The 5 things I've learned from working remotely

After over a decade of having a "normal" job in an office in London, I made the leap to working remotely. When I told people about my new arrangement, the standard response was a raised eyebrow, and something along the lines of "I bet you'll get bored of it". Like any new situation, it took some adjustment to making it work for me - but after a year I think I've got some notes to share:

1. Working remotely ≠ lonely. 

My biggest worry, or rather the biggest worry conferred upon me, was that I would be lonely. Going from a commute where I passed thousands of fellow London-workers and hundreds of colleagues in the office to a home office of one - me - was a big deal. But actually, I wasn't lonely - I was in a new job, so there were lots of new people to get to know and meet. Sure, they weren't sat next to me but they were just on the other end of a slack channel, IM or Google hangout call. 

I did, of course, lose the social aspect of work - try as it might, even the best enterprise communication tool will never replace the traditional "pint with a coworker" on one of the few sunny London evenings. But I found that the time I got back from "work socials" I was able to put into my personal life, and seeing old friends. The ratio of time I spend socialising with home friends to work friends has moved from 50:50 to 100:0. 

So - not lonely at all, then. Rather, what I miss sometimes is the bustle of life. It's entirely possible that apart from my family, I'll not see another human being the entire day. So sometimes you'll find me wandering the isles of the local supermarket, entirely content to experience 5 mins of busy, mundane life. I'm British, so of course I don't actually talk to the strangers near me, but it is comforting to know that life is going on around me. 

2. Netflix changed commuting

In my "office" life, I had a simple routine - one probably shared by millions of commuters. 

- Morning commute to work - read the paper, check emails, drink as much coffee as humanly possible. 

- Evening commute home - watch Netflix (something that won't have copious amounts of violence or nudity - since I'm one of the 22% of people who would be embarrassed about my Public Netflixing). 

So that's about 45 minutes per day of Netflix, five days a week for 48 weeks a year. That's 180 hours of Netflix a year - or put another way, I could watch Season 8 of Game of Thrones 25 times in a row. 

Whilst it's not necessarily a bad thing that I'm watching less TV, I have definitely missed that aspect of my old commute. 

3.  Meetings are the death of productivity, so kill the meetings!

The amount of people that congregate in a workplace directly relates to the number of pointless meetings that those people attend. Maybe it's a law of scale & communication or maybe it's a base human instinct to socialise and gather with others - but the larger the company, the more meetings there are. And meetings breed more meetings. I've lost count of the number of times that I was finishing up a meeting to hear the phrase "right let's get that done, and meet back next week". AHHHH! It's easy to spend more than half the working week doing nothing but meeting people about work you should be doing, but can't because you're in a meeting!

But remote life - no meetings. Well, very few meetings. Communication flows through messengers, and emails, and the occasional video call, but in general 90% of my working week is spent in front of my laptop doing actual work. So, I get a hell of a lot more done in much less time. 

So the lack of meetings has meant a big productivity boost for me. 

4. Distractions are everywhere. 

True story - I sat down to work at home one day, and I noticed some scuffs and marks on the wall. Every-time I tried to work, my eyes wondered back to the wall. So I did whatever any reasonable odd man would do - I went to my local DIY store, bought some paint and repainted the room. It took me most of the working day, so I didn't actually start my day job until about 5pm, and didn't finish until midnight. 

Whether it's the fridge, errant DIY jobs, walking the dog or tidying the house, there's always something else to do when you work remotely. So the key to achieving something (and it took me a long time to realise this) is self discipline. I set myself goals for each hour of the working day - if I hit them, I take a break. 

5. Commuting sucks

Aside from Netflix, commuting really isn't great. At least in the London, the trains are busy, expensive, unreliable and mostly unpleasant. The tubes are worse. No-one ever sat on the Northern Line, terminating at Morden, and thought "yes, this is exactly where I want to be right now". 

Commuting is something you put up with when you have a great job to go to (and sadly, even when you don't have a great job to go to). But if you can avoid commuting altogether - that's a happy existence. 

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Note: I'm the People Operations Director for Status.im, an entirely remote open-source organisation building a new way to transact, browse and communicate over the web. I think remote working is an under utilised option in most companies/organisations but I don't think it's the solution to all their problems. In fact, I don't think the debate should be "traditional office" versus "remote working" - I think the debate should be about finding a balance of all options that works for the organisation and for the individual.