What I have learned from working remote in one year

Around a year back I got an opportunity to work for a london based startup ‘Encyclokidia’, I had quite mixed feeling about the opportunity while i was reading offer letter from Zahir. I was confused, nervous, suspicious and excited!

 

Since it’s been an amazing year(yes, even I can’t believe it!), I thought it is an experience worth sharing with others 🙂

The Beginning!

In Beginning it was almost impossible for me to work from home because it felt like I am working on some hobby project, Having enough self-discipline to work for continuous 8 hrs was HARD!  or should I say impossible… 😛 I found myself watching random videos on youtube (feynman lectures  on physics) for no reason and then work life balanced messed up as I had to work for 10-12 hrs to get the task done. 🙁 This made me sad, unhappy, confused and I started wondering is remote job giving me the benefit I was looking for? I started wondering…

The Realization!

After few days of introspection, I found the biggest problem I had with my remote job was me :joy:(only slack user will understand). I finally understood only way to make it work is by adding self-discipline and organise my work-load.

 

The Change!

I started working on changes I need to bring in my daily schedule, Initailly my routine looked  something like this:-

6:00 wake up

7:00 break fast

8:00 start working

12:00 lunch

1:00 work

4:00 call it a day!

But what actually if looked like

8:00 wake up

10:00 done with breakfast

11:00 start working

2:00 lunch

8:00 call it a day!

I failed! And Failed quite badly :joy:

The Understanding!

After struggling from all kind of issue from self discipline to work life balance. I understood that I have to break the whole problem down into small parts.

1. I started created TODO list for a day and had a fixed timeline to complete it.
2. I got some good pair of headset (thanks to http://suprabha.me) and started worked on shorter time period with high focus.
3. Setting priorities for the day and rewarding myself for completing them helped me a lot.
4. Cafe like starbucks were places where i used to crash after getting bored working from home( you will surprise by knowing how much you miss crowd after working remote :P)