Work Archives - Working Remotely

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.

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.

Working from Home While Your Life Gets Packed Away #spoiledProgrammerProblems

Three monitor setup until I moved a computer desk over. — Arrangement before more appropriate furniture

The problem with moving a home office, especially over a long distance, is that at some point, an uncomfortable portion of your office will need to be packed away. While I don’t have to have a lot to do my job beyond my company-supplied 15″ Retina MacBook Pro, I had purchased a Seiki 4K display and was using it as my main code editing screen. Once even the moving boxes we packed up, how was I supposed to work? At some point, I’d need to be able to work without carrying around 3 screens (I’ll admit that I plugged in the third screen just because it was there.)

Fortunately, a coworker had recently pointed me toward Display Menu, which brings back a screen resolution menu for the recent versions of OS X. With that, I was able to crank up the screen resolution to the native Retina resolution of 2880×1800. While I initially did this in the interest of just trying to see how much screen real estate I could squeeze in, it had the added bonus of being able to display almost as much information as the 4K display (ok, about 66% as much, but the 4K display is a monster.)

So, in anticipation of not having my three monitor setup, I’ve been adjusting to working from the Retina display alone. With the higher resolution, that’s very manageable, and it has the added bonus of being able to work in a coffee shop or out on a deck without being an ass or hauling a car load of equipment out. I also have been working from the island in the kitchen, which won’t be packed up for the move. The smaller arrangement takes a little bit of mental adjustment, but it works perfectly fine for programming.

There are still a couple of accessories for the MacBook Pro that I keep in use with the reduced setup: a Magic Trackpad and a Matias Laptop Pro keyboard. Somehow, these accessories make the workspace feel more like a desktop. It’s probably because moving workspaces involves an armful of equipment and more than one trip, just like a full desktop spread would.