johnmaconline

OK, maybe that sounds silly, childish even, but I’ve found that taking breaks is one of the keys to unlocking the master of remote work.

Like a commute creates a natural routine, the office environment naturally provides mental breaks in your day — lunchtime, watercooler conversation, meetings, a trip to the coffee machine, a colleague stops by to lament about the game last night, a walk out to the restroom.

These little breaks don’t come as naturally when you’re by yourself. 

Done right, breaks can be your superpower. Not taken or done wrong, and you can derail the rest of your day and leave yourself mopy or agitated. 

How do you design breaks into your day?

Like your routine, try stuff and adjust, but start with a lunch break. 

If you don’t normally take a lunch break, start taking one. Take a walk. Workout. Run some errands. Decline your meetings over lunch and take a break.

Then be diligent and intentional about taking some other breaks throughout the day. Walk the dog. Go out to get coffee. Run to the post office. 

One warning — there can be a fine line between productive breaks and unproductive distractions and interruptions, especially when working from home. Setting boundaries helps with distractions and interruptions. 

Master your breaks, and you’re one step closer to mastering remote work. It’s that simple.

When you commute to an office, you have a routine. That routine serves the important purpose of transitioning you from your home self to your work self and back again.

This routine is critical in transitioning your mind and body into the workday in the morning, and out of the workday in the evening. These transitions occur naturally when you commute.

One challenge of working from home is the integration of home and work thwarts that natural transition. You’re unmotivated or distracted to start your workday, and that turns into difficulty staying engaged throughout, which then leads to a challenge in being fully present with your family in the evening. 

It took me a while to find what works for me, and it shifts around a bit. My routine currently doesn’t look exactly like it did a couple of years ago. But when I’m on my game, it always involves these 4 elements:

1. Intention to start the day
2. Priming my mind
3. Priming my body
4. Creating a ToDo list with a clear head prior to the firefights and distractions of the day

What should you do? 

Experiment. Try different things. Start with something similar to what you do today. Take a shower and getting dressed as if you were going to the office. Take a walk to emulate the commute. 

The key is to find a routine that transitions you from your home self into your work self. Once you have that, you’ll find your motivation and focus return. 

You still gotta go to work, which means you need a spot. 

Creating a physical space helps bridge the mental transition to the workday and sets boundaries for the others in the house.

Working from home full-time, or even just for a full day, is not the same as sending a couple of emails after dinner. You can’t do it from your bed or the couch, at least not effectively. 

Effective working from home requires a mindset commitment to the workday, just as if you were going to the office. Having a physical space helps transition your mindset, just as your commute did before. Once you set those physical boundaries, your focus sharpens and you’ll have a better time ignoring interruptions. 

At the office, everybody’s on the same schedule, but at home, the schedules clash. You can’t run your day interrupt-driven from your family and expect to be successful. 

This may be your biggest challenge, but it’s worth sacrificing a spot in your house. Even if you have a tiny apartment, make a permanent spot that you can go to each day. Set up your big monitor and docking station. Layout your favorite pen and notebook. Leave this stuff there just as you would at your desk in an office. 

When you go to this space and sit, you are going to the office.

Even though I started working formally from home ten years ago, my journey started about 15 years ago, in the middle of the night.

At that time, I was burning the midnight oil from home just to keep up with my job as a programmer. Found myself thinking, “I’m productive alone. What if I ditch the commute and office distractions?”

Tried it, but ultimately failed. Slow internet, household distractions, and isolation killed my motivation. I didn’t yet know how to do it effectively.

Then I took the job ten years ago. The daily grind of a three-hour commute to Philly forced my hand. I knew I had to get serious about remote work. So I went at it for two days a week. A lot had changed, but what really made the difference? I was mentally committed.

That’s step one.

Then I got laid off, but it was a blessing because I had learned how to work remotely by that time and started to love it. So, I jumped at a full-time remote opportunity and never looked back. I lead teams all over the world now from the comfort of my home office.

I’ve learned what makes me tick in this setup. And I’ve figured out how to keep a remote team humming.

Ready to dive in? Next up, I’ll share the secret sauce for successful remote work. Stay tuned.

Ten years of remote work and still loving it, with all of its ups and downs. Over the next several days, I’ll tell you how I mastered the art.

The transition began subtly. The first three years had me in the office three times a week, laying the groundwork for what would become my full-time remote career over the last seven years.

I’m astonished when I look at how far I’ve come since making that game-changing decision to jettison the familiar and forge off into the unknown. But today, the idea of trading my remote workspace for a traditional office feels unthinkable. That’s not to say the office doesn’t have value (it does, and I’ll talk about that), or that I wouldn’t take a position that required my frequent presence in an office (I might, and I’ll talk about that), it’s just that the remote environment is here to stay, so we should acknowledge it.

What’s coming your way? A treasure trove of insights on optimizing your personal efficiency, leading virtual teams like a pro, and leveraging the remote culture to benefit your business. These aren’t just theories; they’re lessons drawn from a decade of trial, error, research, and keen observation.

Stay tuned. If you’re hungry for success in the remote world, yearning to sidestep common pitfalls, or eager to challenge the norms, you won’t want to miss what’s next. Dive in, debate, and refine your remote work game.

More to come…

On the one hand, Key Performance Indicators are a natural and necessary method for organizations to measure themselves and their people.

“Here are the things we care about. How did we do against those things?”

But the problem is the cat and when he gets out of the bag.

Because once you know how you’re being measured, you can easily game the system. It’s why oil companies can score high on the ESG scale, and fast food companies can score high on healthy eating initiatives, and big pharma scores well for affordable health programs.

If the help desk worker knows she’s being judged against how many tickets she closes and how fast, you gotta know that she’s closing tickets quickly and reopening new ones for the same issues. If a software developer knows he’s being judged against story points (or lines of code), you gotta know he’s inflating the points associated with his tasks (or writing extra lines of code).

That’s human nature. We optimize for what’s being measured. But optimizing isn’t the same as doing what’s best. It’s just doing what’s counted.

The fix?

First is transparency. Here are some KPI’s, but KPIs are not the only story. Impact is, and impact may be subjective. You care about the full picture, not just a scorecard.

Second, mix it up. Change the KPI’s. Reveal some after the fact.

Third, foster a culture of genuine improvement. Celebrate and encourage the innovations and attempts that didn’t work.

KPI’s aren’t the north star. Your mission is.

Like John Mulaney said, “I always thought that quicksand was gonna be a much bigger problem than it turned out to be.”

As a Gen-X’er, I grew up on Saturday morning cartoons, and in the cartoons, quicksand is a big problem. One of the biggest, in fact. I just assumed I’d be dealing with it my entire adult life. I remember formulating my plan for how to survive when I fell victim to quicksand — grab on to whatever I could, lay out flat if possible, never struggle. I may have practiced my survival techniques in the backyard. 

As it turns out, I’ve never had to work around nor be saved from quicksand. I’ve never even seen quicksand.

I was a victim of availability bias.

Since the quicksand concept was right in front of me all the time, I couldn’t help but be worried about it. 

The News, and media in general, are masters at using availability bias to play us like fiddles.

The next time you find yourself anxious or angry because of something you saw, heard, or read on The News, ask yourself, 

“Is this quicksand?”

Because unlike quicksand, where you focus really can trap you.

I am one of those computer guys.

When I worked as an intern at GE Astrospace in 1990, our team of about 20 people shared six or seven computers situated in the common area of the office. We had two black and white Mac’s (SE-30s), a color Mac (Macintosh II), and three or four VT100 terminals (connected to the VAX machine somewhere else in the building).

One of my unofficial roles as the intern was to be the “computer guy.” Most of that computer guy work was secretarial. The real engineers would give me their handwritten tables and ask me to create a pretty graph on the Mac. Or they would give me the modified characteristics of a component box on the spacecraft and ask me to update the model on the VAX so they could perform new radiation analyses. 

I didn’t mind because a) I got to learn about real engineering work, and b) I liked learning how to use the computers. In those first few years, I taught my team members how to use now-ubiquitous technologies such as networking, email, and the web. 

My computer guy-ness spilled over into my entire life. Even though I was an electrical engineer working on spacecraft problems, I became known as the computer guy in all aspects of my life. 

My friends and family would describe what I did for work as, “Oh, he’s one of those computer guys.”

In the 90s, having the skill of operating a computer was a novel quality. A quality worth mentioning about a person. Just like being a “driver” was something worth noting about a person around the turn of the 20th century. 

But today? Everybody’s a driver and a computer guy. 

You’ll probably be better off embracing useful technologies rather than sounding the alarms.