1. I usually wind up alphabetizing my socks at some point.
2. a lack of face to face contact and the setting of being in my own space keeps me in a semi-permanent doubt/guilt cycle about my work quality and how my effort and reponsiveness is being perceived.
The second issue is a personal one, and not exclusive to those that work remotely.
I've worked remotely for about a decade now, and have been hiring other remote workers for about half of that time and in my interviews with people, I spend a solid chunk of the time pushing them hard on understanding what it actually means to work remotely - I want them to be damn sure that they are paying attention to their own need for things like contact with other humans, because I've seen enough people burn out on loneliness and quit because they're miserable.
It's more like, cities are not built for everyone to work remotely. If remote was a lot more common, the support structures for it would be more common (some exist, like shared/coworking spaces etc). As remote work expands, cities will adapt to accomodate people working without commuting (which was the norm before industrial times anyway)
2) I've also found that talking on the phone makes remote work much better for me.
Semi-synchronous communications are a trap for distributed workers. It makes it feel you are more accessible (actually true of course), but it drives the discourse to the trivial and makes raises decision thresholds. I feel that if a decision needs consensus, either circulate an appropriate email, or do a skype/hangouts/whatever real-time conference.
But this doesn't work well for junior team members who need more handholding. I'd say that's the one area where distributed teams don't work well.
Since I'm not forcing him to meet my emotional neediness, why should he force me?
That way you're not bugging people with a voice call for what turns out to be easily answered questions. But the culture allows for quick transition to voice and you don't get sucked into long IM conversations spinning your wheels due to miscommunication.
Not responding to IM until later with a 'sorry, was heads-down/afk/whatever' needs to be acceptable too, otherwise you get the problems of people expecting everyone's instant response all the time.
That said, I miss the old MSN messenger feature of 'buzzing' someone, which would animate/vibrate their IM window and play a soft buzz sound. I sometimes use the slack call feature for this (just ring and hang up), but that doesn't quite relay what I'm looking for - something less urgent than an immediate voice call, but lets the person know I'm likely blocked waiting for their answer. There's always that game that plays in your head - if I get an answer in < 1 minute, I'll stay on this task; if it takes longer, I'll spin up a different task I'm not blocked on...
In my last job I had a rule: People who are with me on the site have to come to me physically (or email if not urgent). Remote people can use Skype, but they must call me - not IM. Of course, they can still email if it's not urgent.
People still called, but the volume went down quite a bit.
Flow feels good, that doesn’t mean it is good, or that interrupting it for collaborative work isn’t overall more beneficial.
Still, text messages (SMS or Slack or what have you) are even more convenient. So I would say it depends on the question. A question like, "What is wrong with the syntax in this line of code," is far better by text. But a question like, "How do you suggest we reconcile these two contradictory requests from our customers," might take less time over phone.
The rule I'm trying follow is this: If a reply to one of my emails suggests disagreement or misunderstanding, I usually try to catch them on the phone, rather than trying to clear things up with another reply. My experience is that these emails take several replies to clear things up, and sometimes there is a damage to rapport. A friendly phone call keeps rapport at the same level or even adds health points.
A remote organization may even have an advantage here, if there is a well thought out internal communication strategy aiming at keeping everyone in the loop and up to speed.
I think this is true for some people, but not others. I find it easier to read through a block of text and break it down so that I can ask follow-up questions on things I may not fully understand. If I listen to it instead, I may miss some important detail and just not remember it after 30 minutes unless I take notes (in which case, it might as well be written down in the first place).
I just spent the last two hours helping a dev on my team write some code in an area of the project he was unfamiliar with. We did it all over Slack, with liberal use of code snippets. I can't imagine how a phone call would have helped.
Also to be clear, when I say "phone call" I mean audio + video. So Zoom, Hangouts, Skype, etc.
If having alphabetized socks keeps you happier in your space, then that's a good thing, right? :)
1. Totally unable to take care of home chores and errands. Often falling way behind on organizational or personal administrative tasks.
2. Fully exploited by my work place. I know I don't need 8 hours a day to be very productive. If I'm not working from home on my own schedule, I feel taken advantage of.
in fact, in general, maybe a regular therapy session should be considered a standard part of remote work. in-office we all use our coworkers as a social support network whether we mean to or not, so it makes sense that many of us would need an alternative to help cover that gap.
I'm not even saying that it'd be a good thing (replacing a dozen interpersonal relationships with one) but its a hedge.
The latter is valid. Face-to-face communication carries a lot more information than messages on Slack. If a company hasn’t developed a remote-first culture, feedback can fester instead of being communicated. Regularly-scheduled phone calls, one on one with critical people and team-wide from time to time, in my experience, alleviate this greatly. (Paired with occasional flyings out.)
If someone is having mental health, emotional or personal issues they should not look to solve those issues through their workplace and instead keep their personal life as partitioned as possible from their professional life.
I totally agree with the parent poster - keep personal life personal. I never mention anything personal to anyone at work.
In this case, we're not even talking about personal issues, but guilt at work. If your manager can't help you with that, he shouldn't be a manager.
I don't get it :-/ Can someone please explain what that is supposed to mean?
Due to other aspects of my personal life I feel like my mind is completely spiralling into a black hole. Lack of seeing my team/manager day to day means they won't see this happening, and I also find it difficult to bring up due to limited contact time between my manager and I.
If anyone has any experience of suggestions, I couldn't be more open to them right now.
My advice is to find something else within your timezone +- 2 hours (i.e. at least 5-6 hours overlap with other colleagues)
Very likely not what you wanted to hear but that's my immediate reaction.
This seems like a personal issue rather than an issue with the concept of working from home. For me, personally, I don't care about when/how people work as long as they're delivering on what I'm asking from them. I may just be extremely fortunate that my team is very responsive but I never have issues with being available for my team or them being available for me and that kind of negates any kind of guilt cycle there could be.
American Culture in particular pushes a lowest common denominator of what it thinks work should be: 7-6 while counting commute, sporadic overtime paid or otherwise, and various other things that are entirely not to the benefit of the individual worker. It's crazy.
Rather than alphabetizing your socks, go to the gym or improve some other skill set interspersed with your paid work.
Embrace the fact that you can build a schedule around you and your wants and desires and not that of your companies.