundaries are kind of a bit different like I don't have work email on my phone Which think all the rest of the Anatech you think is weird, but I don't have slack on my phone But weirdly I do have Trello, so if I need to I can crank it up and check out tickets and actually talk to the clients but Why was they saying yeah, so anyway? if you Have your office and you can go in and be in your work mode and you can get that working with your own body clock It's just gold dust, you know Like I often do my best work at stupid o'clock in the morning Stella will often be hacking away at 11 o'clock at night and It's it's a game changer being able to work when you feel productive You know, hey, I'm doing nothing Saturday night. Let's crack out a ticket bang bang bang And it sucks having to work when you don't feel like it So just being able to mix it up is brilliant So yeah, some people need structure And they need the rigidity of the nine to five But if you can work with with your own life and your own body in your own cycles as opposed to against them everything's a lot easier so Yeah, I mentioned it's it's your responsibility as a remote worker to set up your environment to be conducive to productivity because it's an amazing privilege to be able to work from home and you know, it's It's just a month you should respect the people in circumstances that are making that happen And give it the best shot you can, you know There's trust implied in being given the privilege to work from home So yeah, we should honor that so whilst one of the joys of working from home and working flexible hours is That you can deal with all of the little curveballs that life throws you You have to remember that at the end of the week the work still needs to be done You know, it's it. It's just not cricket to get to Friday and go. Oh, do you know what funny log 10 hours? That's not cool. People are gonna be relying on You know a certain amount of output from you, you know People are like project managers are gonna be going right How much work is Somebody gonna do that much. That's what we're planning on. That's what we're planning for You know, it's gonna wreck all the plans in the world if you're just sitting around playing PlayStation and So in the early days, I struggled with that like I remember driving down to see my in-laws in Wexford on Friday and realizing that I pretty much owed two days work Because of Dawson earlier in the week So I had to hide and a little window was covered for the weekend hugging the router because broadband was terrible and Hiding from my family whilst I cranked out the necessary, you know stuff needs to be done The other thing I suppose is it's really important to Make sure to meet Your your regular meetings like if you've got like we got stand-up at 9 30 in the morning There's a gun planning call in the afternoon Friday. Well, I don't have a lot of scheduled meetings But it's really important to make them because you know, that's your connection to your teammates That's your connection to to your colleagues people you work with and You can find out what's going on in their lives and they're more than just fingers hitting Buttons they're they're people with problems like yours with solutions for problems that you've got You know, they're it makes makes a lot a lot easier So in Kitting out your office I Would say That you should go and do it now It's really important to set it up nicely Like get the best computer you can that's probably a bit of a no-brainer because you're gonna be using this thing for what like four or five years probably every day time spent reinstalling applications and You know fighting with your operating system. That's not billable time. You know, that's not gonna make anybody any money And this is you know that computers are a meal ticket it's gonna facilitate everything So it's it's worthwhile investing heavily there then a Great now great chair is important. I Had a crap chair. I got sore back I went to Ikea and got and me chair the sore back didn't go away and it wasn't you know That's like five years It wasn't until writing all of this that I went you know what I need to buy myself a new chair So it's coming on Wednesday. It's being delivered. So that's a win So invest in a good chair save yourself a lot of hassle Do you know what a lot less than I expected I was expecting a cool grand or something. I think it was 285 So now you've got your great chair try not to use it So I've been reading a lot About how you know sitting is the new smoking and sitting is killing us and just keep moving and all the rest So I invested in the standing desk Now these you can get from Ikea now Alas, you couldn't when I got mine. So that sucked, but hey something gets you're amazing and You may be tempted to experiment with like Little coffee table and stick it up on top of your desk and put your laptop on the coffee table and that Works Once or twice, but unless you're just using a MacBook Air with no Accessories It's just not really practical because once you've got cables and extra screens and all of that other stuff It's just a pain To go from sitting to standing so you need one of these desks with the motors and you push the button It also looks cool when you're on a Google hangout and you just rate yourself up like Darth Vader But the whole point the whole point of a standing desk is variation in posture Like it's no good to be sitting all the time. It's no good to be standing all the time But you know mix it up Stand for your calls. I read that you actually sound more confident when you're standing when you're speaking. What's that about? anyway Say go and get coffee and then sit down Go for a walk come back stand for an hour, you know mix it up It you know, it keeps you you burn more calories when you're standing for a start, which is nice But yeah, it just makes certainly makes me feel better than if I'm static the entire day One thing I still need to do for my office is decent task lighting Really need to get one of those angle poised lamps to actually Illuminate my work area and it's been bugging me for ages, but I had two Pretty table lamps that I really didn't want to get rid of but the lamps just blew on them So now they're Now they're for the bin. I'm gonna get proper task lighting, but yeah, you really notice a particularly in the winter when it's dark Proper lighting is is a good time It's worthwhile to customize your space to just sort of inspire you stick up artwork you like You know dig out your old painted miniatures from your college days Get your your favorite book stick them on the shelf Make sure you got a good stereo so you can crank out the tunes that you like Stuff that'll Help you work your way through problems stuff that'll inspire you to be creative stuff again that makes the space nice to be in And Certainly for the type of work I do Second screen is invaluable like a load of the lads have gone large and like Mike's got a huge tally here and a huge tally here And he sits his tiny laptop in the middle Gavin's got a similar setup I've got one extra screen invaluable in terms of productivity just in terms of like Right, there's Trello on that screen. Here's an editor on this screen And all of your information is there and there's no endless window flicking to find the information you want And Then the last two items I have here on office are kind of no-brainers proper broadband Because if you can't support like Google hangouts on your broadband your it's just it's a problem Because you know text chat video chat audio chat It's all going over the internet and it's your lifeline To the rest of the world and you know if it's consistently flaky it's just no good and then lastly I'm guessing that this is something that's often forgotten about Get a backup Like I use time machine. I've got a little plug-in USB Hard drive I experimented with a media server and backing up over Wi-Fi. Don't do that because it takes weeks You know like backup off-site Send a clone of your hard drive to another location if God forbid you spill your tea on your laptop and it blows up You need to get back up and running as fast as you can and the best way to do that is to have a full backup Um One last thing on the office front Don't let your kids near your work stuff Seriously, I see people going around with smashed phones and cracked iPads and keys missing off their laptops Yeah, someone wanted to watch YouTube and now jammy fingers all over it My kids know not to touch this because I went through them for a shortcut when they did There is other devices for them to mess with You know playstations and whatnot But I think it's very important for Because you don't want to be spending mental energy fixing this. This is for you know Make a money with it's not for entertaining my kids with fart noises and cap videos They love those So speaking of children, oh Yeah, there we go Noise is a challenge So I've Yeah kids are noisy Families are noisy. You're a crazy neighbor with a chainsaw. I are noisy And you need to at least a strategy for a dealing with that like the way I tend to deal with it is I repurposed an old surround sound DVD player and Use it to play music So whenever the family is at large and making loads of noise I crank up the death metal and just drown them out Which works fine except if I have a call Welcome come in If I have a call I have to go around the house and go Listen, I have a call in half an hour. Shut up I'll be patrolling for the five minutes beforehand right call time call time everybody okay with that call time brilliant it's reminiscent of Back in the early 80s when you'd be trying to record songs off the radio you'd be holding your Holding your Tape deck up to the radio because you know the DJ is gonna play the song you requested right and you're just hoping to That everyone's gonna shut the hell up whilst you're recording so it's a bit like that and it mostly works I'd it'd be more difficult if like I was a p.m. Or someone who's gonna be on calls all the time I Mean like you could use you could use like noise cancelling headphones or something to block out the noise But it doesn't work when you're when you're on calls and the mic's picking up all sorts of ambient noise I don't have a solution for that. I would love to hear some if anybody's got any ideas but Like some guys just managed to get a a more remote room in their house or set up One of these like wouldn't shed things down the bottom of their garden and use that as their office um So yeah, other than other than threatening people and blocking out the noise with more noise That's all I've got going on. I'm afraid but yeah, it's it's a challenge. It needs thinking about So uh on a different note thought it was worth mentioning Kind of like differences between Remote working and distributed working like where an attack is distributed by default. So we all basically work from home and Remote working is Certainly within this context. That's where there is an office But some people are remote from it So it's quite a different proposition because In in the distributed world Everyone's on in our certainly in our office like with everyone's on Slack. Everyone's on Google Hangouts Everyone's using the same tools to communicate the same channels If you've got an office environment and Remote workers the remote workers are limited by the technology technological communication tools Whereas the office bound people have got the water cooler chat and office or a desk bombing and and and Chatting at the coffee maker In-person meetings So it's more of a challenge for the remote worker then they're more likely to feel isolated because they're not getting all of that extra Communication all that extra information. They're probably going to be playing catch up a lot, you know So in my last job, we had a it was an unofficey place, but we had a remote worker Friend of mine sat beside me we got on very well worked very well together and then he decided hey, I'm gonna move to the States so I kind of panicked because I didn't want to have to get a new team member in to replace them and Spoke very firmly to the boss that he should be allowed work remotely. So that was great He did a lot of his work on the web. So technologically it was easy but We had to do like a cultural shift to make it work, you know, we had to make a top-down decision Everyone's installing Skype. We're going to use Skype chat by default You know where we got a speakerphone thingy So that we could dial him in for in-person meetings made a Point of including our remote guy and He comes over twice a year for a couple of weeks for to press the flesh and Have that person-to-person Contact and it works really well. He's been doing it for seven years now he allowed that he He was working more once he moved remote he felt like he had to justify his existence Because people weren't watching him and seeing him at his desk He felt like he had to work harder to justify it and to prove that he wasn't slacking off Now apparently that has grown less over time as I guess, you know, like if you're doing it for years and it's working. It's proved itself, right? but Yeah, I thought that was a that was a great success story and but I think it's because it's worked because of this organizational effort To make it work if it was just everyone in the office going Damn it. How come he gets to work remotely? How can we have to go to the office? But weirdly that never came up. So yay Anyway, that's the difference between remote and distributed. There are different challenges. I think as a distributed team, we've got it easier How am I doing for time when am I meant to be finished half half 11 no quarter to 12 1145 okay, we're doing okay So Obviously, you know health and happiness go hand in hand the first winter when I was working with an Artec and Roving around with no office and lying on the couch It was really cold. It was wet. It was dark Because I started in November so straight into nasty winter time I wouldn't leave the house for three or four days Because you know Tesco was delivering I Was comfy on my couch And then after work put that down hello PlayStation and it was great And then I actually noticed After a few months of this I noticed walking up the stairs was more difficult I thought oh man. I must be coming down with something. Okay. Let's take this easy walked slower. That didn't help And it actually culminated in like a couple of weeks of effectively being sick So that sucked a lot um It took a while to figure out That the problem was just you know staying in staying static all the time was bad So eventually I figured it out took up running Which sucked because I suck at running I had to relearn how to run like three times I was its own challenge, but The benefits of it were fantastic You know I could chase the kids around I could go up the stairs without pleasing So, you know, I found I found running really hard so I mix it up now I've joined a gym first time ever like if you'd asked college age me Whether I'd be doing exercise you get laughed at But yeah, it's it's cool. It reduces my stress It allows me to clear my head get focus all of this stuff I'm sure you guys have read all of this Exercise equals good More energy. It's great. Um, I actually found that on days not days Like if I go four or five days without exercising say it's raining and I'm stuck in the in-laws house So you can't really go for a walk My mood just plummets So, yeah happiness equals exercise apparently There's a takeaway Um, so, oh, yeah, I Mentioned that My friend Paul The remote worker in America was was working more when he went from working remote I've heard that sort of story lots from different people that I've spoken to I was talking to a guy This summer and we were on holidays met this guy and he'd gone working remotely And he was doing 15 60-hour weeks, which is just mental. It's it what's unsustainable and gonna end up being bad for you like obviously work is really important and Especially if you love with you what you do It's no great burden to be to be working and working and it's great But and you should be able to prioritize your work But hand-in-hand with that you need to prioritize your life That whole work life balance thing like working remotely facilitates that and it's amazing, but the whole point I think is To make your work time more productive by making Everything happier and healthier so Build in to your work time build in breaks build in your exercise build in Outside time go for a walk see some trees and rabbits and de-stress And when you've done your work stop go relax. You just find yourself go point chill out Stop working See ya Health exercise all good Getting outside. I've found really really really really important Not just because leaving the house not leaving the house for a week will make you poorly But just in terms of de-stressing I'll often come up against a bug can't fix it Go for a walk There's a park near my house, so I've actually I've got timers set up on my phone my neighbors must think I'm cracked And five to the hour quick walk to the village and back. It's like 250 steps. It's not far But and then there's a park over there, so if I want a slightly longer walk just wander around the park But if I come up against a bug I'll go for a walk Come back as often as not I have a solution Because you're so conscious is always beaten away at these problems in the background whilst you're enjoying the trees and the rabbits and so I Found I found That it can help to actually take a measure of the amount of activity you're doing physical activity like Because Like you might think you're you're moving a lot you might think that you're doing a lot of exercise like I used to Always late for school picking the guys up from school and dropping them off and all the rest You might think that you're doing a lot run to school collect lads run home But schools only like I Know 500 meters away. Does that really count? I don't know but I'm gonna I'm gonna be a little Fitbit fanboy for a moment My wife got a Fitbit activity tracker Because she wanted to get fitter and do more exercise and all the rest She showed me the shiny graph on her smartphone and all of the glorious data that it collects and I Completely tweaked every geeky bone in my body So I became obsessed with her data and she got pissed off and bought me a Fitbit and sent me on my way to do it myself So It's actually really cool because like it's got targets You know 10,000 steps a day and walk eight kilometers and go up so many flights of stairs and all the rest But we it's changed how we act in our house We want to hit those targets. It's like, you know, like when you're a kid and you get a gold star and your activity sheet It's just the same I get this little endorphin rush when I feel the thing buzzing at 10,000 steps And We're actually getting off the couch at 10 or 11 at night, you know, we've been watching TV Brilliant Shit I've got 2,000 steps to go right I'll be back in half an hour and we'd never do that. Otherwise, you know It's just a great motivator Um So, you know, there's loads of ways to measure your activities smartphone apps and Garmin thingies and all sorts of stuff But yeah, we found them really motivating just in in terms of getting off the couch One thing I forgot to do and Alan berated me badly for this because We do this whenever we're doing performance work on a website take baseline measurements before you do any work And I forgot to check how much activity I was doing without putting in effort So yeah, I can't say oh, yeah double the amount of steps. I do in the day. I don't know But anyway, it's good Um Incidental slides right. Oh now here's the thing That might seem stupid or obvious or overly simple, but it matters So when you're at home You've access to your kitchen and your larder. You're not restricted to Whatever the local cafe can give you and for a foodie like me. It's amazing But alas my lovely wife likes to keep the larder well stocked So I've now got access to all the peanuts and chocolate bickies that I could want So there's a degree of more mental fortitude Required to stop me gorging every day So yeah, that was a non-expected challenge having to manage my own junk cravings Cuz just easy access easy access to all these snackable goodies is Both good and bad So Yeah, I guess I just wanted to say that it's it's important To eat properly a proper meal times and I say might be stupid or might be obvious, but It's something I had to remind myself when I was working in my last job Particularly when we were in Inche Corps before we moved to town. There was a little Tesco just across the road and they were great For marking down the price on anything that was gonna go out of date So I'd go in there with a euro and come out with an armful of sandwiches and a ticket masala I firmly remember I'm not really proud of this, but hey, um, we're all friends, right? I Remember sitting on the counter in the office Dunking sausage rolls into a curry For lunch probably ingested a year's worth of salt and fat and sugar in one go So that wasn't good that wasn't good But yeah nowadays, I like to whip up a big soup or a doll or something on a Monday and That's lunch sorted for the week I don't have to think about it then but I know I'm not going to have the three o'clock slump And I'm gonna feel good for the afternoon and I'm not gonna be rolling around like an bloated mess Which is what he used to do So quick self-indulgent digression, please humor me Amazing amazing amazing cookbooks. Definitely look them up if you're at all interested in cooking and food and if you're not That is funny and very insightful He has guidelines on the difference between food and imitation food like products and Think interesting things like Don't buy your food where you buy your petrol or Shop at the Outside edges of the supermarket because that's where the real food is and not the food like products in the middle or Don't need anything that your grandma wouldn't recognize as food So, yeah, that's well worth a read very interesting. So In different news, yeah mental health so I Said at the start that my wife was worried about me being isolated and feeling alone and all of that sort of stuff and You know the key to not having that is communication So as I've mentioned that we have stand-ups every morning We've used Google hangouts and that was kind of revolutionary. We were just Skype and just audio and that was fine and I don't know. I think we might have been a bit nervous about going video, but It does mean everybody has to get dressed, but that's probably a good thing, right? So, yeah, Google hangouts is amazing and we've got we've now set up sort of hangouts for our different teams and for like subject matter and Myself and Gavin work and support and our chat is called Down the Pope and Every time we we have a meeting on that particular hangout inevitably it makes me smile So, yeah, like you can you can find joy where you want to find it But yeah, communication is where it's at and don't let your inner imposter Stop you or think, you know, I don't want to ask this question because it's stupid ask the stupid question because if it's stupid so much the better you'll probably get an answer and Probably somebody else has the solution that that you need And the other thing that I came up with was Get enough sleep You know everything feels better when you're not tired. It's not rocket surgery but It can be difficult like sleeping more is often not an option, but sleeping better can be So, you know, like I was I was trying to figure out trying to hack my sleep, you know trying to get Get rid of all of the things that would stop me sleeping. Well Turns out there's loads of things stop me sleeping. Well, like, you know, if there's any light at all in the bedroom For example, somebody in the next in the bed beside me reading her that'll stop it If it's too hot or if I exercise too close to that time, you know Or if I've been drinking or if I've been watching really entertaining TV. Oh that Effects sleep so it's it's I guess the point is the it's worth Doing a little bit of navel gazing and little self-examination going what is What stops me sleeping? You know, what did I do the night before when I haven't slept? And Equally then you can figure out what does help you sleep It turns out sitting in the comfy chair and reading a book helps me sleep As I said, it's not it's not rocket surgery One really cool thing actually that I would like to share on this related topic is So in winter time when it's dark and I Hate winter. I always got bummed out at winter But we got a dawn simulator alarm clock So cool So, yeah, I see ferret brows and confused faces So you set your alarm for say I have mine set for six six thirty because I Like to start early so that especially if I'm gonna be picking up the kids in the afternoon or something get my day's work in beforehand, you know Central arm for six thirty and this thing starts to glow at six and it gets brighter and brighter and brighter over the course of half an hour Until it's at full brightness at six thirty And it yeah, it simulates dawn and your body responds to it and if you can time it with The circadian rhythms of your own sleep like I've got a sleep cycle of about an hour and a half So if you can time it to six hours or seven and a half hours or whatever You don't feel like crap when you wake up Which is brilliant. So that revolutionized winter time Oh Yeah And another thing I was talking to a few guys who use full spectrum light bulbs in the office I think iterate have those and So the idea is to get around the lack of sunlight in the wintertime These things simulate sunshine And rather than you know sitting with your face in a light box They actually just install them in the in the ceiling And apparently they're fantastic. I haven't tried them yet, but that's worth looking into Yeah, and the other the last bit on on mental health is it kind of Well, it comes back to communication, but Get into physical contact with your co-workers make a point of going to visit Like sometimes I'll just go Stella. I'm coming over. Are you in and we'll just sit in the cage together and work Often on completely separate projects. We'll have tea together but Yeah, being close to people every now and again is good We have we make a point of getting together as a group the whole company a few times a year Like once a quarter or something. That's the aim But then, you know, you've got camps you got Drupal con and Yeah, a big point of everybody coming to Drupal con is to be together We can all go out and hang out and get to know each other a little better because in effect we're spending a lot of time together and like I Barely ever seen Karen in the flesh because she lives in France And So yeah, yeah, so co-working and getting together physically that's important Now, oh crap. I'm gonna run out of time. Okay. Okay speed up So this is important because of that whole justifying your existence thing and Because nobody's gonna be minding you This is it's like when you go to college for the first time and it's the difference between school and college you know in college, it's your own look out to do the work to go to your lectures and Working remotely is the same because your boss isn't always looking over your shoulder Your colleagues aren't all knuckling down and you feel compelled to do it too. Everybody's remote so it's It's important to be able to convince yourself that you've done enough And What hell you can use to convince your boss that you've done enough But yeah find out If you're looking at what you're doing, how long it's taking You can find out what the time sucks are where you're wasting time Streamline your processes and they just boost your productivity So time you can't account for is difficult to build for that's what it comes down to So I use that I didn't find a type task timer that I liked so I wrote one It's on GitHub Knock yourselves out There's a photo come on is he done good Right Time pressures Okay. Now. So here's a couple of challenges. That's was really surprising It wasn't just me who had to learn how to work remotely Everybody in the house had to learn How to have someone work remotely Like if I'm at home my kids thought hey dad's there brilliant He's available, but no I'm working. So you need to actually set I Don't know. I hesitate to say rules guidelines, maybe like the pirates code So they know now they know that when I'm working I can't play with them But they love to be able to run up and say hi Here's a interesting fact about my day and leave again, and then they're happy equally My lovely wife had to figure out the boundaries as well. We're still working on that Her funding so sometimes In the same way that I work flexible hours she works kind of flexible hours and sometimes she'll work late I'll say a Tuesday or whatever and She'll work and then do yoga and then she'll come home. Maybe it's 10 30 I've done dinner done bedtime got the kids to bed and She'll come in maybe I'm working now hacking away She's just home. She's now in off-time. I'm in work mode. She wants to tell me about her day Cha cha cha cha cha cha cha cha cha cha half an hour later. Oh, sorry. Were you working? I We've talked about this and laughed about it. It's no secret, you know but Yeah, it's something that we need to to work out. It's one thing I do now is I'll pull up my task timer and press stop very visibly and then turn around go right. You now have my full attention Oh Yeah now here was an interesting thing as well when I started working from home all of a sudden she had Visibility into all of the time that I was at my desk. Whereas you wouldn't otherwise, you know and Whereas I was tracking my time and reasonably meticulously So I knew what I was doing And you know, this is time when I'm actually working and time when I'm doing bookkeeping and time when I'm doing Expenses and receipts and tax returns and all of that associated junk She was convinced that I was working far too much Now I suspect I was just spreading out the work over Maybe a longer period and taking breaks and stuff in between but from her perspective her perception was Going from having no visibility into it to seeing me working all the time. It's gone. Oh, it's not good. Not good So we had to get over that hump. I Think she's happier now But yeah, that was a surprise Um And the last thing I'm gonna say Because I'm conscious that I'm running out of time will flick on to I Love what I do a lot. I love doing it But as a part of the theme of get outside Have other activities that you can go and do it's not just Drupal all the time that might be sacrilegious at Drupal con But but like, you know Have half a dozen things in a month that you can say I go and do this. I Go and sing in musicals on a Tuesday. I Meet my mates in the pub on a Thursday and we play role-playing games. I Occasionally go cycling with some people and you know do stuff because You know You can't be working all the time even if it's your hobby. It's fun, which it kind of is So Yeah, like having Drupal as a hobby is fantastic and getting to work on something you love. It's fantastic. I Guess you can have too much for good thing So, yeah, mix it up So I'm gonna call time on that. I think I've a minute left So I hope you all enjoyed that and got something out of it You know, if anyone has questions after that information deluge and rant There's a mic there Otherwise, we'll go back to yoga and the prodigy So, yeah, I managed to Delete the sprints slide. So please evaluate the session But go to the sprints tomorrow. Thanks a million. Thank you Hey