The 3 Keys to Working Remotely

After working remotely with multiple teams over the past four years, I’ve learned a lot about remaining effective and contributing meaningfully while not being colocated with my teammates. Throughout these experiences, I’ve learned three things that have made a world of a difference in how I work.

1. Overcommunicate

After going remote, one of the first things that change is how you’re able to communicate. Now that you’re not in the same location as your teammates, you’re not presented with nearly as many opportunities to converse about work or otherwise. That’s why maintaining communication, especially around work-related items is paramount. After going remote, I immediately aired on the side of overcommunicating to prevent any problems from occurring due to this natural dropoff in opportunities to converse.

I learned to always communicate early and often. This is also even more important when delivering news that might be challenging or less than ideal. Maybe an unexpected roadblock is delaying the timeline of your project and you must now communicate that to your manager and other stakeholders. While it’s not ideal, the earlier you communicate this news, the better for two specific reasons:

1. The earlier you sound the alarm, the better the chances are that you’re able to rectify the situation and course correct as needed

2. Informing others about a problem sooner helps minimize the potential impact it has while also increasing the chances that someone can help you resolve it

To my surprise, I’ve found that simply being aware of the need to explicitly communicate things that used to naturally occur in an office environment was half the battle. You can also proactively schedule recurring meetings with individuals or groups as a way to reserve guaranteed time to connect. While you might not always need the time each week it’s a good way to ensure things are communicated early and often and these meetings can always be cancelled on a week-to-week basis if there’s no agenda. It’s easier to cancel a meeting than it is to find time for one on short notice.

2. Timebox Debugging

While debugging is a large part of software engineering, it’s not made easier by the fact that you’re now remote. There’s a reason that “rubber ducking”, the process of audibly articulating a problem you’re stuck on to someone or something, is an effective means to arriving at a solution. And while a literal rubber duck can suffice, I’ve always found the process more effective (and fun) with a duck that can talk back to you (i.e. a teammate). Since you’ll face new challenges in debugging while being remote, namely not being physically surrounded by other engineers, I strongly recommend timeboxing your debugging.

Timeboxing is a time management technique in which you allocate a particular amount of time to serve as the upper bound for how long you’ll spend on a given task. In this case, it’s how long you’ll spend debugging a problem on your own before reaching out to someone else for help. Remember, past a certain point, it’s never valuable for you or the company if you spin your wheels too long chewing on a problem. This is why timeboxing is valuable — it ensures that you give yourself ample time to potentially solve the problem at hand on your own while also not wasting unnecessary time.

If you’re debugging and reach your time limit it’s time to ask for assistance. While asking for help is not something I struggle with, it’s something that seems to plague other engineers, especially those with less experience. To help remedy any anxiety you might feel when reaching out for help I encourage you to internalize this: it is always okay to ask for help, but to take care to be courteous when doing so and ask in others’ preferred ways where possible.

Good teammates are always willing to help to the best of their ability and current capacity. If they aren’t, they aren’t good teammates and if someone refuses to help you, they’re the problem, not you. Depending on your team asking for help can be done in multiple ways such as messaging a group chat or an individual engineer, sending an email, attending office hours sessions, or even scheduling time on someone’s calendar directly.

When you do receive help from others always be sure to thank them and express your appreciation. If you’re able to arrive at a solution together, be sure you understand how you arrived at the solution and why it works. This ensures the time together is well spent as it helps you improve as an engineer and you can help others who face the same dilemma as you in the future.

3. Curate Your Workspace

My old desk setup in NYC (affiliate links)

In four years of being remote from my teams, few things have been as beneficial to my productivity as curating the space in which I work. As engineers, it’s easy to convince ourselves that the only two necessities for work are a laptop and an internet connection, but I strongly urge you to reconsider. The environment you choose to work in can have a serious effect on not only your productivity but also your health.

Once I realized that it could be a while before returning to an office, I took time to procure the things I felt were necessary to remain productive and healthy while working from home. This meant ordering a dedicated work desk, monitors, an ergonomic chair, a mouse, a keyboard, and more. If you’re interested in all the gear I use while working remotely you can find it here (affiliate links).

Once you outfit your space as you see fit, it’s also beneficial to minimize distractions. The three ways I’ve best accomplished this are by:

1. Setting my phone to do not disturb during work hours

2. Heavily utilizing noise-cancelling headphones and music

3. Choosing a dedicated physical space where I only work

It’s very feasible to remain effective while working remotely. Like most of the world, I used to doubt if it was possible — now I wonder how I ever worked any other way.

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