 If I could boil it down, I'd do three things. I set an alarm every single day. I think it's really easy to get into the habit of sleeping in or not having that wake up time. So I set that alarm every single day. I also get dressed for work every day. I think it's easy to get in your sweatpants or your yoga pants and just say, whatever, right? But I dress for work every day. And then the other thing I do is I like to have a workspace that is clearly different from my personal space. Now, even if it's just moving a couple feet over, it's still a different mindset when you shift. So those are some of the things that I do to set a routine and how I define my workspace. Hello and welcome to a new weekly webinar from Get Lab. Each week we'll take around 30 minutes to talk about the realities of remote work. We'll tackle the real challenges, ask the hard questions, and of course, try not to take ourselves too seriously. Hi, I'm Darren, head of remote at Get Lab, the world's largest remote company. During these interesting times, we want to share some of the best practices that our team has pulled together from our years of working as an all remote company. Each week we'll uncover some of the tips, tricks, and insights gleaned from within Get Lab and from partners in the industry. We know there's a lot of great content out there, so we want ours to be digestible, actionable, and of course, as fun as possible. Among other things, we'll talk about how other companies have transitioned to remote. We'll have special interviews from tech leaders that are enabling this virtual future or present that we're living in today. We'll ask some burning questions like, what's in your tool stack? We'll digest some of the terminology like, what's a DRI? What's the difference between remote first and all remote? We'll also take a look at home office setups. We know a lot of you are diving into the world of home offices for the first time, so seeing other spaces may be of use. And finally, we'll invite a bit of balance with freezing, breathing exercises, and finding your moment of zen with our team. If you're currently juggling time management and setting new expectations with your co-workers, family, roommates, dog, inner child, and all the rest, you are not alone. We at Get Lab know what you're going through, and that's why today's theme is preventing burnout and achieving balance or doing our best to achieve that. Joining us for our inaugural webcast is Sarah DeVilla, Senior Partner Marketing Manager at Get Lab, who is also in the process of becoming a certified yoga instructor. Sarah, welcome. Hi, thanks for having me. So let's start off by asking you to tell the crowd a bit about yourself, what you do at Get Lab, and how long you've worked here, as well as how long you've worked remotely all told. For sure. So I do partner marketing for Get Lab, and that just means that I work with external partners that help tell our story or fulfill a solution for us, and I build go-to-market programs for them, and we do them together, and hopefully that helps drive increased revenue for both of our companies. I've been remote for a little over three years, and I'm relatively new to Get Lab, but I'm very familiar with a remote culture and what it takes to be successful. So we're going to touch a bit on home office spaces, but I just want to cue a little snippet about why having a dedicated space is so important. If you're in a home big enough that you can devote a room to it, that's ideal. If you're in a small one-room bedroom apartment, find something that's makeshift, even if you just hang a curtain or towel or something to block off a space where you're going to work, so that it creates a clear delineation between where you're working and where you're living. That physical separation is absolutely key, and this goes into separating work from life. Burnout is a real thing, and it is definitely possible to get burned out when you're working from home, and it's important to make intentional efforts to separate work from life, because it's all too easy for sleep to just kind of blur into work, to just kind of blur into sleeping again, and you lose track of time, lose track of your identity. So if you're just shifting to remote now, one thing I would recommend is proactively planning the time that you would usually spend commuting. So maybe you proactively plan to just rest more, totally fine, but replace it with something proactively. Replace it with cooking, replace it with exercise, replace it with e-learning with your children, replace it with calling relatives or friends, replace it with writing notes or a gratitude journal, anything, but be deliberate about replacing it with something. This helps you to wake up, ramp into the day doing something intentional in place of the commute, and then ramping out of the day doing something in place of the commute, and you'll quickly find that those are a lot more awesome than the actual commute, and you'll probably see that once that genie is out of the bottle, you're going to have a hard time going back, and you'll start to understand why remoteers love the freedom and autonomy that they have. Don't stop engaging with people. If you normally communicate with people around the coffee machine or water cooler, keep doing that. As I've mentioned, you just have to be a little bit more proactive about that, and experiment with some video-based chat tools. It's also something to consider if you're a team leader, to just have a zoom link that's kind of always on, kind of like a hotel lobby. So if anybody wants to come hang out, we're here in the hotel lobby. Come when you please. Leave when you please. No expectations. Let's just hang out. All right, so now that we're back from that, Sarah, what are the ways that you set a routine and define your workspace? Yeah, that's a really good question. So I think there's a lot of ideas out in the internet right now about what it means to be remote and how to be remote, and a lot of people wonder, like, are all of these things what I should be doing? And so for me, I try to do three things. If I could boil it down, I do three things. I set an alarm every single day. I think it's really easy to get into the habit of sleeping in or not having that wake-up time, so I set that alarm every single day. I also get dressed for work every day. I think it's easy to get in your sweatpants or your yoga pants and just say whatever, right? But I dress for work every day. And then the other thing I do is I like to have a workspace that is clearly different from my personal space. Now, even if it's just moving a couple feet over, it's still a different mindset when you shift. So those are some of the things that I do to set a routine and how I define my workspace. I really love that concept of a different chair. Obviously, it's ideal if you can devote an entire space in your home, but we're seeing a lot of people that have been thrust into remote and they live in a one-bedroom apartment, and so kind of everything happens in one room. So if you don't have the luxury of a dedicated room or dedicated space, even changing chairs can signal this is where work happens and this is where life happens. I want to ask you one more thing on the routine. So I've advised people that have become suddenly remote. You might want to stick to the routine to begin with, because you need as much stabilization as you possibly can. But also one of the perks of remote is that it enables you to kind of experiment with what your day looks like. And if your peak productivity hours are different than the rigid nine to five, it gives you the freedom to do that. It enables what I like to call a non-linear workday. So I'm curious if you've experimented with that or what the timing looks like when you can say, all right, I'm familiar enough with what's going on. Let's experiment with breaking up the day a little bit. Yeah, for sure. So I think when you're first new to remote or you're first new into a new remote situation, it's nice to have that structure, right? My manager is going to know that I'm on from this time. They know when they can reach me. But once you've kind of established what you're doing and who you are, you can be a little bit more flexible with that. So if you need to take an hour in the middle of the day to take a walk or to walk your dog or that sort of thing, I really enjoy that, you know, we have the flexibility to do that. And it's not frowned upon, it's actually encouraged. Yeah, and for people that want to try that out and say, how do I communicate that? I think it can be as simple as making sure your slack status is up to me. And just kind of letting people know where you're going. And it also just kind of folds into having a non-judgmental culture around things like that. You want to make sure people can actually leave their desk just as they would in an office to go take care of things like that. So speaking of that, GitLab actually does have a few subvalues that come into play. So I want to cue a snippet talking about no ego and low level of shame, two of my very favorite subvalues. Here's a sneak peek. I would say that both no ego and low level of shame, they sort of overlap for me. They're almost two sides of the same coin in that I have noticed in my time at GitLab that the no ego sort of allows you to be a little more resilient when dealing with other people. So you've got the ability to put yourself out there a little bit and take risks, which is the low level of shame, not worrying too much about the anxiety that typically associates in the company is that. And then the no ego is the sort of flip and counter side to that where if you strip ego away from your interactions with people, it becomes a little more resilient and a little more buffered for lack of a better term as to making that conversation flow better and any potential problems that arise end up being a little more than hiccups I would hope. All right, we're back. Sarah, how do you work and communicate with your team asynchronously? And for those that aren't aware, asynchronous is work happening when people aren't necessarily online at the same time or in the same meeting room at the same time. This is what we would call synchronous work. Yeah, so my team, my immediate team, we're in different time zones. So a lot of the work that we do is asynchronous. And so for our team it's particularly important to collaborate in the issues and just providing status updates and notes in there so everybody knows where we are with the project and they can pick it up, you know, from where you left it off. And the other thing for my team, but this is the culture and the nature of my team, we're a really friendly team. So we do a lot of communication in Slack and we rely heavily on GIFs to convey our feelings and emotions. I had, when I first onboarded at GitLab, my onboarding buddy told me that it's really important to use emojis because sometimes your text just doesn't come through the way you mean it to. So we take it one step further and we use a lot of GIFs as well. I like that. One of the first things I did in my tenure here is actually added a handbook section on it's okay to use emoji and actually cited a university study where they looked at remote teams and they found that for remote teams the more use of emoji in business communication, the more that people actually empathize and understood each other. So I think one thing that remote is doing is breaking down some of the stigma around hey is it okay to use an emoji or a GIF in business communication. I mean you're not in the same office, it's like absolutely yes. Anything that you can do to add depth and precision to whatever you're trying to convey, it helps teams empathize and build those bonds with each other. That's awesome. I love the thing about GIFs. So whatever it is for your team, find something that you can connect that livens up the text just a bit. Yes, totally agree. So I want to ask you about unwinding. So how do you unwind and re-center yourself between calls a marathon of zooms or at the end of your work? Yeah for sure. I'm sure lots of people are like this, it's just back to back calls at this point in your life maybe more so than you ever had before. I'm fortunate to live in a space where I have a little bit of green space in the backyard so if I have five minutes I get up from my chair and I take the time to walk outside to the backyard, walk around the garden, say hello to a butterfly if I see them, you know just put out some gratitude into the universe and then come back in a little bit refresh. It was only a couple minutes but you know got a little bit of vitamin D and some fresh air so that's how I like to unwind between calls. Yeah and I would say for anyone listening you really have to be intentional about this. When you're working remotely especially for the first time it is very easy to just get stuck in your chair and just plow through the day and then just keep going and never actually give yourself permission to stand up because the reality is something is always happening especially in an asynchronous team where you have people around the globe contributing to different projects at different times. So if you're just kind of wait for the perfect time to get up and actually stretch your legs go get some fresh air it might not happen. So in a remote setting you have to say I'm taking permission, I'm giving myself permission to go do this and you have to do that. It's one of the ways that we actively work to prevent burnout and isolation. All right Sarah, so on to the good stuff. Can we have a tour of your home office? Okay here goes. Welcome to the inside of my CASA. This is the GitLab cribs edition, kidding. So I actually share my office space with my partner. So we share a big conference table. He gets one side I get the other and what I was talking about with the two chairs I wasn't joking. I literally have two chairs one right next to the other and at the end of the workday if I still want to sit at my computer I just scooch over to the other chair and even though it's just a shift of not even a foot it's a mental shift of a mile and that's that's my my home office. Yeah speaking of GIFs I actually saw one over the weekend it was a late night host and he was sitting on the left side of his couch frantically typing away on his laptop and then he threw his hands up and said oh thankfully it is now the weekend and then he got up shifted over to the right side of the couch reopened his laptop and then presumably went to watch Netflix but to your point it might look similar but the mental shift means a lot and being deliberate about trying to separate work life and and home life is really big especially for people that have shared spaces but that's very cool that you share that space with your partner I guess in an office environment it's very very common for people to share spaces and share desks but just having that open dialogue between the folks that are working together and obviously you can probably hear my child and wife behind me we all share spaces to some degree and I think that's one of the cool things about remote is it breaks down the stigma of your office needs to be some pristine board grows to kind of mimic the office that conceivably you left and now we're realizing that's that's not practical and it's not necessary it's it actually humanizes it quite a bit to recognize that hey we're all seeing each other's home or work spaces we're all humans first and colleagues second so I can definitely appreciate that yeah so I want to wrap this one up by asking you a question I've been told that you could lead us and help us in a breathing exercise to help us get grounded and make sure there's balance in our life so take it away yeah for sure so if you want to join in you can definitely do that what you could start with by doing is if you're seated in a chair just stay where you are just make sure that your feet are firmly planted on the ground you'll take one hand and put it on your chest like up here and you'll take the other hand and put it on the top of your belly like right there and then when you breathe in you want to think the word saw s a and when you breathe out you want to think the word ha h a so it would look something like this and I would have thought the word saw and then so if we're going to do this and we're going to do it together we'll do it together three times ready much better so if you can't yeah if you can't get out to walk the yard or to walk your dogs in between calls you can do that and that took like what less than 30 seconds go that's pretty great yeah it doesn't take anything extravagant it just takes intentionality and actually we talk about intentionality a lot at GetLab and how we work but it's pretty fascinating that that even applies to taking a breather from work and kind of resetting yourself in the middle of the day and you're right that could happen even between calls even if you only have one or two minutes between calls helps you kind of reset and get back in the zone awesome well thank you so much Sarah thank you for joining us and helping us kick off this weekly webcast next week we're going to focus on the ideal tools needed to thrive as a remote team and if you have questions please tweet us at GetLab and we'll try to work those into the next episode be sure to connect with us on LinkedIn and Twitter visit all remote.info for all of our all remote guides as well as our remote work report and the free remote playbook where where we package all of our best learnings up into one easy to digest ebook we can't wait to talk more soon and until then stay cozy be excellent to one another aloha and mahal