 The accommodation. As a person that never gets sick, yet walking to Mongia. I didn't even know this was a thing, so getting on a plane was really an option as in Victoria, British Columbia. And I'm really grateful. I love Montreal so much. When I tell people about Canada and the States, I'm always like, do you have to go to Montreal? And I'm sure the streets were insane last night because Go Raptors! Wow, what a nail-wider game that was. Today I'm really excited to join you folks to talk about living the dream is a big thing. Working from home is a big thing. And I gave a presentation in Austin a couple years ago when remote work was just really becoming a thing. And it's interesting now that remote work has become so prevalent. It's actually kind of intense sometimes, and that's what this presentation is talking about. I'm going to go ahead and get started. Let's see here. Can everybody see my screen okay? Yep, yes. Awesome. Okay, wonderful. I can see you up here as well. So welcome again. This is exciting to be here. We're not out there, so I love you all. We'll go ahead and get started. So first off, as I mentioned, I'm Ms. Defendant Head of Founder and CEO of Canada Studios. We really build, design, and support websites for clients that only make impact, and we take care of the whole life cycle of the website. So we believe the first day of the website goes live is the first day of your project, because then the world gets to see you. So the folks that are there, how many of you already work from home? Three quarters of the room. And I already work from home. It must be so relaxing. You get to work from anywhere. You have a really flexible schedule. You, of course, you get to wear whatever you want. Really? Social interactions, you have a lowly. It's not as motivating. Working from home can also be physically damaging if you're not moving around as much as when you have to commute or work in an office. It's stressful sometimes to work from home. What's kind of interesting is that this intention economy that we live in has made work intense. And the intention economy means, and there's this expectation of real-time responses. I found this very fascinating that us as service professionals, 94% of us would in 50-plus hours a week, with nearly half of that group clocking 65 hours. As part of this attention economy, we don't really get uninterrupted time. Our phones are on from the time you wake up to the time you go to bed. Interestingly enough, from the State of Life Work Balance report that I investigated was that 40% of knowledge workers never get more than 30 minutes of straight-in uninterrupted time. And it's interesting because it's well-established that as long as possible, except for 1% to 2% of the population, it's a multi-task. Most of us try to spend our days bouncing from task to task or try to make up lost time by multi-tasking, but it's not really a very effective. We use 56 apps and websites every day and switch between them over three. And we're too much of an honor to work long hours and leave sleep. And the funny thing is that when we pass a certain threshold of working hours, our sleep starts to become impaired, we're more likely to feel depressed and stressed. We have a hard time communicating, collaborating, and getting things done. And people are proud of this. And what's the most scary to me is that stress is transferable. If anybody's had that boss, they know that their life generally, like it just goes down, right? And they can take that stress everywhere they go. So, stress is transferred from boss to staff and staff to staff to staff to clients, you know, from team to team, from staff to team home. So, without too much work doing today's stuff because it's kind of scary out there in the State of Life Work Balance when doing this research, you know, workers are getting less than three hours of productive time a day. Twenty-one percent of their days is spent on like social media and news. And yet 28% of us start their day before 38, 8.30. Many of the people starting before 7 a.m. 5% of us use our computers after 10 p.m. and 26% of our work. One quarter of our work is done outside of normal working hours. Valerie, I'm sure you've picked up some weekends that you've had to get stuff done. And these two are kind of scary, is that we check instant message on average every six minutes. And since 41% of our day is spent multitasking, no wonder it feels intense at work. So, and this is whether you're in the office or at home, when you're at home, some of this stuff is really compounded. So, let's stop for a moment, people. This is interesting. What we want to do is we all want to have a home and happy day at work. So, our intensity, but the balance, and harmony. I love this quote because we can't keep going to be happy. We actually have to find that balance and order and the rhythm and harmony. So, I found that as growing a remote team comes to work, it's a two-sided, it's a two-way mission. So, each of us, the employee and the company needs to stand together and connect to make this happen. So, I'm going to go through both. So, as an employee, I'm going to give this remote presentation. What's always get dressed? Get up and now it is not an option on our path. You can always have to wear pants or shirts or anything. The point is that getting out and getting dressed is why it's being a very good thing to start your day or to be very exact. It's true. Lunch. It's really important. I noticed that some new employees that start working with us is we urge them to put it out on lunchtime and check it out and go outside. And, you know, we have this thing that I'm like, I like to take a hundred steps after eating because it feels great. So, you know, have lunch, make a lunch, make sure you take a lunch and get outside. Work space, time and boundaries. So, for example, I use my iPad for my nighttime stuff. I'm not going to be totally a plug, but it's nice to not have Gmail and Slack and all those things plugged into that. You know, often it's a place where, you know, I live part-time in San Francisco. My living room is my office, so I have got one of those Japanese divider boards and I stick out in front of my desk because I don't see it on the weekends. You know, there's lots of ways to create space. You can also create space in your head by using the Pomodoro Technique. If you're feeling overwhelmed, it's a really great place to start, to say 25 minutes at a time. The Pomodoro Technique is where you focus for 25 minutes at a time and then you take break. So, this is very helpful if you are feeling very s-pulled out. Also, when you work remote, you underestimate this when they're first starting to work remote. If you're planning to travel and go somewhere, check the Wi-Fi first. Even ask them to send you a speed test because sometimes they'll be like, oh yeah, our internet's great. You can totally work from here and you get there and you can't and then that's very stressful and that does not make a calm day at work when you can't get online. While creating rituals and bookending, your days is a great way to create some space. For me, it's more like walking with my dogs and then you can walk with the dogs to create space for more. I have a bunch of my crew that gets dressed and wants to Starbucks and gets their coffee from a Starbucks every day. Or Tim Hortons, right? There's lots of different options. Wait, they can book up to school and then they know when they get back they're grounded and focused. So, why do some ritual in a team? Oh, and I have to say, I really love working at home because I have dogs. They're both amazing. They're amazing little distractor factors where they do encourage me to get outside. If it's not possible to get a dog, I would definitely... We have a great channel at County Studios that's called our Fitness and House channel and that we set up stepping challenges with each other. So, there's an app called Stride Kick that allows like the Fitbits and the Garments and the Apple Watches all to be saved on the same schedule when you create little competitions. So, we have a work week hustle and that's always nice to know if you've learned it in the office. Tim, stretching is basic stretches that computer nerds like us can do and it's easy. It's forward fold. It's one of the most powerful yoga stretches and it's really easy. You can even do it sitting on your couch, put your legs out straight and just lean over. If you're tired like me, you probably won't go very far anyways. So, you'll be able to watch the program and then you'll be relaxing. So, hand yoga. We do a lot of computer stuff stretching on our wrists. It's a great way to always do different types of hand yoga. Great way to wait for the coffee to brew. Do some stretching. It's amazing what the body feels when you move a little bit. And this is really interesting. I found that creating some life work balance made cutting screen time. So, I love a powerful female speaker named Mel Robbins. Love her. Definitely recommend reading all of her books. But what I love about her is the phone is one of your most your worst productivity in having a scalar. If you cut off the screen time, you're taking control of your life. One thing she taught me was to not sleep with it in my room. Having as a CEO, putting away my phone is kind of scary sometimes. But really, what helps it helps me take back my time. So, I turn off my phone in three hours before I go to sleep. I read or I meal prep or I play with the dogs or I play with the harp. I just try not to have the screen time and avoid life feel a lot better. I found that as busy people and we probably some of us are kids or obligations and so forth, often the only quiet time is in the morning. So, sometimes it's time to take that time for yourself. You know, there's a really cool philosophy that I've been practicing which is 2020-20 which is 20 minutes of exercise 20 minutes of meditation and 20 minutes of learning. So, it's how we really feel inspired because I love learning but sometimes I'm stuck in the grind and running a web agency and I got to get to work every morning and when I get off work the last thing I wanted to do was open up a book. So, I'm tired. So, right first thing in the morning I do 20 minutes of it. Wow, has that been inspiring for my life. So, finding time for you in the morning really will start your day off right. And here anytime is when everything quiet down. Kids are asleep. The chair is chores are done. But this is about time to work. This is the time for you. So, finding time to turn, tune out and tune turning inwards will really give you time to process things that are going on and then you can take on a day with a clear head. Sleep heals. If you're a manager definitely encourage your team to get offline at the team online. If you're a night owl make sure you sleep in. Don't try to take 7 a.m. calls and encourage yourself. If you're a morning person get to bed early. You're gonna love it. Your brain feels good. I love the meditation is medication. I'm the worst at staying still and technology is like my life. But just there is apps out there and I can help you. There's a cool app that's totally free called Stop, Breathe, Think. You go on this is how you feel in today. I don't know just sickness and I feel kind of excited about this presentation but maybe a little anxious about talking remote. And then it gave me a kind of meditation that helped me grounded and tuned into me. So there's technology simple habits another one calm but I like to stop, breathe, think because it's free. There is clutch when when talking about culture you know really it comes from living your values and living your values is something that you it kind of is a magical thing where you co-create these together. So operationalizing our values and we have six values I can have in studios. And what we do is we have an app called Hey Taco Has anybody heard of Hey Taco before? Oh it's so very expensive I'm sure every possible will go for it. It used to be free but it's not free anymore like five dollars for a user per month or something it's not too bad. But the point is that we can operationalize our values by giving away tacos in gratitude for those things. So first we really value clarity in all of our projects whether we're working with each other our clients or anybody we value clarity. So as far as a really great job at providing some technical documentation or really easy to use easy to digest format the team might be like Hey here's a taco great report or on human connection being we're better together so when we do stuff and it shows that T connection that T movement we can give away tacos. Here we go the hey taco here is just because like a slap chat where you can get tacos and it's become part of our culture and it's allowed us to operationalize our values. And I think as a company leader you have to build that culture by the people the people have to build the culture which means that they are the ones that are contributing. So it's also I feel really important about knowing our why and in order to be happy at work working for an organization that have the clear why it's really helpful for everybody to rally around and have the folks work where they would all have their unique identities and then they would have the parts and they would all go and be doing whatever they want and they don't have this care-care-mare stare which I feel like it's so important for when you're building a company creating a sense of unity where everybody has that care-care-mare stare bringing their own part of energy to their work and that's why we exist to support humans in every way to support our clients by giving them great work so they can be successful online to support their employees and they can be successful in their own work in all lives I mean because we do much more than just like build websites you have to support them we focus on the whole life cycle you know that means that all of our employees are engaged for creating an amazing with what experience the day you go by and all of this so it's kind of fun that people know our meeting as a leader to create a culture where it can be calm means that you need to lead with radical candor and radical candor means it's important to be direct and honest without any it's not mean it's clear and Bernay Brown as a lovely leader she does love leadership training and one of her things is called clear as kind so as a leader when you're building a company or you have a boss you know radical candor means you don't sugar coat stuff you don't pretend it's better than it is you give them exactly what they need to be you need to test the sandwich you know the good, the bad, the good because like intelligent humans we can smell that from a mile away and it ruins the good stuff because every time we hear something good we're expecting the bad stuff to follow so say it as this clear as kind find a way to go forward and inform we killed our annual performance review in favor of quarterly meetings that do align with our values and the project that we're working on did we accomplish the goals of the project so it's not this like mysterious day that you're going to show up and all of a sudden again everybody knows where they stand and I believe that all employees are happy because they know where they stand which sometimes is something that is so important I can't stress it enough and I think so many bosses are afraid to have a conversation when things are tough but when you don't have those tough conversations it can read a sense of all of the things because often what is the most scary things that a lot of humans feel shame especially the really smart ones and especially the perfectionists and sometimes when we screw things up we're scared to kind of ask for help or our bosses are afraid to deal with it because it's a lot of emotion so having a culture where you can actually give feedback real time feedback both ways creates a sense of purpose in building stuff together and it's okay that we screw up but it's important that we talk about it as soon as it happens and of course this is the collaboratives part building a great organization where you have the ability to run a remote company and be happy means that everybody has to take the time to listen we have to create space to be able to create a connection you know as a lot of people say well how do you folks hang out type thing just a minute ago for our all hands and you know we're doing a talent show work so sometimes we just do silly stuff together but you know in order to have that you need to have a leadership that can be able to really listen and create the space for things to be brought up tool that I would recommend as a growing organization sometimes hard to get to know everybody and we use a tool called know your team and know your team is great that's three questions one on Monday, one on Wednesday and one on Friday and usually they're open in questions sometimes they're yes or no and the first one we ask is on Monday is really just how is your weekend we use geekbot for project updates we have all this project stuff for scrums but this is more of like who's our team so getting to know what we did on the weekend gets to know each other because we don't have those office cooler checks so having that weekly heartbeat come in and then the Wednesday is kind of more on the company question so it is something like you know if we're doing a new program or if we're going to you know we're just about like hey I have top tips and on Fridays there are social questions where is this question like you know what was your favorite food as a kid or what is the one thing that you don't like that the rep to the world thought is surprising when people say game of thrones why don't I like that right so you know getting to learn your team as both from a manager your perspective means that in a remote culture you need to create the pathways to be able to do that this is a really affordable tool a place where that promotes and spends some calm means encouraging good work ethic so when you're talking about people when you're talking about working with people you know it's like did they do what they say they were going to do did they put in a fair day's work did they respect their customers co-workers and peers you know are they fundamentally a good person that's good work ethic working evenings working weekends that promotes a sense of the craziness which around Slack Slack was originally meant to be a bit of an asynchronous tool that you could put something there and you could come back to it but now there's this demand for real-time responses so we created a Slack policy to help people understand the expectations around responding in real-time because you need that focus time you remember back to that original time hours of focus work a day and 30-minute increments so carve out your time own your time and then you know as managers encouraging good work ethic is like wow I'm really excited how much work that you effort and time that you put into this because you were able to focus versus thanks for multitasking on this while you're on a call because managers that push for people to multitask when they're on a call means they're craft-tasking they're not doing either very well it's a really interesting opportunity to create space and recognize their work consistently and meaningfully recognized that their work are 11 times more likely to spend their career within a single company I'm sure y'all know Lullabot I love Lullabot they have about 50 employees and then nobody leaves all courses that everybody loves to be at and you know nobody leaves that's really cool because they recognize great work culture and they create peace and they create calm and I feel like right now in such an intention-driven economy where we're being you know we're being pinged all over the place we can create space in our heads and in our communities by helping each other and by creating a positive culture where we're getting away from pushing around on working after hours or over-resourcing and they have to multitask one of the things that I did is I lost control of my calendar everybody could just book meetings everywhere at any time and what happened was is I never got any time to myself and it was like I was literally waking up at 4.30 in the morning so I could work from 5.00 till 7.00 in the morning Pacific so I could get on call starting at 7.00 in the morning to finish my last call at 6.00 oh you got 4.00 hours because there's an interesting thing have you folks heard of the Parkinson's law where humans will fit in so for example if I'm given 3 weeks to write a blog post how long will it take me 3 weeks 3 weeks if I'm given 3 days to write the same blog post how long will it take me 3 days so if you are a morning person you like to focus tell your manager make it work I like to call for a new I love y'all but I need to focus and I can do a great job if I get this done so carving out time for yourself to focus will give you the time to be able to be responsive and they can say hey I'm going to be available on Slack from 1.00 to 3.00 and I'll be there to do all the things and stuff or create a daily scrum there's lots of ways that you can match communications because I think this expectation of real time response is so intense to find a file for someone and that person doesn't need that file right away we are all over the place with what's your win and then we go into our stuff first we always talk personal stuff at work because we're busy and we don't want to be in the meeting as a remote worker I'm sure as you all have noticed you don't get up and move very often because you don't have commute times between meetings at work as we close this deal or hey my win today was that I got this patch fixed it's all done it's important for people to share their failures and when people can come to the table and be like wow this was really hard and this really sucked and I don't know what I'm doing here and when you feel that culture works okay to see ideas from each other this magical thing called synergy happens and all of a sudden you've got all these great ideas and you feel supported and you know that you're not alone and wow how many people here have taken when how many people failed their first time oh that's good but how do I see you know the three people that passed the three people that didn't pass it was like oh let's get this let's dig into this together so it's important to create a space where it's okay to fail because we will because open source development is hard we have this thing that you know every day we do our scrubs and on Thursdays and it's not about each other and it's not about a client or every evil or nasty in that way but sometimes we can get really mad at some hosting situations where we're very frustrated with why this patch of shoulder configuration is working here and not there or sometimes it's like I'm really frustrated with whatever they've got going in life but it creates space but it is time to be happy and calm at work so I do want to thank you all so much I want to talk about how to live and work for all of you and be happy happy to take some questions now because I left about 15 minutes for questions in conversation we can talk about tools we can talk about process we can talk about culture but thank you for listening to the main presentation a book called it doesn't have to be crazy at work it's by he's the he builds based camp he writes this book with his partner and they're a 20 year old mature product company a little different than the agency says but really good read awesome any one questions the resources of these slides they ask if you can go back to the resources they slide, they slide but you'll be providing the slides right I'll provide the slides right after this yeah so slides will be provided I will try to maybe let you have a question what are the 5 apps that you can't live without I have to say that as a remote worker my phone is the app dictation is my friend I love writing emails by talking to my phone saving them in draft and going to my computer and finishing them so that's one productivity hack that I found was really helpful was actually just going into my mail from there and talking to my phone and Siri sometimes has some very interesting suggestions Drupal is usually triple I've been trying to train Siri what Drupal is for a very long time also GitHub she doesn't really understand that word either but generally I find that staying connected is zoom zoom is great big fans of the Hitaka app but I couldn't give enough talk to them so I love that and I would probably say stop breathing has been really powerful for those moments where maybe I'm a little nervous or I'm stressed out or I'm anxious or I'm really excited and I'm having a hard time focusing so that would probably be that is 4 or 5 Do you use Trello or Asana when you're working with your team to focus on the new job we use teamwork we use teamwork and teamwork desk because it allows us to handle our support tickets for everybody that's coming in through our support model as well as through project based it allows us to do like Gantt charts and all that kind of project management stuff and it has the card of you too so it's helpful so we do the Kanban we're big fans of the Kanban process which is the backlog to do in progress and done I try to do less very anxiety producing personally because it's really hard to get to them everyday and it seems like sometimes it grows before it shrinks you look at the day and you're like I have a list and nothing about that I don't feel it so I've been using time where I walk in I find that when you're doing kind of remote work with a bunch of people it creates some defined collaborative space so that you can come online together and then try to do as much as synchronously as possible so using tags or automation with a trill or so forth so if you move it to the floor it automatically triggers that thing I have a question so CCURI CEO and also working from home the room in here has only people in the half of it the problem is working from home and the other half is not what is here today from a lot of people was like oh my boss doesn't let me work from home they let everyone in the office would you be able to share some some lines or something like they could use with their boss say hey I like to work from home three days a week and they say no I want you in the office so what would you say to this boss to say hey it's fine they can work from home sure so trust is a tricky thing because that starts right at trust getting your boss to trust and they're probably afraid because they lack some type of visibility so for those that work in the office I would recommend a pilot so there's not a big term commitment it's like hey why don't we do a pilot and during this pilot here are some of the things that I will do to create accountability and clarity so what I will do is the only person that wants to work from home and there's 200 people that work in house you're going to have a bigger battle than a team of 10 and you want to work from home so kind of navigating your landscape but I recommend kind of coming up with a bit of a deal plan and saying hey let's try this for this week or next week for two days a week and this is what I will do we'll have a phone call first thing in the morning and I'll explain all the things that I'm doing and then at lunch I'll send you these things and it's about kind of creating trust and showing that you're still online I think a lot of people think that home would not work so if you say I'm going to get this deliverable done by this day and I think a part of the big things is around why to help them understand that that state of life work balance is not necessarily just like that's for everything so if you can say like I have a harder time to focus at the office because I'm getting pulled into so many different directions that I can be more efficient with this budget if I'm at home working because I can actually focus sometimes helping people understand that it will save them money is a weird way to kind of put it but if you say hey I have 100 hours to this project it's going to take me at least 100 in the office because I have to get pulled all over the place or so I can work from home and I can do this over 10 days and 8 hours a day each you know you have some kind of like thing out to show how much more efficient you are and a part of the last low commitment you know let's just try it out more questions? no? nothing? okay and thank you that was awesome thank you so much thank you always happy to chat about anything to do with work as an employee years employee on the through-hole slaps too you can probably find me in Indiana awesome awesome how can we get the link for your presentation so we can get the apps names and everything for everyone here oh sure why don't I send it to you here right away? yes email me I think you have access to edit to your presentation don't you? okay I'll upload it right after this yes you can you can upload it with the link in there upload you can put the link perfect and then you guys can go back and we'll be all in awesome and I have one suggestion always do your presentation remotely it's the best but I miss you all I would add with Montreal I love through-hole it's like a two favorite thing to plan awesome thank you enjoy the rest of your evening