 But then I started working remotely and Everything changed Hi, my name is Joan Olson My name I'm a happiness engineer with automatic as Rachel said and today I'm going to share with you some things that I learned in the past three years working remotely And I would like to say to begin that it's clear that the world is changing and Work is changing as well because this cartoon that I just showed here is from the New Yorker magazine from two years ago, but more and more people are working remotely But what does that actually mean? So first let's define what is remote work? There are we can say there's four kinds of jobs anybody here who works remotely already Anybody here who works in an office? Good, so we have the two sides. So there's the office job where you go to the office every day and Then there's a flexible job where you work at an office, but sometimes you work at home Then there's a remote job and at the remote job Everybody else is at the office and you're working from home and then there's what I do Which is technically a distributed job where nobody goes to the office Everybody stays home. So an automatic we have Say for the Tumblr acquisition We have a thousand people all working from their homes in their home offices co-working spaces cafes or anywhere as I'll get to I Learned about working remotely when I first applied for automatic I was working in an office on our WordPress consultancy gig And I read that you can actually work for a company in San Francisco living anywhere in the world And I thought this is magnificent because at this point my career wasn't going very well here in Spain And I was actually considering moving to London or Copenhagen or San Francisco somewhere else where there would be IT jobs But then in came the remote work and here I am It's a brave new world, and I will say that it is definitely a better way of working But it also has its own particular challenges If you already work from home, you're gonna recognize some of these things if you don't I hope to give you a little bit of insight into how it works The first thing I realized when I started working remotely. There's no commute. You don't go anywhere That's a little bit strange, but it's a nice thing because I'm sure that you had the experience Where you have to be at a meeting at 10 a.m. You're late. You're getting your car. You go out on the road, and that's a traffic jam And now you're there. You're stuck in traffic and you're half an hour late This doesn't happen when you work remotely because you might as well, you know be a minute late with your coffee, but everything happens online So you can save a lot of time in not going back and forth And if you think about it if you only go half an hour to work and half an hour back That's still five hours a week That's five hours that you could be spending doing something else being with family friends developing WordPress The other beauty is that you can work anywhere And in the beginning I thought this is fantastic. I can work anywhere with my laptop I'm gonna go to the beach We turned out to be less productive than I hoped Because if you've ever been outside with your laptop, especially the new blank screens There is no productivity. You cannot see anything in The same way I have some colleagues and I try this myself who wake up Take the laptop in bed and start working No, I cannot do that. I try going to a park Same thing. You're outside what works. I found cafes cafes are good But then you have to pay for the coffee to at least be nice Or you can go to a co-working if you want to be with other people or as I have found works best for me having a home office Because with all the things all the flexibility being anywhere in the world just with the basic internet connection I still found that it's good to have a routine Because if you consider before we're going to work we leave our house We go out we experience the world come into a new place and now we're working So your mind has a chance to change the environment and you're getting ready But if you don't have that travel time Your mind doesn't switch so I found that having a routine to get me started simulates that experience So I will get up around 8 a.m. I'll go to the bathroom brush my teeth. I'll go downstairs and meditate I'll take my dog out and then I'll exercise to get that crucial daylight in Then have a shower and by 10 a.m. I'm at my desk So that's the way that I found to kind of just make my mind go into work mode and then When sitting down to work It's important how the environment is like and so I discovered that Just because you're working from home. You still have the same challenges as you have an office Because at an office, what do you get? At least you get a desk you get a chair and a computer, right now I had this I had this setup over when I moved houses. I didn't get my home office setup yet So what did I do? I sat at my dining room table in an Ikea chair Anybody here who knows Ikea chairs for sitting and eating They're very very stable when you sit down the legs go out and the backrest is non-existent So not thinking about this and just working either my dining room table or my couch after a while I thought developing shoulder pains and So I realized okay now it's time to actually you know do something about this So now I have a proper Desk that can also be raised so you can be standing and And an ergonomic chair and these things are just as important at home as on an office Maybe even more so because there's nobody looking after you. You have to look after yourself In a similar way, I'll get into this a little bit more you have to Tune your mind into when you're working and when you're not working So this may seem a little bit strange, but what I found number one works is working in one space Have one designated space to work. It might be a home office. It might just be a desk It might be a certain spot, but in this spot we're in work mode So I have made this into my home office where I work in the office, and I don't work anywhere else if I can avoid it But at the same time I've experimented with using all the senses So for example, I use music anybody here listens to music when they work and The rest of you are sleeping. Okay. No, just kidding No music is a nice addition to the day But what I have found is that I actually take certain internet radio stations, and I only listen to that while working So if this genre of music is playing We're working if this genre of music is playing we are not working It works somewhat and I've also experimented doing the same with smells You know in Macadona you can get those cheap candles one of the cinnamon not the lebanilla So I experiment it was like okay. Can I subconsciously program myself to let my brain know that when the vanilla is on? We're not working. It kind of works. It's not great So really what works is separating the things Because when you're working from home, there are so many distractions if you let there be and The way that I realize this. I mean I actually thought about calling this talk How to stay productive when your entire house is a distraction and What I'm talking about here is not just the average phone calls messages Facebook Reddit all the things we know we shouldn't be doing during work. I don't do those But I can be caught up with other things. Oh, I have to go make a cup of coffee. Oh, there's this dish I forgot to put into the lava. He is there's this little thing I have to do It's amazing how our mind can take us anywhere apart from what we're supposed to be doing That's because I will admit. I'm a procrastinator So this is why I have these little challenges But I also had to say that from my perspective. I Don't have kids So for those of you that do have kids and work from home Wow, well done. I also don't have cats So I don't know how cats behave when you're working from home, but I've seen a lot of colleagues that have tails Walking around on the screen when they're talking on zoom. Have you seen this? so with Dogs at least I can give you a tip because my dog is very annoying. Oh, you're working. Can we play now? Can we play now? And I feel bad because of course I want to play but not right now So my colleague gave me a tip. She said if you're working and your dog is annoying Have it close to you Dogs are pack animals. If you move their beds to your desk, they will stay there and be happy And it worked So I cannot do tell you what to do with your kids and I cannot tell you would do everything else But just know the distractions are plentiful. So it's about finding ways around those distractions And one of those ways is to have clear boundaries And what I mean by boundaries is that you have anybody else living at home with you It could be family. It could be roommates. Whatever it is They need to understand when you're working For those of you that already work from home, you may have said this to people before Yes, I am really working It may be that I'm just sitting here looking at my laptop, but I'm actually doing work Well, this is how I do my work So please don't interrupt me and this is where it comes to setting healthy boundaries. So number one if you're in the office You can leave the door open, but if I'm in here, don't disturb me When I come out talk to me that works now. Why is this important? Those of you that work from home Hands up again Can I please get to shout out? What role do you do this in a door desolator other cosa? Okay All these things have in common that they are knowledge work So when we sit down in front of the computer, we are doing knowledge work And it's been scientifically shown that if you get interrupted if you are in the flow You're just working everything like and then you have interruption It takes an average of 15 minutes to get back into that flow So it's extremely important to not be interrupted while you're doing something important and instead do that afterwards So one thing can be like I said telling people it can also just be close in the door Because I found that if you have guests over especially if they're not off the Internet age, they may not understand that you're working. So just close in the door might be enough But more importantly is about setting expectations and that as well goes for communication Which brings me to my next point Because working remotely you have some distinct challenges in terms of communication. I Work at automatic and automatic. We do all of our main communication in slack Anybody here uses slack Yes, most of us and slack is text only communication by default and that's how we do it on automatic Now, of course, there are also audio calls and video calls But when you communicate only in writing, there are particular challenges There was a study from Yale way back when that looked at how people perceive when you're talking to them And as it turns out the actual words that we say are only seven percent of the full communication Thirty eight percent comes from our voice Artenality how we say it and a full fifty five percent Comes from the body language So it automatically we talked a little bit about the concept of bandwidth Not your fifty say fifty six K mode and versus your fiber, but bandwidth in communication So if we say that if it's only in text That's low bandwidth if it goes an audio call medium bandwidth You go on a zoom video call high bandwidth But if you are in person face-to-face That's full bandwidth and in my opinion nothing can ever replace that Which brings me to my next point that is important to socialize So if you're living with other people, this is not a problem But if you live alone and you are working from home, there's technically no reason to leave your house Some days if I didn't have my dog I didn't have to go out and I do have a colleague who says that he will stay in for three days at a time He gets the groceries delivered Just stays in So it's really important when we're in front of a screen all day to actually go out and meet other people and have that connection Which also brings me to going afk. This is a term that we use in automatic anybody here knows what afk means One but you cheating you're working automatic afk afk is an English acronym that means away from keyboard and I don't know about you, but I tend to be caught up and I get really focused and then I forget to have breaks What I didn't say my routine thing is that I will also put my lunch on my calendar So I don't forget because there's nobody saying hey, we're going to lunch you want to come no That doesn't happen. So you have to do it yourself And so throughout the day it's very important. I find to just step away from the computer Know that you have a real world before you go back into the digital one In the same way when getting off work. I also try to stay away from screens In fact, I just tried to leave my laptop in the office and not open again even when logging off I Will have a shutdown routine where I turn off the security So that I don't accidentally log on to work again and start working because again you're working from anywhere so you have to set your boundaries and finally It's about disconnecting and this I think applies to anybody that is working in front of a computer in an office But what I'm talking about here is doing things that are truly offline There's no computers. There's no phones. There's no internet connection Now where can you do this out in nature? I'll apply it without the laptop Going to the woods going for a hike going for a run. I think these are incredibly important because we are all sitting at a computer all day and While many of us have given up smoking now they say that sitting is the new smoking So now I at least tried to get outside and move But I find that being in nature is kind of like an antidote to all the technical input So to answer the question Do I work from home? Or am I living at work? The answer is both But it works if you separate it. So the world is changing and Work is changing and my question to you if you don't work remotely. It's remote work in your future Thank you any question any question So yeah more than a question is just Sharing my experience because I also work in a distributed company Everybody from a home co-working whatever And there is a point that has been really important for me and you don't mention it. I would like to mention more than these Times of how many time can I be focused when I am distracted? How long I take to be again in productive mode? It's quite a common thing But to me these approach never work and what really worked to me is mix what are the distractions with the The tasks that I have so I try to know upfront the task I have to do one or two days upfront because more it's a bit difficult And then I try to pack them and schedule the interruptions as as disconnections And managing this like I will do these that I need two hours Then I can do these two hours and they go shopping for half an hour And then I got the groceries for lunch then I work one hour for this task and then and This kind of approach work it for me because at the beginning I was trying to keep like yeah Two hours a break two hours and these things and this never work it because it depends on the tasks and to me It's more important the time that you invest and focus in the task than the focus time at work So right just so you build in breaks where you go and do something else For example, they said go on the grocery shopping and you put that in your schedule Or you do it. Okay, but the point is to give yourself work time and then you go out. I think that's very very good Yeah, thank you for sharing that All those big ones or other questions Congrats for the conference very interesting, but I want to bring it just once still is Do you have settled everything? But what do you think is gonna be the first step to do when you decide to start to work? Remodely for for me like passion and how I translate that Wish to the to the company. Thank you. Can you say that one more time the first thing? Are the first things it's what how it starts to become every month, right? Okay. Yeah, sure Absolutely, so now there's actually I've learned about since coming into this world that there's actually a lot of companies that do remote work Some of the more famous ones are of course automatic. I believe a human may does the same as well. There's also Base camp which is very famous and has been you know remote for years and years and years but there are some resources that I believe it's there's one called we work or as we work remotely But the point is that just like you have job databases you have databases for remote work And so more and more and more of these are coming up and now also ironically, I just read that with the corona virus They're asking people to stay home. So it's actually a forced experiment and having people work from home And so I didn't go much past the headline, but it said are they coming back to the office? Nobody knows So it might be changing just for the corona virus But there's plenty of resources out there and if you want I can give you my card afterwards and I can send you those actual links I don't remember them right now Anyone else? Anybody else here would like to share their experiences was working from home. I also work from home, but I do have kids So my day is a little bit different. I would start at 8 I'd be up about 7 start at 8 and then try and get the whole day done as quickly as possible Without any breaks and try and finish around 4 4 30 and then have my day do all the other bits afterwards But divided my day up to have little breaks in between it just makes it so long And I don't have any time family time. So I think it's just finding the right pattern It took me a long time to get into that pattern as well But I think it you have to find what works for you Hmm and do you find also that you don't have to travel does that give you more time with the family or is it? Yes, but I agree with you that not traveling you miss that kind of time Disconnecting and getting back into it. You're just kind of thrown into it thrown out of it And I missed that a little bit, but I also worked from home before Cool, thank you for sharing Rachel. All right anybody else No, I will say thank you all for staying so late Thank you for listening and if you want to work remotely I can you know point you to some resources like over here But thank you all and have a great rest of your day