Tips for Remote Work

During COVID lockdown, I worked remotely. I did all my Code Cop things, e.g. pair programming, code reviews, coding workshops, just in a remote way. All these tasks involved other people and I was severely affected by my "remoteness". After one year of remote work, one of my clients ran an in-house knowledge sharing on how to do that successfully. They invited me and I thought about the advice I would give. What would be my top three tips for remote work?

1. Check-in
When working remotely, the first and foremost thing I use are check-ins. During a check-in everybody says a few words how he or she is here - as a human being. The check-in is not about your role, your expectations or current work. It is about how you feel. When we work separately, I miss your face and body language and we need to be explicit how we are. In a face to face situation I might be able to recognise if you are tired or distracted or upset. I am unable to identify the little hints when you are just a small image on my screen. Now I place more emphasis on the human and emotional side of my peers because it is missing in a remote setting. Some people always reply with "I am OK" and I am fine with that. Nobody has to share. Some people keep talking and I have to remind them what the check-in is about and stop them from taking all the space. Conversation, arguing or discussion break the check-in. And at the end of the meeting I ask everybody to check-out, which is the opposite, asking how they are leaving as human beings.

2. Be Professional
I preach being professional. After all "I help development teams with Professionalism" (as written on the second introduction slide of all of my decks). Professionalism is an attitude, it is how you do your job. This includes also your appearance. In a remote setting, your appearance is the image of your face, the sound of your voice and the background behind your head. There are several implications: Your camera is always on. You are in the centre of your camera's focus and the camera is ideally placed on top of your screen where you are looking at from time to time. On the other hand, when only half of your face is visible, or your face is distorted in some way, it is hard to see and to connect. In communication theory, as the initiator if the exchange, the sender is responsible for the message to be received. Much of your message is conveyed by your voice. For the best audio, use a headset with a microphone so your team mates have a change of hearing you. Next I recommend a professional background. Best is a uniform wall or board. In the beginning of remote work, I hung a blanket between two window handles to provide a uniform, non distracting background during my video calls. Non uniform backgrounds are distracting and make it harder to focus on the face of the person speaking. A Green Screen background helps if you have no option to work in front of a wall or door. Please choose a neutral image with soft colours. Most Green Screen backgrounds are unsuitable.

3. Strive for the same Level of Collaboration
It is harder to collaborate under remote working conditions. For example pair programming is more complicated. Now I do not accept less collaboration than before remote work. There are options and tools to overcome the barrier. Ten years ago, in 2012, I already used tools as TeamViewer or AnyDesk to control the machine of my remote pairing partner. I spent many hours working like that and it worked well. Modern tools I have used include Code With Me, which works with the JetBrains family of IDEs, Visual Studio Live Share, which you can even join with a browser, Floobits, CodeTogether and mob.sh. If you are blocked by remote work, push for some solution to keep in touch and do what you used to do. Do not accept less collaboration than in face to face situations.

We need to keep in touch
After I had put together my three tips, I was surprised. I had expected some technology or tool but all three tips are about connecting. Then it is not a surprise after all, because remote work first and foremost affects collaboration. Most advice of the other presenters was aligned with that. Here are some examples: When working closely with a team you need to keep in touch. You should speak with your team members often, probably talk daily. You should also meet outside work, e.g. remote game events like online escape room. Meeting in person is even better, e.g. visiting each other or visiting the office once in a while.

Video Conference All Day
A team lead shared his story how they had managed transition to remote work. The team used to talk a lot during the day. When remote work started, they kept a video call running. Whenever people would work, they would be in the call, unless they were in a meeting with someone. Many team members used a second device, e.g. a tablet, for this ongoing call. They felt like being in the office and whenever someone wanted to talk, she could talk to the people in the room. Using the video conference open all day, the team kept up the good vibe while fully working remotely.

I am curious about your tips to improve remote collaboration. If you have any, I invite you to comment.

The One Thing

Last year, during second lockdown, I watched a message of my guro Jakob where he proposed reading some books in the time when you are not able to practice in the dojo. He specifically recommended two books, The One Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results and Atomic Habits: An Easy and Proven Way to Build Good Habits and Break Bad Ones. I had seen both books in my Goodreads feed and had not paid attention. But when your master asks, you better follow ;-)

The Book
The book is about extraordinary results determined by how narrow you can make your focus. Gary Keller insists that it is possible to reach any goal if you focus on it. And by focus he means that you really focus i.e. dedicate four hours of each day to your one goal. It has to be one single goal. And then, by the thousands of hours you have put into your goal, you will see results. Yes obviously, when following this approach, you will see results. In this sense, the One Thing is extraordinary and boring at the same time. I highly recommend reading it.

First I planned to summarise the book for you, and others have done a better job doing that. The book's homepage is a start and you can find many summaries of the book online, like this one on Four Minute Books. While summaries are short and save time, you will not get the benefit of the book without reading it. A book is not only about its content. Here the book is cementing its message by many times the author tells you the same thing in different words, a.k.a. repetition. The total time it takes to read the book is also time you have to reflect on the material.

Impact
Maybe my summary above is a bit lame, so let's discuss the book's impact on my life. And it had a profound impact as you will see. The first and utmost thing I remember from reading the book is the permission to drop stuff from my agenda. Like all developers I know, my daily plan was way too full: work, write a blog post like this one, release an episode of the Coderetreat Facilitation podcast, run a public Coding Dojo for the community, follow up on this cool idea I read about, finish reading SICP and get back playing with Scheme, create more exercises for workshops, keep up to date with Twitter and other feeds, work out, spend time with family, fix this next thing in the flat my wife is complaining about, fight climate change and much more. How was I supposed to allocate 4 (FOUR!) hours each day for the thing I want to do? It was impossible. Obviously Gary was crazy. ;-) Or I had to drop some tasks from my agenda. The idea of focus and dropping tasks was not new to me. I remembered J.B. Rainsberger mentioning a "Not Doing" column in his task list in 2014. I myself have put whole technologies on my blacklist - which I would ignore from this time on, but I have never dropped tasks and ideas so aggressively. I had several TODO lists of low priority where tasks went to die without being honest to myself.

The First Month
I spent the first month following the One Thing on a meta level because I did not work on anything but worked on the process itself. First I increased my focus: I deleted most icons - usually things to do or bookmarks to look at - from my desktop. I removed TODO markers in documents and on my hard drive. Then I reduced my commitments, e.g. I dropped the schedule to blog and record, stopped visiting meetups, reduced the number of learning hours and decided on the maximum number of hours I would work for each client per week. And I was OK with that. Letting go became a mental state and I had been following the Minimalists and Marie Kondo already before I started.

Suddenly I had more time - I even had some unscheduled time to play video games which I almost never did. In hindsight this was not extraordinary at all. If you drop most things you are working on, you will have more time available. It is a matter of focus. Lockdown and home office helped as I saved more than two hours every day. While some colleagues complained that they worked two hours more, I used these two hours - giving me half of my required four hours already. And I used the first month - 80 hours total - to practice the One Thing process. I started each day with a few minutes of mediation to improve my focus. I read more books about focus, e.g. Leo Babauta's book on focus and simplicity, forming habits, e.g. Atomic Habits as mentioned above and learning. I studied these books, taking notes and collecting them. I recommend all of them. I clean up my "office" and spent some time decluttering it, storing stuff in drawers or trashing it to further improve my focus during work.

Books
One example of my achievements since I started using the One Thing methods are the books I have been able to read this year. The Pragmatic Programmers once wrote that you should read at least four technical books a year and the last year I was able to follow their rule was 2016. Since then I have been struggling to read at least one technical book a year. Reading became hard, I had problems focusing and I usually fell asleep after reading a few pages. I decided to add some reading time every day to my four hours of focused work, reading on the topic of focus of course. So including the One Thing, I have read ten books in five months.

Clarity
Spending four hours on focused work each day reduced the time I had available for other things. After some struggle, I had more clarity - and stopped my self-deception. For example, if I see an interesting article linked on Twitter I either read it immediately, or I forget about it. There is no point in adding it to my read-later list, because there is no read later list because there is no extra time for that. I would not read it anyway, my read-later list kept growing and growing. While I was dreaming of doing so much in the past, I have become a naysayer now. For example "this is a good idea. I might try it. (One second later.) No, not really this is not my One thing and I have no time. End of idea." This is refreshing and freeing. Clarity is one of my needs.

Crunch Time
One drawback is that I am always in crunch time. As my time is more limited, I have to prioritize harder and postpone many tasks I know I need to do. This makes me feel uneasy at times. And for the things I still want to do - not as my One thing, but from time to time, e.g. maintaining my blog - I have to live with tiny increments. For example, I was working on this blog post 15 minutes at a time for more than a month. It was a bit frustrating. Still writing and "Public Relations" are not my priority.

Sorrow
Not having time to attend meetups caused some FOMO (fear of missing out) and made me miss the people of the community I had not seen in a while. In general being unable to do things which I liked mad me sad. I have been attending every one of our local, bi-monthly Coderetreats since its inception January 2019. When I was unable to attend for the first time in more than two years, I felt very, very sad. I felt a loss, almost like mourning. Maybe this was the first time in my life when I really let something go. It is easy to let go things you are not attached to.

Crunch Time Summary
Time for a very short summary (as my latest 15 minutes increment is almost spent): Read the book. Find your One Thing. Focus on it. It is possible to allocate four hours each day to focus on your highest priority, though it might be hard to stick to it. I am half a year into the process and did not miss a single day. Keep pushing!

Advice on Creating Space

Last December an executive manager created an internal blogging challenge. He asked us to share our hands-on approach or tested technique on creating space. There was plenty of good material on time management and how to create space already available, but I felt like sharing this piece of advice anyway. It was not a live changing resolution, nor did I win the challenge, but it helped me to calm down and make use of the time I had.

There are these days when my calendar is riddled with meetings and conference calls and I know already in the morning that I will not be able to get anything done. As a software engineer I need continuous pieces of time to concentrate, get into the task and finish it. I would struggle to use the few minutes between meetings during the day to work on my tasks. It didn't work and this used to frustrate me.

As soon as I accepted that I would not be able to work on my (high priority) tasks on such days at all, I got more relaxed and it "created" time. Now I use this time for small things, e.g. update my CV, read some blogs, fire up some development tools and try something new. Sometimes just leaning back without the pressure to work on a particular task gives way to new ideas.

So my advice to create space is to accept the fact that there are days when you will not be able to make any progress. Accept this fact! Don't fight it! Don't plan anything! Use the few minutes of free time to do something else.

Productivity Tip: Folder Names

I want to be productive. I like the feeling of GTD. I believe that even small things make a difference in productivity. For example assigning a keyboard shortcut to the calculator application. I don't use the calculator very often, but when I do, I have this warm and cosy feeling that I saved one or two seconds to open it. I'm always assigning keyboard shortcuts. I have been doing it since the early days of Windows 3.1.

One trick I found recently is to name folders beginning with different letters. For example some time ago my main work folder contained subfolders article, code, community, posts, presentation and resource. To speed up folder switching I renamed them to article, blog, community, develop, presentation and resource. Now all folders start with a different letter. Each folder is uniquely accessible by pressing a single key in explorer or any navigator. The same is true for drives.

Finding names can be difficult. They should describe the files inside them. If I don't find a proper synonym or word in a different language, I don't change it.