Working Remotely — Learning to Flourish On Your Own
This article is for those of you who might be looking for a change. It’s for those of you who wake up every morning unwilling to get out from under the covers because you feel the day ahead of you has nothing to offer.
Like most of the world, my previous job involved me doing the following every single work day:
1. Waking up at a more-or-less consistent time every morning
2. Commuting to work
3. Doing the Nine-to-Five
4. Returning home exhausted
Sound familiar to you? It should. Only 3.2% of the workforce primarily works away from the office.
Working remotely for Nrwl, getting out from under the covers each morning is exciting. Every day, I get up and get to choose where I’m going to work that day. Maybe I’ll plan a midday break to go to tackle some of my chore backlog or even see a play. Maybe I feel like socializing so I’ll go into one of Nrwl’s co-working spaces and work with the other Nrwlians. Who knows? It keeps things interesting! When was the last time you looked around during the middle of your work day and said “Man, this job is cat’s pyjamas!”
For me, that was last Wednesday.
Overview
For the remainder of this article I want to focus on the Who, What, When, Where of working remotely. Namely:
- Who should work remotely?
- What do you bring with you when you work?
- When do you work when there aren’t set office hours?
- Where do you work without an office?
Let’s get started.
Who should work remotely?
In my experience, the kinds of people who tend to enjoy remote work possess the following two attributes.
1. Preferring time alone more than the rest of the population
2. Desiring a dramatic change of pace from office life.
Determining that it’s time for a radical life change is a difficult, personal decision. And make no mistake, working remotely is a dramatic change from whatever you are used to. Starting any new job is isolating at first. None more so than a job in which you will be alone for the work day.
Those that I’ve encountered who have flourished in a remote working environment all invariably are able to feel happy and energized without social stimulation. Does that sentence fit you? If not, then remote work probably isn’t for you.
What do you bring with you when you work?
Let’s do this section in the style of The Verge’s What’s in your bag. But without their multimedia team so a lot less impressive.
So what’s in your bag Daniel Muller?
Glad you asked. First and foremost, as a remote worker I need to have reliable power. On any given day I can’t tell you if I’ll have access to an electrical outlet reliably. If and when there is an electrical outlet, I need to make sure that I can plug into it no matter how far away it is.
How do you plugin into something that’s 20 feet (6 meters) away?
Ingenuity! To battle with the problem of faraway wall sockets I made sure that buy a battery with pass-through charging. Now, I can make the world’s longest charging cord by plugging the AC charger into the battery and the battery into whatever needs charging. The Hyperjuice battery is one of the few USB-C PD batteries on the market with that capability.
Charging multiple devices at once takes a lot of juice so I made sure to buy a wall charger with plenty of watts. My Wacom charger is the only one on the market rated at 100 watts USB PD which is the maximum the USB-C spec allows.
Cool story bro. Okay, other than power, what is the next most important thing in your bag?
Easy. Noise isolating headphones.
When you work out and about every single day you are never in complete control of how loud your environment is. A quiet coffee shop can turn into a loud one in a matter of minutes. But that doesn’t matter when you have headphones that put you into your own little world, completely divorced from the noise around you. My Sony WH-1000XM3’s are my best friend.
When do you work when there aren’t set office hours?
Choosing when to work is, in my opinion, the best part about having a remote job. It enables you to wake up when your body wants to rather than at a prescribed hour. It lets you make time in the middle of a work day to take care of yourself by handling chores and giving yourself an opportunity to clear your mind.
As a remote worker, your day begins as early as you choose or as late as your first meeting — Your only responsibility is to attend all of your scheduled meetings and work a 40-hour work week. The time of day those hours occur is up to you.
Where do you work without an office?
Without the requirement of going to an office every day, the entire world becomes your office. The stereotype of millennials working out of coffee shops exists for a reason.
While working from Nrwl I’ve traveled to and worked out of Boulder, Colorado; Brooklyn, New York; London, England; Florence, Italy; and Lisbon, Portugal. In all of those cities, one constant has held true. There is always a coffee shop filled with remote workers within a mile of my doorstep.
If you’re looking for more stable internet and more reliable seating, you can also consider a local co-working space. And when in doubt you can always work from the comfort of your own home. One of the greatest joys in my life is waking up in my pyjamas, pulling out my laptop, and working in bed till the late afternoon. Nothing beats your own bed.
Wrapping up
Does my remote experience appeal to you?
If you’re interested in working with great clients and building open-source projects with a great team, don’t hesitate to apply to join us. Nrwl offers both remote options, plus an in-office environment for our team members in Toronto (Canada) and Phoenix (USA).
In case you want to know more — Nrwl was founded as an Angular ‘brain trust’ in 2016 by two of Google’s former Angular team members and well-known experts, Jeff Cross and Victor Savkin. Today, we use our deep knowledge to help our clients work through the biggest and most nuanced challenges of building Angular applications at scale.
To apply to our team, visit jobs.lever.co/nrwl.
If you liked this, click the 👏 below. Really, I need the validation. Also follow @nrwl_io and @mrmeku.
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