Tips and Tricks for Fully Remote Working Software Engineer
This incoming year, 2022, I will be starting a position as a fully remote worker. This will be a first for me. Obviously, like many other software engineers throughout the past 2 years, I’ve essentially been fully remote, however, I have always had the ability to go into the office for social interactions. As well as the fact that I started my previous job being 100% in the office, therefore it will be completely different having to learn from scratch remotely and not be able to easily nudge someone on the shoulder to start a conversation about something you’re not sure about.
Due to this, going into this year, I have a few things that I’m going to try and aim to do to make sure my remote position works for me.
- Make sure I’m forcing myself to go to the gym.
I feel like this point is more important that it first looks. When you’re fully remote, you’ve a tendency to continue to work on, and you can easily lose a sense of the distinction between work and relaxing.
In light of this, I will make it my goal to continue to get out of the house, hopefully at a set time (more or less) to go to the gym — usually with a friend.
2. Always take the full lunch break
In my previous job whilst working remotely, I would tend to not take my full lunch break, and rather go back to work a little early and try to get as much work done as possible in the day. However, I felt near the end that this was taking a toll on me, and tried to ease off this and take the full of my lunch break. I felt that this started to work a lot better for me. You’re only capable of how much you’re capable of! If it can wait until tomorrow, it should.
3. Take up a hobby — cooking.
At the moment, I’m trying to get more into cooking. I’m hoping that this will be a nice release from work. Although this isn’t getting me out of the house, it will be good to learn a new skill, especially in the time that I have back from commuting to and from work.
4. Make sure the weekends are your own.
I started to take up golfing as well near the end of my previous job, and I really started to enjoy it. I went every Sunday with a friend to the driving range and practised. We don’t actually play golf (there’s probably a reason for that…) so until then, we’ll continue to practice so that we don’t embarrass ourselves for when we do come to actually play on a course.
5. Keep a tidy desk
I’m generally a fairly messy person, but in the New Year, I’m going to try my best and not be as cluttered, especially on my desk. Hopefully I will just have a notepad for the good old fashion note taking approach and a few pens. I usually take breakfast while reading emails, so I will try and remove the dishes from that during lunch time and have the afternoon with no clutter.
6. Experiment where works best
At the moment this is a little hard with everything going on and shops / coffee shops constantly being shutdown or having increasingly surmounting regulations placed on them, but I would like to try and work from different locations that my contract allows. That would include working from a coffee shop, from a friends house, etc. See if there’s any change, if one place makes me work better than another. We have flexibility when working from home and I feel like it’s important to harness that flexibility, as I only started to see that during the end of my previous job, and would like to continue that into my new job.
Now I’d like to hear from you guys! Would love to know any practices / items you’re going to use in the new year to make sure you have a pleasant working from home experience.
