I think that almost all of us are in the middle of an interesting journey since the pandemic started. Not sure you ever had the chance to imagine how a global pandemic will look like. I think that COVID-19 is reshaping the workplace especially for technology companies. Many companies had to switch to remote work in a short term which obviously brings many challenges. Companies that weren’t fully remote are struggling how to do it right. More companies discover the advantages but in the other hand they understand that staying hybrid isn’t that simple for the long term. I’m not going to talk about it in this post — it’s a totally different topic and there are plenty of well enough educated articles around it. If you ask me, I’m personally curious to see how these changes that companies implement today are really going to stay in the post-pandemic era. What we can be sure is that in the time of writing this post, it’s not over yet and there is still a long way to go to get back to our pre-pandemic life… :)
Since I’m very curious what will stay with us after these crisis are over, I just realized that many things have been changed in the way that I work. I used to do many things different and I would like to share with you what I learned so far. Hopefully I will be able to take them with me on —
- Plan better my day — when I was at the office, it was all pretty clear and when I didn’t have any special events, I usually knew the approx. time that I’m planning to leave the office that day, it wasn’t really strict and was very dependent on the events. Plans were more fluid — you talk to people, meetings, eating lunch. Now it’s all mixed up, especially during the lockdowns. Just as a side note, here in Israel we are just fading out of our second lockdown so work and the kids that I need to take care of while my wife isn’t fully remote is a challenging task. Things changed — (a) these days I’m planning my next day the night before, I’m a morning person so trying to plan the important tasks early, (b) closing in the calendar the time that I need to take care of my personal obligations to family prepare them breakfast, checking that my daughter is doing her homework, etc. (c) trying to schedule the meetings back-to-back and that way I’m leaving for myself enough time to concentrate with less disruptions as possible, (d) something that I didn’t use to — it’s important also to plan when you finish your day! I’m bad at setting boundaries and still struggling but it’s important to try understand when your day is going to finish so you can take the time to rest a bit as well :) Planning your day is a very tough task and I’m still learning how to do it right but this is something that I didn’t give enough attention before the crisis.
- Time is your most expensive asset — a different angle of the point above is that time is limited and I should use it wisely. Part of my job is solving problems, chat with colleagues on a variety of topics that we need to tackle in our day-to-day, brainstorm on technology challenges and give a hand when necessary. Working remotely brings with it the complexities and you can quickly find yourself disrupted with chats and mails. When you were in the office, people could quickly realize you are in a meeting or that you concentrate on something but when you are remote it is a different story. You can find yourself disrupted very easily with chat and mail notifications. It is very hard to focus if you don’t define your availability times for yourself. I realized that things should be changed, otherwise there is no way to really focus — (a) the first thing I done was to mute the notification sounds and phone vibrations — that way I decide when to disrupt myself and not the notification sounds, (b) set Slack reminders to chat messages that I should get back to them later so I can continue follow the relevant channels, (c) schedule focus times in the calendar so they are like any other meeting that I should arrive on time and finish on time. It might sound simple but these 3 steps just helped me to do it better. I won’t lie that I’m struggling but it’s getting better.
- Utilize better the tools that I have— at the office it was very easy to go ask a question, quick sync with your peers and catch up while drinking a coffee. Being remote, these communication is challenging — you are much more in an async mode because you are not sitting next to each others or people are just not online in the same timeframe as you are. These are some of the things that I’m trying to do — (a) write Confluence pages and share them with peers for collaboration, (b) if you need to present something that people might need to think offline, you can sometimes save the time and skip the first meetings by just recording yourself in Zoom explaining that (lets say you wrote some tool and you want to get feedbacks on that), (c) create ad-hoc Slack groups for quick syncs, (d) set Slack reminders to make sure you get back to your peers and not disrupt yourself while you are concentrating in another task, (e) add other watchers or yourself to Jira tickets to keep different people in sync.
I am still learning and adopting my routines but it is getting better day to day. Must admit that I had another view of the remote work before the crisis started ;) Hopefully the things I learn will stay with me after it is all over because it should make my life much more easier.
So… what did you learn?
