Comment by bkovacev | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bkovacev | Hacker News Reader

After working remotely for 4 years I am switching back to the office at least 3 days a week and moving back to our company HQ in the States.

Hardest challenge for me was staying in shape, because I lacked self-discipline to workout and eat healthy, but funny enough work didn't suffer and it was the most productive period in my life.

It gets extremely easy to start slacking (no pun intended) and not do your work out. You tell yourself "oh let me just push this feature, fix this bug or communicate about a new feature". Work gets prioritized and everything else is put aside. That actually damages your productivity in the long run and the chance of burning out is far bigger than if you dedicate time to do other things.

Took me a while to recognize the trap I was in - I felt obligated (no peer pressure, but just the fear of missing out) to always be online, answer emails or slack messages. Of course, my mental and physical health suffered due to this FOMO.

Since I have about six months before I get back to the office I promised myself to tackle these things by doing:

- Fix morning routine by working out, cooking and taking time to do other things (read, play video games, hobby)

- Snoozing notifications at 6pm my time.

- Learning to say "It will have to wait 'till tomorrow".

- Spend more time outside of my apartment at night.

- Dedicate more time to my SO.

- Learn Elixir/Erlang during the weekends.

Agreed. Been WFH for six years and around year two I was probably the least healthy I'd ever been in my life. I had been waking up naturally around 8am every day which I thought was amazing, but I generally liked to be online by 9am so there wasn't much time to fit a workout in.

At year three I started waking at 6am to fit in 2-3 hours of personal improvement time, primarily working out and reading. Unless it's an emergency, I'm not doing anyone else's stuff within those 2-3 hours. I also go to sleep around 10, which takes some getting used to.

Today I'm the most physically and mentally healthy that I've ever been. I actually live close to NYC but the train / ferry commute would take those critical two hours away. Going to keep my current system in place as long as I can.

I think its more about priorities to be honest. I work from home and I am currently getting towards the end of a training plan that will have me running an ultra marathon. Working from home has been a huge plus in achieving that, as time I would have spent commuting, has instead been spent running.

These last couple weeks, and my first two years of work, I think I've hit my best groove by waking up at 06:00, optionally going for ~20-30 minutes in the gym, and jumping straight into work. When I delay eating until at least noon (so fasting for at least the eight hours I spend in bed, plus six or more waking hours in the morning), I tend to maintain a healthy body weight and feel little or no gnawing hunger.

I'm currently working from home, and it seems to work even better at home than it did full time with an office commute, and I clock out more or less whenever I feel like it (which is less often than I would've guessed). I've spent the last year at home, and these last two weeks have been literally an integer factor more productive and enjoyable. I've enjoyed it so much that I currently work somewhat on weekends as well, by choice.

Fasting is actually something I have been doing as well lately that helped me maintain (and lose a bit) my weight properly and that one meal less a day meant a lot.

Do you not feel the urge to always be online when you're working from home? Once I clock out I can't keep myself from checking emails/slack etc.

> Do you not feel the urge to always be online when you're working from home? Once I clock out I can't keep myself from checking emails/slack etc.

It can get to be a serious problem, but my solution is to just close the stuff while I'm working, and set time aside to check it when I get up to refill my beverage and relieve myself. If somebody really needs to reach me, then they can call my phone.

Update: In addition to that, for the moment I have the luxury of doing exactly what I want, and selecting who will employ me for it, so that could be affecting this considerably. I think the holy grail would be learning to convince myself to enjoy my work even if some day it's untangling some ridiculous JSP cobweb instead of porting compilers.

I ended up removing my email account from my phone and removing my work slack channels from my phone. At around 3-3:30pm I close my laptop and I'm done for the day (outside of a problem gnawing at me that I think of a solution for at 10pm haha).

But generally just tune out from work and make sure you are disconnected.

> Hardest challenge for me was staying in shape, because I lacked self-discipline to workout and eat healthy, but funny enough work didn't suffer and it was the most productive period in my life.

How do you expect that will be fixed by spending more time in the morning and at the end of the day commuting to work?

More freedom requires more self-discipline. When you are doing things like everyone else the systems are built for you. When you aren't you have to build those systems yourself, which can be harder than people think.

Exactly this. Building systems that work for myself has probably been one of the hardest things and is taking a lot of trial and error.

One thing that I feel will be the key is that I won't have to worry about missing out on something before 9am or after 5pm once I leave the office, it will help me "containerize" work.

My commute is my workout (I cycle). I've found that much easier to stick to than having to make an active decision to work out.

Could you elaborate a bit more on your morning routine plans? I’d like to get up earlier and do more productive things before I start work (I’m remote and flexible), but as it doesn’t get light here until 8am at this time of year, I find it really hard to get up early.

Currently the sunrise here is at 6:45-7am. I'm up between 5:45-6:00 by myself anyway, but I usually just waste that time checking email/reading HN/reddit. I will make sure to not check phone until 7am. These are my plans and of course there is a big chance that I do not achieve all of this at once, it might take some adjustment, but if I do not check my phone, read and workout it's a win for me. I want to allocate 3-4 hours for myself in the morning.

Getting up early is an amazing feeling, but I learned that by tiring myself for a week, eventually your body will go to bed earlier and you'll wake up earlier. Do it for two weeks and you should be able to become an early riser.

5:30ish - wake up, bathroom etc

5:45ish - Have breakfast. Want to eat slower so I allocate 30 minutes.

6:15ish - 7:00 - read/cook lunch and dinner.

7:00am - head out to the gym

9:00am - back from the gym

9:30ish shower, eat, check email

10 - start working or an hour long nap depending on how I feel.

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