Ask HN: How do you start your remote work day?

In the Dark Playground right away :(

I waste a lot of time on Hacker News and checking other social media, then I freak out that's it's almost lunch time and I wasted yet another morning and proceed to have another stressful day full of guilt because I completely lost my work discipline and can't seem to find a way to get it back.

https://waitbutwhy.com/2013/10/why-procrastinators-procrasti...

Wake up, go the the bathroom, look in the mirror and tell myself I don't have depression. Then I grab whatever t-shirt from the pile on the floor, open the laptop and make myself coffee before joining a standup meeting.

Wake up, turn on the moka, boil 2 eggs, stretch a bit. Start reading HN and emails. Get the coffee and continue until 08:00. Clock in and keep browsing HN but now with guilt...

I read Everything in Its Place about 6 months ago and it convinced me to become an organized person:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B06Y2PFG5Q

Now I start my remote day with a very structured 30-minute planning session where I review my “inputs”: Slack, Asana, email, and anything left over from yesterday (the key is that I NEVER reply during this process, I just write them all down and quit the programs/close the windows as I finish my review). Then I make sure my desk and computer desktop are clean and ready to work.

Next, I look at my calendar and create times during the day for process work (shorter periods of time for emails, quicker tasks, things that unblock others) and immersive work (where I don’t want to be disturbed and focus).

Finally I list my to-dos for the day, taking into account my inputs, my calendar, and the things I want to accomplish.

Then I start working through my list. As new stuff comes in during the day, I don’t work on it, I write it down in its own list. If it’s urgent and important, I will choose to work on it. If not, it can get prioritized for the future during tomorrow’s planning session.

Usually my partner nudges me to get up before my 10 am stand up before I get in trouble. Some days Ill even manage to get up early, like 7am. But typically I just have enough time to do some dishes, splash water on myself and have a coffee while my dry eyes settle down enough to see any urgent messages from my more punctual colleagues and boss. I check all comms and make sure the priority stuff in planner is visible and get to work. Coffee is essential. There's usually a lot of half-asleep banter in Teams until I get the scent of something urgent, interesting or annoying and I hyper focus, sometimes late in to the night. I like simply keeping a rough heading and taking notes. Plans, schedules, alarms, meetings just roll off me like water. Exercise is middayish and a dog walk before dinner. This is the way.

I wake up, read a little bit in the bed.

Than I stand up, with my cloth from yesterday, go to the bathroom and brush my teeth.

Then I get to my desk, log into my Mac and do same defaults: reading my mails and answering them, reading slack, checking the support Jira board, check what meetings I have and then I start to think what I need to do.

I do something (start to finish) then read some hn etc and do the next thing I need to do.

Lucky for myself: I already have to do a few things every day and have to have plenty of useful meetings so when I slack of I already did things.

Doing support (internal only for systems we ran) is often enough seen as being very helpful and it also gives a good excuse to be less able to concentrate for a long time on one task.

Doing the default things every morning helps me to get into the headspace of work.

I’ve been working remote long before COVID. One thing I found is that when going into the office I would walk a lot: to/from car/cafe/meeting rooms/office. With remote work in my own house I’m no more than 20 feet from anything. So I’ve become religious about doing at least 1 hour per day of elliptical trainer and 1 hour a day of walks (usually 2 x 30 minute walks.)

As for Slack, I check right when I start my day but only to see if junior devs or managers have any blocking questions. Otherwise I close slack and only reopen it to after lunch where I am generally available/monitoring it for the remainder of the day.

After 6:30pm Slack is closed and work phone is muted/charging.

During the week I'm not shutting down my Mac, only putting it to sleep. Thus, in the morning, Slack (and all the other stuff I was working) is already open so it's easy to jump back doing whatever I was doing yesterday.

Each day varies... Usually, early in the morning is the least crowded time to deploy stuff, and when I'm mostly doing mine (we're doing Trunk-based development). Other than that, is the best time for doing code reviews before the daily meetings begin. Then there are meetings, incidents to follow up, interviews to conduct, features to implement and so on.

I wake up between 7 and 8. I don’t start until 9 so I use that time to shower, take my dog out, water the plants if they need it, make my coffee. At 9 I log on, check email and Slack, then look at my todo list. If anything from email or slack is actionable, it goes onto my list and gets prioritized. Then, I work through my list. Standup isn’t until ~11 so I have some good focus time in the morning.

I don’t start work till 9AM, but my wife starts at 7:30 (school teacher). So I’ll get up around 6:30 with her, and while she gets ready I’ll make coffee for the both of us. After she heads out I’ll walk to dog, and spend the remaining hour or so playing a video game, reading, or hacking away at some side project until work starts.

Promptly at 8 AM, I log in to the work site, the overseer bot inspects my dress, above and below the desk and confirms my hair is combed and that I have shaved and have applied deodorant, and my clock starts.....

Scroo that, I hope nobody endures that. Even so, if I am zooming, I look OK, at least above the desktop....

Coffee with my partner at 8:30. Zoom standup meeting at 9:00 am. I usually take a few minutes to organize my space, make some plans for the day, then I start procrastinating.

Shower, take out the dog, workout and stretch, breakfast, make coffee. I don't wake up my computer before that. Then I start work.

wake up, prepare coffee, shit, eat, work work work until 12, lunch at 12, back to work 12.30 - 45, work work until 16.00. Close computer, prepare food eat and go outside.