 Hi, I've done this conference thing, like I said, for a while, this is my very first time as a presenter. I'm super nervous. I'm going to mess that with bravado and dad jokes. This has been on my bucket list for a while, so it's kind of a cool moment for me. And I want to say thank you to everybody for the opportunity and for hanging out this long and sticking with it. Yeah, I'm Jeremy. I'm the cheerleader in chief of Think Through Math, where we use a bunch of computer what-nots to help kids learn math, like it's super cool. I live in Seattle, just north of here, and most of my team is in Pittsburgh. And before that, I was the technical director at a digital agency where I directed lots of technical things. That wasn't a remote gig, though. Before that, I worked at a startup where we did weird machine learning stuff with Ruby for calendars, and that went kind of bust. But my team was in Providence, and again, I was in Pittsburgh and flew back and forth a bit, so it was pretty remote. Before that, I did interaction design and development for point of sale systems in hair salons. I lived in Pittsburgh, again, and my team was in Alaska, and my client was in Berlin. So that was an interesting time. So there's a lot more to all of it, and to me, of course, but it's probably enough to get us going and for you to see that through some inexplicable reason, I've spent large chunks of my professional career working alone. I'm gonna tell you about why I think and talk so much about working alone and communication in general. I'm gonna tell you about the batteries in my brain and my body and how I figured out how they worked, and I'm gonna tell you how to do more than just cope when you work alone. I'm gonna do my best to distill all of it into four actionable pieces of advice and provide some context where remote work not only feels possible, but desirable and sustainable. Like, truthy and falsely, especially in JavaScript, nothing in life is simple. Intro, extroversion, total false dichotomy, we are mostly endiverts. Even the famous guy who coined those phrases said that a true extrovert would be a sociopath. I had like a quote and stuff, but forget it. When we say we're either an introvert or extrovert, I think what we're saying most of the time is that we have a typical preference on what we do to keep our batteries hot, and I'm gonna come back to batteries in a minute. Identify as an extrovert. And when I say that, I mean I recharge those batteries most of the time via social engagement. Introverts, on the other hand, my understanding, they recharge by more isolated activities and none is any better than the other. It's just all about what works for the person. As an extrovert, though, when I work in an office environment, it's wonderfully fulfilling, it's empowering, and with a good social chemistry amongst my coworkers, which I'm fortunate enough to enjoy, I can stay motivated and motivating, engaged and engaging perpetually. That's not what this talk is about, of course. This talk is about how I survived and eventually thrived working alone. I was a weird kid. I suffered a speech impediment as a child. I stuttered to an extent that speech therapy is a part of my life in varying prevalence from ages six to 18. There I learned to think about what I'm saying. I learned that there's a word road in front of me and there are hazards and holes in that road and I have a special set of skills that helps me maneuver around them. This special attention to words and speaking is net me many benefits, the most important of which is to do exactly what I'm doing right now, which is to speak and be understood. A lifetime of thinking about how I use words blossomed into academic and professional interest and how people communicate with each other. In high school, I lettered in math twice. Thank you. My university education was in the social sciences, liberal arts, and I got my first programming gig in 2004 and it's been what I've been doing since. I bill myself as an interaction engineer. I care very deeply about how people communicate with each other through systems. Most often those systems are web applications. That's what pays the bills, but not always. Like I said, I built point of sale systems, which is a whole different kind of interaction pattern. And this one time, an interaction engineering was literal hack. We took four inches off the base of a podium so that a certain congressman appeared taller than he actually was. So a weird mix, writing, editing, programming, designing, social science, and computer science. In my heart of hearts, I dream of someday being a copy editor or a speech writer. Some context. So, small disclaimer, I can tell you about what's worked for me in my situation. I've done this full time, remote, across time zones and continents, three times in 10 years, so that's what I'm qualified to talk about. I can't tell you for it with any certainty what will work for you, but I'm more than happy to spend some time with you to figure it out. So here's my situation. My team is pretty much local to each other. I'm the odd guy out. We are a product shop as opposed to an agency or an institution. I was privileged to spend some time with my team in person about six months before I shipped out to Seattle, and we use very text-heavy tools to stay in contact. Some, none, all of these may apply to you. I'm hoping at least some. I think there's anything too unusual about this arrangement if you do remote work, but it does should directly affect how you do stuff. Working in a consulting shop versus a product shop may not change your day-to-day programming too much, but it likely includes significantly more interaction with external clients, and that's the kind of consideration that would alter my approach to work. So the following advice will be most applicable to people in situations similar to mine. I hope there's some value in it for everyone. Just remember, of course, your mileage likely varies. Communication is the intentional transmission of messages, and that's it. The rub is what does intentional mean, and we can talk about that all day, and it gets existential and frustrating pretty quickly. So in the name of moving forward, we're going to define intentional as a mostly conscious effort on the part of an individual, and leave it at that. Being in an office, we use all manner of communication. There's words, of course, written and spoken, but equally important, there's gestures, which I use a lot of. I talk with my hands, movements, body positions, verbal cues that aren't words, verbal cues in place of words, and a couple dozen others that I can't remember at the moment. Being remote, I lose all of these. We've all experienced this to some degree. It's essentially impossible without tone and pacing to convey irony or sarcasm on Twitter. That's how you start a lot of fires. The manner in which you alter the delivery of a message is as intentional and crucial as the message itself, even if it happens seemingly semi or unconsciously. Successful remote work requires active communication. That means willful, careful consideration of how you communicate, in addition to what you communicate. As a remote worker, I've got limited channels available. My effectiveness and productivity and ultimately my happiness is tied to how well I can leverage those channels to get messages from my brain and into yours. So voices, your voice has grown, like a garden or muscles. It takes hard work and a little luck and a lot of trial and error. Once you start paying attention to your voice, you begin to see the gardens that other people are cultivating. To talk about my voice, I wanna tell you about my friend, Chris. I've known him for a couple years. We work really well together and we ship features, like a lot of features. We call him CG, it's a clever nickname that's the phonetical pronunciation of his initials, CNG. And I want to tell you a little about working with CG because he really helped me find and cultivate my voice. He calls him like he sees him, right to the heart of matters. He's a self-described introvert who somehow hasn't tired of me. And he's really good at his job and he's a really good friend. When I worked in the office back in Pittsburgh, I would know when CG was frustrated. He clipped his words more, kind of a rattling cadence. It was a stark contrast to his normally very wide and very southern flow. He's from Atlanta. Most times he wasn't frustrated with me, most times. A fact confirmed by his body language and facial expressions. He'd lean back in his chair, wave a hand dismissively at the screen in front of him and say in my general direction, how in the hell did this ever work? It's a favorite of his. It's the way he turned his body to me coupled with a small furrow and his brow and a slight smile that I told me that he was commiserating rather than accusing. How would this exchange work in a chat room? How do I or CG or you communicate or commiserate rather than accuse? I don't have tone or cadence or facial expression or body language to help me out. What I really do have are memes, emoticon, emoji, hyperbole, oversharing and poor spelling. And it's with those tools that I've constructed my voice. So all of these sampled in the last week at work. This is just how I talk to people. I'm really sorry guys. They teach you in business English to write like you talk. And then they teach in creative writing to never write like you talk. And even a character's dialogue should be in their voice and not your own. Chatting with coworkers is somewhere in the middle. I mean half the time I'm working but I'm also socializing. I'm explaining and I'm storytelling. I'm professional and I'm casual. It's a blend of fact and fiction and it's a lot of work to keep in balance. In my experience, my coworkers associate long periods of radio silence with mostly negative things like frustration, disengagement and confusion. So I err on the side of over and hyper communication. At times I feel like a caricature of myself. But the voice is there and the result is that I'm more real and more relevant to the people on the other end of the wire. I'm gonna do that thing where I read exactly what's on the slide. Even though everyone says you're not supposed to but this is important and if you write anything down it should probably be this. Cultivate your voice such that you are memorable without being hard to decipher, explanatory without being condescending and inquisitive without being confrontational. These are subjective words. It's gonna take some work. It's gonna take some practice and you're gonna make mistakes. And when you do own them, apologize and promise you'll do better. I'm still learning and working on it. Fran recently asked on Twitter about strategies people employ to help newcomers feel welcome. This was my reply and thinking about it later. It felt like fertile ground for your voice garden. The default pronouncing is something I'm still working on. In fact, I messed up on it about 45 seconds ago. I'll get there and my friends and coworkers are very gracious with my occasional bros and guys and dudes and brothers. Let's talk about batteries. I mentioned them earlier. Let's talk about them in detail. Keep them alive. I've got two batteries. Most people have at least two. You might have more. I think of them as my work and my life battery and I'm holding my hands over my chest because in my mind brain my batteries occupy the same space as my lungs. I don't know what that says about me. My work battery over here on the right side governs my productivity and engagement. My life battery here at the left and conveniently over my heart governs my happiness. It's really that simple. I can be productive of work and not too happy with my life. I can be super happy with my life and not be very productive at work. But being productive and happy is a sweet spot and in that sweet spot I feel like all of my activities draw in balanced measure from those batteries. I can work hard and feel good about using half of my waking hours. I can enjoy a very lazy or a very active Saturday and not stress the upcoming Monday. It's when I get out of balance, that's the problem. I'll sap my life battery to keep my work effort powered and that's crunch time. And the cost is a marked decline in my happiness and the happiness of those around me, I get grumpy. Likewise, if I don't make the effort to keep that life battery charged, I get restless at work and leading to low engagement and high distraction. I'll seesaw between these states until I find a way to get back in balance. So let's talk about balance. My strategy to keeping in balance is rooted firmly in my extraversion. As I said earlier, I think that the approach a person takes to battery management is a really good metric for gauging their placement on the anti-version scale. So here is my surefire strategy to keeping my life battery in good order. I go do stuff where I might maybe talk to people. That's it. But really the optional social component of a non-work activity is the key. It lets me recharge or discharge at will. It's the key is the environment where I can absorb the scene or actively participate with others. Gym, super awesome for this. If I'm overflowing with energy and feel restless, I can put on my headphones and listen to some trashy punk rock and move heavy things into my arms literally fall off and they have to be reattached. If I'm low and I kinda need a boost, I can go to the gym and benefit from some shared focus and shared interest with the gym goer and strike up a conversation and feel that duality of purpose. Concerts are great for this as are farmer markets and street fairs. Extraversion typically manifests in a way that it seems like I can talk to somebody forever, seemingly endless, but that's not true. Being alone in a crowd is a great way to kind of feed off that shared energy and recharge. Managing my work battery though is more challenging. It's about utilizing my not work brain to do work brain things but in a very specific context. Mandatory talky bits are the key. It's the difference between like a meetup and a hack night. It's way too easy to go heads down at a hack night if there's not any emphasis on a social component and that heads down time is so wonderful. It feels so good, but it's 100% out of that work battery. I really need conversation and connection to recharge. A good conversation at a meetup will carry me for a week at work. Two hours hacking quietly in the corner will just kill my motivation to get out of bed the next morning. It's kind of a conundrum. So focusing on activities that have that mandatory component will keep me lively. I surround myself with peeps that do what I do and it makes me better at talking about what I do which is pretty important given that my paycheck is beholded to limited communication mediums on other people's social bandwidth. And if you've got an important message to convey on a limited medium, other people's social bandwidth, gotta make sure you're good at talking about it and you gotta make sure that you're gonna leverage every advantage available to you. So let's talk about tools. Let me be very brief here because this is trial and error and this is where the variability is. You don't have to figure it out alone though. I'll talk to you about stuff that's worked for me. Tell me what you're trying. Talk to other people who work remote. We like to talk about our process. Get you started though. Here are three strategies that work really well for me. Really good tools. I love to pair program. Let's me be chatty and productive at the same time and it helps me submit an understanding and unfamiliar concepts of course. And it's another tool in maintaining relationships with coworkers. It's super fun and if you're gonna pair, by all means, please use Screen Hero. They just came out of beta and they are totally worth all the dollars that they ask for which I believe are nine, nine of your dollars. But only use them if you're a fan of software that works much more often than it doesn't. On the other end of the scale there are things like go to meeting and Google Hangouts. These things are equally terrible and equally necessary. I like being part of a conversation and these are the tools that let me do it. In a pinch they can serve as a pairing platform for remote employees but Screen Hero is so much better. The text communication isn't cutting it. Have an easy way to jump into a voice or video call. Do it enough that it feels normal. Practice, take time to practice transitioning a conversation from a text based format to a video call. It should feel super normal. The last one is called Everybody's Remote and we do this a lot on my team. We get together to chat like a stand up maybe or perhaps a planning meeting or even just a catch up. We do it as if everyone is remote even if everybody but me is sitting in the same room together. Everybody gets on their laptops, they put on their headsets, they log into a Google Hangout and this subjects everyone to the horrors of latency and awkward silence. So it levels that playing field and it kinda helps your coworkers understand the context which is your full time. It's really hard to interact in a group conversation when there's three seconds of latency and I'm nothing but a sweaty forehead on a screen. So continuing with leveraging, you just have to accept that your day to day affairs as a remote worker are different. Your environment is different and that's okay. If you try to force an experience that emulates what you do at the office, you're going to be unhappy. Working at home, you have unparalleled flexibility in your approach and your timing. Early in my remote career, I would go through extraordinary links to recreate the office experience and I seem to forget this every year or so and start doing dumb things. Most recently, this included trying to make stand-up. The stand-up is at 9.15 in Pittsburgh, which is 6.15 in Seattle. That's really early to talk about work, especially if you're accustomed to rolling into work around nine. I did that for a couple of months too last summer and eventually I approached the CTO to discuss alternatives and long story short, putting in those early morning show that I was willing to do the work, that I was willing to be flexible so they were too and we found a compromise and makes things easier and better for me and the other people these days. Stand-up happens at a much more reasonable time for me. It's like 8.30. My team appreciates and I'm coherent and prepared and I appreciate having a work day that feels sane. I still work early. My work day starts at 7 a.m. My friends think I'm crazy but I totally love it. The thing that started as a detriment, these time zone differences has become a really wonderful positive. Took me a while to figure it out but now I start at 7 and I wrap at 3. And when I say a wrap I don't mean just work work. Typically by 3 p.m. I've got my not work work wrapped too. Does anybody do Pomodoro, the tomato timer, right? I'm not super strict with it. The general idea is that for every hour you work you take five or 10 minutes to rest, reset and deal with distractions. At the office for me that usually meant checking Facebook and getting another terrible cup of coffee but at home Pomodoro breaks for me or walking the dog, changing the laundry, loading the dishwasher, checking the mail in all manner of similar activities that eat into my not work time. And but Jeremy, I can hear you thinking, I don't know why you sound like that but you do. But Jeremy, you're taking a break from work by doing more work. Yeah, that's kind of true but it's different work. It's a context switch, right? It's mostly physical, requires little to no brain power and that's what the work breaks are all about. You move around a little bit. You rest your brain and you hydrate and then you're ready to jump back in. So why not take that time to throw the garbage or empty the dishwasher? Talking a little more about time, commuting is the worst thing ever. If you commute now, stop, quit your job, go find some place you don't have to commute. My worst commute was 90 minutes in a car, each way, every day. I did that for about a year. My commute now is six seconds. 15 if I stop and say hi to the dog. And I don't get that time back just from commuting. Since I work alone, I wear my gym clothes in the morning so I can get a quick workout and at lunch. I live in a building that has a gym in it and that's one of the biggest reasons I live there. So I lose no time to commuting, traveling to and from the gym or for meals since I eat at home almost every day and health and dollar professionals will tell you that's typically a really good thing. So my coffee is better than yours. I mean, almost certainly. I can't say it 100% but most likely in nine situations out of 10, my coffee is much better than yours because I'm home and I can do dumb things like roast my own beans. Being at this little ceramic manual burgriner takes 225 rotations to make four cups of coffee. Good coffee's important to me and working at home lets me geek out on that as much as I want and I could do that in an office but it'd be a lot harder. I mean, I have friends that do shout out to Paul. But it's so much easier. There's nothing to transport, right? It's easy to store and retrieve. There's no worries about getting lost or stolen or misplaced or broken. It's just my stuff in my kitchen. So at 3 p.m., maybe four, if I'm dragging that day, my work work is done and I feel good about it. I'm at home as clean, the chores are done. I've been to the gym and I'm ready for my day to begin. That's the big difference. Before I got good at this, when I worked in an office and I commuted every day with the exception of dinner and some laying, I'm sorry, see I did it again with some boring television, my day was pretty much over when I left work. It's different now. I leave work, my day starts. Anyway, the coffee and gym and spending time with my super cute dog are just examples of what working at home lets me do that'd be really much harder in a shared office. But conversely, let's be fair, some things are a lot easier in the shared office. It's not all sunshine and unicorns. There are definitely some things I miss about working shoulder to shoulder with others. The slide here kind of makes light of it but the atomic components of a team culture are comprised of shared experiences and peer validation. That's gossips, jokes and hugs. When you spend time with people, like half your waking hours, five days a week, they become significant in your life and you become significant in theirs. There's a camaraderie there and a relevance that factors into all manner of decisions and actions. Without physically being present, it's very easy for me to lose that relevance and with it, the consideration of my peers. I didn't know how to address this for a long time until I met Carol. Carol's known as the hammer of justice on our team. And if that sounds intimidating, you're half right. But hammers build houses as readily as they knock them down and Carol's a fantastic architect of both software and teams. I explained my growing illies and feelings of irrelevance one afternoon and the next morning I had a calendar invite from her for a new event called the whiskey hangout. Carol and I both enjoy craft whiskey. In fact, the first team bonding event I ever planned at Think Through Math was a tour of a craft distillery in Pittsburgh. If you ever go to Pittsburgh, I recommend you check it out, come talk to me. Anyway, her idea was to recreate the water cooler experience except with whiskey and were 1500 miles apart. Twice a month, she'd work from home and after the workday was over, we'd chat via Google Hangouts and enjoy a whiskey drink. That's it. She fills me in with what's happening in the office in the city and I tell her what's going on with me in Seattle. We cancel when we have to but about six months in we're still going pretty strong. It provides context. I need to understand what's happening in the business and it lets me reconnect with a really good friend. It's rad. Oh, and I get to drink whiskey at three in the afternoon because yay time zones, right? First person ever, time zones are awesome. So what's this all mean? It means that choosing remote work is choosing a different approach. If conducted with significant forethought and consideration it can provide a lifestyle that minimizes the headaches of traditional office jobs and traditional office culture without sacrificing the personal fulfillment of shared labor. I promised you the beginning of all of this. There were four actionable things and we covered them in some manner of detail but to recap, grow a voice, takes practice and work, manage your batteries, figure out the things that keep you going and make sure you give them time, use good tools, screen heroes, like the best thing that's happened to me software-wise in a couple of years and then leverage the positives around you which I do by minimizing the time I have to spend and boring things and minimize those negatives which I do by finding new and innovative ways to drink whiskey with my coworkers. That's it, it's that easy. I really hope this helps you get your feet wet with remote work, with hard work and patience. You can learn to dislike wearing shoes just like I do and I'm always around if you wanna chat. I wanna say thank you again to everybody for this opportunity to share and a special thank you for Ben and Karin for giving me the opportunity to present and for putting together some amazing conference. I've been on the other side of that registration table and it's an obscene amount of work so kudos and cheers. Thank you. Thank you.