ThomasPowell, Author at Working Remotely

Challenges of a New Place AND Being Remote

Slow Job Search

It’s been interesting trying to replace my wife’s job down here in Pensacola. Things seem to just move more slowly that back in Louisville. Maybe it’s a Southern thing? It seems like turnaround for a job application is 4+ weeks, and that that isn’t a surprise to anyone.

I’ve also been looking for a replacement for my Catholic Music Ministry, which has been a similar challenge compared to Louisville… Even the Catholic churches in Louisville that are on the verge of closing have bigger congregations than some here that are moderately healthy.

Prices of Things

Florida does their licensing and car registration differently. Driver’s licenses are for 10 years (at least at over 21 ages.) For car registration they get all money up front for the license plate, apparently. This means the driver’s license was about 2 times as much as expected and the car registration was about 2.5x the cost of our property tax renewal for my new car. My understanding is that the long run cost of registration is significantly cheaper, though.

We’re also missing ALDI, which made the weekly grocery bill significantly cheaper than it is currently, at least for common stuff like bread/cheese/eggs… No hope on the horizon of an ALDI showing up in the city anytime soon.

Being Remote

There are actual days in which I don’t actually run into people that don’t live in my house. I’d love to be able to walk (or quickly drive) down the street to be around other people. but the rental house that was available in the school district that we wanted to be in is 4 miles from any place of business. I’ve gone out for a couple of meetups and tried to connect with the local church, but it’s been pretty hard being an introvert and just randomly making friends.

Summary Moving 600+ Miles Away

Based on research, experiences, and actual costs:

Moving cost was about $2.00 per square feet of space, including sparsely packed basement and garage, after shopping around.
Expect to be able to get the best deal in the town you’re leaving for movers and to pay almost as much at your destination.
Closing costs in Pensacola, Florida are 25-50% more than in Louisville, Kentucky.
Rent is 25% more for a comparably priced home than FHA mortgage with PMI.
Meeting the owners of a rental house personally may be your best opportunity to get past artificially low limits on your rental, such as “dogs under 30 lbs only.”
With 2 dogs, expect to have to pay about 3 months rent in deposits, fees, and first month’s rent within 2 weeks of moving in.
Non-profit organizations such as arts and church diversify and their resources expand exponentially with the size of the metro area.

Livin’ on Pensacola Time

I’ve worked with team members who worked in a different time zone before. Half of my coworkers on one [extended] team worked in Central Time while my portion of the team worked on Eastern Time. That really wasn’t all that bad, because “headquarters” was on Central Time and many of our team couldn’t make it in until 9am, anyway.

I’ve also worked with a team that spanned Eastern, Central, and Pacific times. That was a bit awkward, because after you overlaid 9-5 for each time zone and excluded lunch times, there were only 2 time slots that worked for meetings for everyone.

In both cases, people in time zones “behind” mine drove the schedule somewhat, so while I occasionally felt like I was being “held up” by the “slower” time zones, I never felt like I was playing catch up.

Over the past 2 weeks, I’ve been working around a life schedule that mostly adhered to Central Time… “Oh, it’s only 8 P.M…” (Which gets really bad once you substitute in 11 P.M.) However, all work events still run on Eastern Time, because all but two of us are on Eastern Time.

Lately, I’ve found that I’m barely coherent when everyone else is ready to go. I start taking off as everyone disappears for lunch (I get hungry as they return). Then, I turn around and start getting my second wind in the work day once everyone is GONE. Being out of sync is productive in many ways, but in other ways I feel like like regularly “catching up” because I’m an hour behind.

I’m hoping that the kids’ school schedule will improve my alignment with everyone else. Until then, I’m going to have to scoop more coffee in the coffee maker in the morning. Hopefully, I can also learn use my calendar to better help communicate my availability and presence.

Moved In

The day started off well, with the trailer finally arrived at the new house.

The initial survey of things was that a few pieces of our belongings were banged up a bit from being packed in there, but for the most part the damage was cosmetic.

Once the movers started at about noon, we started realizing how much stuff we had, and we had gotten rid of belongings (including a sectional) in a house only about 300 ft in space larger than our current house. We *did* have a 2 1/2 car garage, but we used that for our cars vs this house’s 2 car garage that current is full of boxes and things.

It took about 3 hours and 45 minutes to unload the 26 linear feet of trailer space, about half as much time as it took to load it.

One thing that I wish we had done better? Tracked smaller parts such as bookshelf parts and inserts in bags in a large plastic bag and wrapped with plastic to the item or in a sealed shut drawer associated with the item (such as a TV). We’re missing a few parts, including one remote, because it wasn’t securely packed with the item itself or a piece of furniture associated with it.

We’re also missing a chair back to a recliner, which makes the purchase of a replacement couch a bit more urgent.

Damaged piano. That bottom piece should be near the bottom.

However, the biggest disappointment of the day was the my electronic piano took a major beating, after being packed resting on its pedal board that was never meant to bear the weight of the entire instrument, much less any heavy objects packed on top of it. The good news is that the pedals still connect to the rest of the console (electronically) and that the main console functions either way. The body is also actual wood due to my interest spending the extra [too much money] at the time to upgrade from “rosewood finish” plastic. I’m hoping this means that the board can be repaired/reinforced enough to be completely functional. I was pondering a replacement keyboard instrument, but wasn’t planning on replacing it so soon.

Moving Out Complete

Well, we’ve moved out completely and closed on the selling of our house.

The trailer was packed to 23’9″, or 9″ over the 23 linear feet estimate. In the process of having our trailer dropped off and picked up, we discovered that the subcontractor for U-Pack (an ABF subsidiary) for our move was Old Dominion Household Services, which offers consumers moves direct to consumers themselves. I ran the estimates on OD Household Services and discovered that the move would have been 40% cheaper by going directly to OD. While I shopped around, I didn’t go deep enough into my search.

We’re currently living out of suitcases and bins with family, and preparing to fly out of the country for a few weeks. Our dogs are staying with other family in town and have settled in to a mostly lazy routine themselves after a rough couple of hours and lots of nervousness about the old house being emptied.

There’s nothing much left to do with moving but go to our new location and find a rental house. Our stuff is already on its way, and we’ll catch up with it in less than a month.

Working a Reasonable Schedule When You Don’t Work a Fixed One

One of the biggest challenges with not working a fixed schedule in a physical office is that, occasionally, it’s hard to keep track of time (whether you’re working too much or too little.) My work arrangement for now will mostly revolve around a typical “9 to 5” Eastern Time Zone work day, but we also have most of the flexibility of a “ROWE” environment.

I firmly believe in the intent behind the ROWE concept introduced by Why Work Sucks and How to Fix It (Amazon affiliate link). I believe that many problems with work start when you don’t really know what meeting your objectives looks like, provided that everyone is mature enough to accept that they have work to get done. However, it’s sometimes hard to gauge your focus and how you’re spending your time without the crutch of office hours and a physical space.

I’ve found that the amount of time I spend distracting myself from work and/or taking breaks from is closely related to any lack of direction that I might feel, and becomes a canary in the coal mine to call my attention to the need to make adjustments or seek better direction.

RescueTime is one application that is helpful in tracking activities and time. I’ve tuned my account to track certain websites as distracting or very distracting and coding, project applications, and software development reference sites as very productive.

I end up using the productivity score as a percentage and multiplying it by the number of hours worked that week. From there, I can gauge my effort level from week-to-week.

I can also compare the productivity score itself from week to week and look for trends and slumps in my productivity.

Another handy site that I’ve found that is geared more toward programmers is WakaTime. There are plugins for several popular editors, and the plugins track how much time you’ve spent on projects. (Maybe you were coding, but you fell down a rabbit hole on a project you weren’t even supposed to be working on?)

I currently use the free versions of both of these tools, and those versions generally provide me with enough details to give myself an audit of what I’ve been working on and make adjustments to work or environment if things are falling apart.

The paid versions of both services give you more historical information and RescueTime gives a few more options with the paid version. (WakaTime only does 7 days for free.)

I don’t share my productivity numbers with anyone else in the context of a performance review, and I wouldn’t recommend anyone else use these tools as evidence for themselves or for or against others. I use them as one measurement of how I’m getting work done. In this limited and private context, these tools are invaluable to me.

Moving Day 2

6 hours of professional movers later, the trailer is packed to about 23′ or so. I ended up doing some slight adjustments at the end to get a few stragglers in the trailer.

In the process, we’ve ditched a worn out sectional, a broken recliner, and a crappy computer cabinet. The added cost of hauling those things along was more than their replacement cost, at $120/ft of trailer space.

Moving Day 1

Well, there was a communication breakdown with the movers, and we somehow ended up having to get squeezed in for a “last appointment of the day”, it seems.

The movers spent about six hours at our house today, partially interrupted/slowed down by the severe thunderstorms that came through about the time the movers arrived.

The packing has been incredibly efficient in terms of space, making use of virtually every cubic foot of the 9′ of linear feet that was loaded after 4 hours.
We’re probably going to go a few hours over the time I budgeted, but it looks like we’ll have a good shot at loading in the 23 linear feet that I had quoted.
The movers have to return tomorrow for a few big pieces, but otherwise, the trailer is pretty well loaded, with most of the belongings packed into 15 linear feet.
This whole thing appears to be one giant game of Tetris to me.

Our U-Pack Trailer is Here!

At some point, we’ve had three simultaneous reservations for “pack it yourself” moving and storage services:

PODS
UHaul UBoxes
U-Pack

PODS for 2 16’x8’x8′ units was going to be about as much as filling the U-Pack trailer (27’x8’x9′). PODS offers slightly more cubic footage for that arrangement, and about 18% more square footage for a full trailer. There were two upsides for U-Pack: monthly storage was about 10% additional per month whereas PODS was about 20% additional per month.

The UHaul UBoxes were 8’x5’x8′, but the internal dimensions were slightly smaller than that. The cost was similar to the other two for the initial move, but the upside was that 30 days of storage/rental were included. (Monthly storage was in between the other two services.) One problem that I thought of with the smaller units is that a lot of space could be wasted by having 1-foot gaps due to not being able to fill the space.

Flexibility

If I recall correctly, PODS needs several days notice for pickup and drop-off, and their truck needs an easy space to get in and out of. One of the PODS would likely have had to been outside our gates (which probably would have blocked the street).

UHaul only gave Thursday and Saturday drop-off options for its boxes, which we could probably have worked around. However, limited availability for drop-off could also mean spilling over into an extra month rental just because convenience didn’t allow drop-off to happen sooner.

U-Pack uses a 28-foot trailer that otherwise has no special requirements and uses the same drivers as any other tractor-trailer, as far as I can tell. They contract out to trucking companies for transport, and our trailer was provided by Old Dominion. While the trailer looks unwieldy, the driver was able to maneuver the trailer into our backyard without much effort, unlike the massive PODS we’ve used before seem to require.

TBD

What we don’t know yet is how much space we’ll actually require, but U-Pack is beneficial here, too, because if we’re able to tightly pack our belongings, then we’re not charged for the unused space at the back of the trailer. We’ll see where we are when loaded.

5 Days Until the Moving Trailer is Loaded

Since this is the last weekend before the movers help load the moving trailer, virtually everything is packed away now:

All the dishes except for the ones that happened to be in the dishwasher at the time.
The toaster oven, coffee makers, pots and pans.
Any dry foods that required cooking or additional ingredients have been handed off to the sister in law.
Soy sauce, fish sauce, and other non-refrigerated condiments and spices have also been handed off to the sister-in-law.
About a week or so of clothes is packed for the Philippines trip which will happen the day after we close.
I’ve packed 5 days of running outfits in my gym bag and will hold out 2 pair of running shoes as well.
The “lawn mowing shoes” have been packed up. Oops. I have a backup pair of shoes that can be “converted”, though.

Observations so far:

The shorter the time frame you have to work with, the less painful things become.
Keep track of things that you’ll need close to or after the date in which your stuff gets packed up or transported away.
Even if you eat out quite a bit, the amount spent getting carryout for dinner versus having to cover every meal without pots/pans/toaster oven is another level of expense altogether, unless you really like PB&J and cheese sandwiches.
Starbucks VIA still has that “instant coffee” taste. I’m sticking to the french press as long as possible. Or buying coffee.
I’m stashing an extra couple thousand dollars in a hidden “moving across the country” account on the off chance we do this again.

Still to do this weekend:

Consolidate the technological devices in the house and pack any extra switches.
Break down the beds so that they’re just mattresses on the floor and the rails and hardware are wrapped up for quick loading.