Lessons from Seven Years of Remote Work

The inspiration for this post is Željko Filipin’s post on the same topic.

Nobody worked remotely during the pandemic, but everybody worked from home.

During the pandemic, office workers had to adjust to working out of their homes. But remote work is different: you’re not working from home, necessarily; you’re working while seperated from a lively, in-person office. You might be in the same city as your co-workers or on the other side of the world.

When you’re physically disconnected from your colleagues, you have to build new skills and adapt your tactics. This is advice I wish I’d had seven years ago when I started working remotely.

Asynchronous communication ¶

Office workers have the luxury of hallway conversations. In an in-person office, getting feedback takes mere minutes. But in a remote work position where you may be on the other side of the planet, communication may take overnight.

To be effective, you need to master asynchronous communication. This means:

Timezones suck ¶

I wish this section was as simple as saying: use UTC for everything, but it’s never that easy. You should definitely give meeting times to people in UTC, but you should tie meetings to a local timezone. The alternative is that your meetings shift by an hour twice a year due to daylight savings.

This all gets more complicated the more countries you have involved.

While the United States ends daylight savings time on the first Sunday in November, many countries in Europe end daylight savings on the last Sunday in October, creating a daylight confusion time.

During daylight confusion time, meetings made by Americans may shift by an hour for Europeans and vice-versa.

I think the only thing to learn from this section is: you’ll mess it up.

from Hacker News https://ift.tt/3p9iLCA