Telecommuting Hits Home
Crews work to return connectivity to surrounding buildings while Fuze Box employees telecommute for a day.
No thanks to a big ol’fire in a manhole at 7th and Mission, the entire Fuze Meeting office had no network connectivity Monday morning and after about 30 minutes (don’t worry…our web conferencing software was still up and running), we all just called it quits and headed home with our laptops and mobile phones in tow, ready for a day of wildly productive telecommuting.
You work remotely-ers. You work from home-ers. You on-the-go-work-outta-your-hotel-ers. It’s not all a walk in the park!
Which leaves me to the real point of this blog – a plea for advice for our community that works remotely. A request for help and any tips that could make ‘working remotely’ productive and not painful.
Real life testimonial:
After immediately changing out of my work clothes and into my civvies (1 point telecommuting), I sat down, popped open the laptop and NOPE. It took me less than 5 minutes to realize this is not happening. Not at my house. There was way too much to get distracted by, including but not limited to quite a few DVR’ed episodes of 24. So off to the coffee shop.
After one quick little “working from home today” Facebook status update, all of a sudden, my friends are all up in my bid-nezz like I somehow snaked a day off? “Oh great, I’ve been meaning to catch up with you. Let’s get coffee!” Hel-LO, I’m WORKING!
“OK. OK. This is all part of the gig,” I remind myself in a soothing zen voice. But…at this point I’ve been camped out at a coffee shop for 3 hours and honestly couldn’t stomach one more banana nut muffin and the guy behind the counter is giving me the stink eye, so I pack up and head out. Goodbye 30 minutes of productivity.
Where am I supposed to go now? Another coffee shop, of course! And on to coffee number 3 for the day. By 4 PM with caffeine buzzing through my veins, I canceled my evening plans because I realized I was already shooting way under target and could count on a whole evening working. Goodbye work/life balance.
The conclusion: Hats off to all of you who manage to do this effectively, because I can tell it’s the sort of thing that would take a lot of practice to be good at. Thank goodness I have my web conferencing software all picked out and ready to go, but let’s face it; online meetings are just going to scratch the surface.
So the question is: How do you do it? What tips/tricks/software do you use to make working from home more efficient? And hopefully my next telecommuting blog post will have incorporated all your fun little tips.
Hey Kristen,
One word. Accountability.
If you don’t stay accountable for your work, as in you don’t have anyone you need to report to on a regular basis, then you fall into a trap.
You start to feel like you can work whenever you want, which can be true, but is detrimental if your idea of “whenever” is the very last minute.
Knowing someone is waiting for you or that you will get in trouble if you don’t deliver is great motivation to keep working when you really need to.
What I have is weekly to bi-weekly reporting of work, and I never let a task sit for more than a week without action.
I also have a stop watch so I can track my time specifically. Doing this helps me understand exactly how long tasks take instead of just feeling like they take “forever”.
I also break my tasks into smaller chunks so that I can focus on completing those chunks in 30minute, 1 hour, 2 hour or 4 hour time frames.
Shut the door to stay focused, and don’t multi-task. You work twice as fast this way.
If you’re going to jump out half way for coffee with friends (which I sometimes do), make sure you have time to do it, and don’t have pressing deadlines 
Yasuo Long
Wow Yasou! Thanks for your comment. I actually think scheduled breaks would really help out a lot…like a light at the end of a tunnel. But, your advice on multitasking…It would be GREAT not to have to multitask, but seems unrealistic because so many things are due “yesterday.”
However, I’m inclined to try it out – after checking out your website, you clearly have a handle on working remotely!
I just had the experience of a tree cutter cutting the line to our building. Fortunately, our deadline had already been met (by 1/2 hour!). It’s comforting to know Fuze Meeting is there.
Also, thanks, Yasuo, for those helpful tips.
I have been working from home for five or six years now. It gets very lonely from time to time, but mostly, it is a good arrangement, especially when it comes to the savings in day care expenses! You asked me on twitter to share my ideas, so here goes…
1. Have an office space in the house until you can work on the couch. Do not try working on the couch from the beginning or you will be tempted to watch 24 instead of work. Trust me.
2. If the kids are off for a snow day, try to get them involved in something with the other kids or you will have one bored kid on your hands.
3. Make sure you use web conferencing (like fuzemeeting, which is awesome), IM, and the phone to keep in touch with people. Otherwise, it can get rather lonely. Collaborating in the cloud is not instinctive and takes time to develop, as well as practice.
4. If you can’t handle being in the house, go to the library or to a cafe where they have WiFi. Actually, that’s the whole reason I got a MiFi appliance – so I could be truly mobile! It might help you to be more focused.
That’s all I can think of off the top of my head.
One of the things I like most about working from home is that I make my schedule, and for me this means: time for exercise! When I have a day to work from home, I usually start as early as I can so that in the late morning, when I am starting to fade, I go out for a run and come back refreshed and ready to go again! I can’t do this when working from the office, and it makes a huge difference for me.
Thanks for the tips!
Wow. Heather – Great points and thank you so much for your comment.
I didn’t even thing about how much MiFi might help out. Then I wouldn’t be limited to the two cafes in my neighborhood that offer free WiFi. Also, the reminder that practice makes perfect is some nice encouragement. Nowhere to go but up, I suppose!
Via Twitter: @timebandit: I did it full time for15 yrs. Little kids at home during work hours is recipe for disaster