Being a good remote worker takes a lot of discipline. We have to do everything ourselves without anyone watching.
In this article, we’ll look at some habits we can adopt to become a good remote developer.
Know When to Get Off Work
Since we’re working at home, we don’t have to go home from the office.
Therefore, we should know when we should stop working when working remotely.
We should aim to get off work at the same time as we do in the office. This way, we can take the breaks that we need.
Embrace the Perks of Working Remotely
Working remotely is great because we can control our workplace and we can do anything we want as long we finish our stuff.
Therefore, we should aim to embrace the good side of working remotely by keeping a flexible schedule and enjoy ourselves in different ways that working in the office outside of work.
There’s so much we can do now that we aren’t confined in the office that we should enjoy it while it lasts.
Automation for Remote Work
Developers are all about making things automated. Therefore, we should make our work automated as well.
We can set automatically schedule for notifying when we’re away on most messaging systems like Slack so that we all know that we’re away from the keyboard with something like Zapier.
Also, we can send video meeting links automatically by using Zapier.
It can also greet people automatically on Slack.
We can also do the same things with IFTTT by automatically creating recipes do automatically send notifications when something happens and many more that we probably haven’t think of yet.
As developers, we can also write our own scripts to do automation, which opens up an infinite number of possibilities as long as we can use libraries and APIs to help us automate our work.
Create Our Own Water Cooler
Chatrooms are great for water cooler conversations. We can create chatrooms between different people and there’s even more private than chatting neat the water cooler in the office.
This is because we can create private or public chat rooms that are only between the people we’re chatting with.
Also, we can send GIFs around and talk about the weather online, among many other things we can chat about.
Use an Online Whiteboard
Online whiteboard are just as good as real whiteboards, if not better, for brainstorming.
Online whiteboards can be of any size, whereas a physical whiteboard can only be so big.
We can use it to write anything, uploading pictures, add links, attach files, and do much more, which adds to the conversation in ways that we can’t do with regular whiteboards.
Also, we can save a snapshot of our online whiteboard so we can go back to what we have later.
The best we can do with a regular whiteboard is to take a photo of it, which isn’t that great.
Therefore, we should take advantage of all those capabilities that aren’t available with physical whiteboards.
Brainstorm Alone
Since we’re working in our own home, we can brainstorm alone quietly instead of having to think inside a noisy open office.
It’s a great opportunity to just close our room’s door and brainstorm.
Many people brainstorm better on their own, so we can take full advantage of our home office by brainstorming alone quietly.
Decide If We Need a Meeting
We should only call a meeting if it’s really needed. If chat messages and emails are good enough, then we can just use them and not disrupt people with extra meetings.
However, if we have no meetings at all, maybe we can make an optional one so that people can socialize online.
Standup meetings can be done on chat since it’s only used to update people on our progress for example.
Record the Meeting
We can record meetings without people feeling creepy in a remote meeting since people aren’t watching a camera recording ourselves.
That’s great since we can record our meetings instead of having people take notes.
We can also go back and watch the recorded meetings at the speed we want if we want to recall some information from the meeting.
Conclusion
We should take advantage of the benefits of working remotely, like having a rich whiteboard for brainstorming and recording meetings to let recall information from them afterward.
Also, we need to set boundaries so that we can all take a break.
