My first month as a remote worker
At the end of December I moved from San Francisco to Florida (of all places) and started working remotely for Adobe.
It’s been quite a transition, moving across the country, buying a house and starting to work remote. I figured while it’s still fresh in my head I’d document some of the pros and cons I’ve found so far!
Pros
More focus time
Working for a West Coast tech company from the East Coast means that literally no one is online until about noon my time. That means that if I start working at 9am EST, I have three entire hours with no emails, no Slack messages and no meetings. I’m really enjoying this time to put on my headphones and get some great work done.
Less distractions
While I do miss the social interactions of being in the office, open offices are just terrible places to focus. When I finish a meeting at home, I turn off the app and am immediately back in my empty office working. No one coming up to talk, no overhearing arguments in the office, it’s a lot easier to concentrate on what I need to do.
Housework and errands
When I was working from the office, I had a really hard time motivating myself to get errands done before or after work. Running to the post office, doing laundry, cleaning the house were all things I’d tend to put off. Working from home makes taking care of those issues a lot easier. Especially (and this is a con as well) since I no longer have a group of coworkers to eat lunch with, it’s easy to run around the house doing some chores after I eat.
Time with my family
It’s also been really nice having my girlfriend and my dogs one room away at all times. Luckily, our new house is big enough that we’re not working right on top of each other. But it really is nice to order some food and meet in the living room and have a nice lunch all together!
Cons
Loneliness
As I get older, more and more of my friends and social interactions involve work or work friends. Between not being at an office and moving to a state where I know so few people, it’s taken a pretty big toll on my social life.
Feeling disconnected from coworkers
So far I’ve been having a pretty easy time keeping up to date on my work tasks. I’m having a much harder time keeping up to date with my coworkers on a social level. Last week some of my teammates dialed me in to a video call while they had coffee! Going forward, I’d like to set up regular 1:1’s with them to feel more connected.
Work-Life balance
If I take a full lunch break and finish at 5, I feel like I didn’t work enough. If I stay online until 8pm (5pm PST) I feel like I worked way too much. I’m going to have to work a lot harder on finding the perfect balance to strike going forward.
Conclusion
I’m really loving working remotely. I think it’s going to be a great way forward for me. It does come with its own unique challenges and I’ll have to develop some new routines and systems to handle those.
Any of you work remotely? Got any tips? I’d love to hear them in the comments!
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