 Thank you, Luca. Hi, everyone. Hello. All right. Let's do it after this thorough introduction. I need to try and not be in the way of the projector. It's going to be hard because I, like, walk all around the line. But to start things, hi. I am Petia. Luca already said in short, I work a lot and I do a lot of things. I am a project manager for a company called Human Made who does enterprise WordPress development where an agency and a product company that works for clients, big enterprise clients, big media, but also creates their own products. I'm also a WordPress contributor. I'm involved with the polyglots team and with the community team, I help translate WordPress to Bulgarian and I also help all the other translators from all over the world get started, keep going, localize WordPress, bring it to more people. It's something that I'm very, very proud of. I also have the privilege to be a lead organizer of WorkCamp Europe this year, alongside 20 other amazing, amazing people, including Sartoni. And if you have a ticket for WorkCamp Europe, we'll see you then. And if you don't, it's sold out, so sorry, next year. Yeah. All right. So about 14 months ago, like a year ago, but 14 months ago, I became location independent, which means I started working for a distributed company. I got hired by Human Made and I became a part of a company that employs 30 people in three... What? Yeah? Do you hear me okay now? Okay. So 30 people all over the world, clients all over the world, all completely remote. We don't have an office anywhere, so that means that we are able to work from anywhere. And in the past 14 months, this is what happened to me. I've been to 21, I've worked from 21 countries. I gave 12 conference talks. I've been in three continents. I launched nine projects with Human Made, and I organized four events, including WordPress events and community events. And I sent, as of this morning, 100,000 to 23, 324, whatever, sorry, yeah, that number of messages on Slack. And for the last 14 months, I've been thinking about what is remote working and what my takeaways are from the past year. And there's one thing that I realized. It was an epiphany that came to me about two weeks ago, and this is my biggest takeaway. And it's this one. My mom makes the best chicken soup in the whole world. It's like there's no chicken soup in the whole world that can match my mom. It's like, sorry, I know. You probably think it's stupid and like I'm failing. And this talk is completely useless. I will actually, apart from that, I will actually try and share a couple of things about communication in a remote environment and also productivity and happiness, because that's what everybody assumes remote working is, being able to work from everywhere, making up your own hours, right? Like, why not be happy? So let's start with communication and the first takeaway. When communicating online, this is like the bottom line always. Set expectations about what you're going to do in writing and then meet them. If you're not good at setting expectations, get better, because if you're not setting expectations right, you're going to fail at remote working. In a remote environment, we exchange the office with a lot of tools. We use Slack and different chat channels for live communication. We use Zoom and Skype for video calls. We use Trello. It's one of the tools that we use to keep track of projects and clients and asynchronous communication is a very, very important thing. But communication, they say, in a remote environment, isn't oxygen. And too much oxygen, as well as too little, can also kill you. So you have to be careful about not overdoing everything when communicating online. I know I'm being a little vague and hopefully I can get a little detail, but I don't have much time, so I'll go through this and if you have specific questions, ask me later. Too much oxygen can kill you mean that over communicating in a remote environment can also mean burning out and also mean you not getting away from your computer for 20 plus hours. Before I get back to that, I'm going to talk a little bit about written communication. When you're not in person, when you're not face to face with a person that you want that you want to talk to, there are a lot of things that get missed. There is just the written communication, the language and sometimes people have different backgrounds and they have different levels of mastery of the language. So in written communication, especially across multicultural environments, this is what I always do. Whatever somebody tells you, whatever way they tell it to you, always assume they mean no harm. They are being aggressive, they are being passive aggressive, something they said is offending you. It's probably not what you're thinking. Assumptions are very, very wrong in a remote environment when communicating and writing. So what I always try to do is strip all of the words that seem harmful or offensive to me and try to get what this person is trying to say. Just strip all the context, all the cultural biases and try to think what is this person saying? I have a problem, I cannot do this. Even if you assume by what they are saying, it's your fault that I cannot do this. What they are actually saying is I cannot do this, help me. It's almost never personal. It's almost never about you. It's always about their frustration and their inability to accomplish something and you being one of the obstacles. It's not personal, don't take it personal. And when in doubt, this is the rule of thumb. Just be nice. There's one universal language and it's kindness. Kindness is as a facial expression can be seen but kindness in writing needs to be specifically expressed. It needs to be there, visible. Think instead of like ask instead of demanding, for example. Ask for more clarification. If you're not absolutely sure a person means what they mean, put your assumption in writing and then finish the sentence with correct question mark. If they confirm, that's what they meant. If they don't, you keep going until you understand what the other person means and what they're saying. And this is something I've been working on for 33 years. Don't take yourself too seriously. You're usually getting offended because you're thinking, oh, I put so much work into this. I spent so many hours and what is this person now doing? They're telling me that this is not enough. It's my fault. Something is happening or something like that. Oh. You're just one person, like the other person on the other side on a computer. Don't think about what you've done and what you deserve and what you don't deserve. Think about the end call. This person is trying to tell you something. Try to understand what it is. Rule number one in a remote environment. Document everything. In Human Made, at Human Made we use internal blogs for literally everything that goes on in client projects and in products. We need to document every meeting. We need to have notes from every call. Everything that develops on a project gets put into writing. Otherwise, somebody along the line will miss it. Somebody will miss that something happened on a project. And we use a tool called P2. And P2 is like a blog that you can write on from the front end. And P2 is religion. It's like, you know, it's state of mind. It's a way of life. So you forgot to take notes at that last meeting in a remote environment. That's failure. All right. Productivity. There's a lot to be said here. I can talk for two hours about how to be productive in a remote environment. But it comes down to this. Choose your battles. Set goals. There's always a lot to do. There's always a lot to do. Choose your battles. Set goals the night before or in the morning. And then stick to them. Stick to those goals. If something urgent pops up and in a remote environment, something urgent always pops up, just exchange one thing with the other. Don't just add it to the queue. But choose your battles and stick to the goals that you set. Otherwise, your productivity will go to hell and you will eventually fail at whatever you're doing. You will not do it well or do it in a way that doesn't make you happy. And then learn what you're like, try to monitor yourself and optimize your processes. This is a tool called rescue time that I use to monitor all the websites and all the tools that I use on my day-to-day basis. And what I do is I set categories and some categories as productive and other categories as less productive. For example, my development work, my presentation writing, and different tools that require that are set as very productive. And there are other activities like Slack, for example. Sometimes it's very productive because my role is to communicate. But sometimes it's not that productive because it's also a distraction. And I iterate my categories and change what is productive and less productive on a weekly basis so that I can then go back and see how my day went, sorry. And I can see that I spent a lot of time on social media or I spent a lot more time on Slack that I anticipated. There are ways to set goals and it's like a great thing, a great tool you can use to iterate on your process so that you can be more productive. And then in a remote company, always be prepared for offline. It's going to happen. Wi-Fi will fail somewhere, your 3G card in a foreign country won't work. Be prepared for offline. Have tasks in mind that you can do while you're not connected to the internet. Even if you're a developer, you can sync up GitHub and work on your local environment. If you're a writer or a marketer, you can work on strategy and planning. There's always something to do. Never let obstacles be in the way of you working. Otherwise, if you're traveling all the time, there's always going to be something. You'll be in a car, you'll be, you'll get car sick or something like that. Plan for these things. Plan for complete work hours like at least five or six productive hours a day, even if you're going to be in transit. Otherwise, you'll fail. And last but not least, remote working is not what you imagine. If you work in a remote environment, you probably know that there are several very, very, very big issues. One of these issues is I work in a company that has employees in three continents. This means that when the UK goes to bed, Australia comes online. And sometimes I have projects with clients that are in Europe but with Australian developers. And sometimes I have projects with clients that are in Canada with European developers. And that means that if I don't force myself to stop, I can literally work 20 hours because there's always going to be something to do. And this is a huge problem in remote environment that needs addressing very, very strictly. Otherwise, it gets overlooked. And what happens in human made a lot and we're trying to fight it right now is people get, like, not intentionally. You just get pulled into it. You just work too much. And burnout is real. And it's a real problem because it affects productivity. After 10 hours in front of the computer, even if you have to do something, your productivity levels are already like at 50%. So it's not good for you. It's not good for the company. And it has to be taken seriously. Even if we laugh about it, it has to be taken seriously. In human made, we make sure we take enough holiday. And also, we share our travel plans. And we make sure that they don't interfere with anyone else's. And remote doesn't mean necessarily working alone. What we usually do is just get together, often, plan it. It's not on company time. It's not, you know, there are enough conferences, there are enough places you can go where you can meet your colleagues, meet other people. And we did it last year. It was great. Called the day time road trip. We went to four work camps, passed through seven countries in one car, four colleagues, there are people coming and going. It was really, really fun. And we also got a chance to give back to the community, which was like an additional perk. So there are two things about location independence. There is a myth and there is the reality. The myth is this, you know, you're all over the world, amazing places, taking photos, you know, just enjoying yourself. The reality is that you have to be badass, hard at work all the time, and be very motivated and very disciplined to make it work. Otherwise, you'll fail. So to sum up and go back to my big takeaway from the last 14 months, the best thing about being able to work from anywhere is eventually going home. You just appreciate it on a whole different level. You know, your mom's chicken soup as well as the long beach walks in Thailand. So yeah, it's about it. Thank you. We have time for one question, which I'm not going to ask because I'm a polite person. I'm kidding. I just, I'm just happy to be the failed guy because I'm good at that. That's the question there. I need to take a picture of that. I will. Hi, I was wondering what's your take on what it's like to be location independent when you have a family? Because this has been something on my mind for quite some time. I have two kids and they're growing up and we're actually thinking of becoming location independent, but because of their ties to schools and their community and so on, do you think that's feasible or do you think that location independence is actually limited to a childless, I don't know? I think the way I do it, it's probably better to not have kids because you're going to get killed by your partner or whoever you're raising your kids with. But I can give you two examples of colleagues and friends of mine that are doing location independence in their own way with families. One is, one couple is actually traveling along with their kid. So he's very little still. So until they start school, it's actually easier. But then the more interesting thing is what my friend Paolo does, where he moves his family every few years to a new location and it's beautiful. Like he said to me once, when my kids are 18, they will have lived in five different countries. They will speak four different languages and this is my legacy to them. This is what I can give them that no school can teach them. They will be able to appreciate differences between cultures. They will have lived in different ones being integrated into one. So if you think about it, maybe moving around every year or so is not ideal, but it's doable and there are people doing it just because they're dedicated to kind of bringing that kind of legacy to their kids. And he is location independent. His wife doesn't work, but they still manage to spend time together and they move around. They've been to a lot of places. So this is a way that you can do it with a family, I believe. Thank you very much.