Isolation, anxiety, and depression in the remote workplace
I work mostly remotely (although I do visit my clients every now and then), and many of the pitfalls in the article are real, and I had to deal with some of them.<p>One is the ability to work whenever the hell you want. For me this led to working in the dead of the night. I&#x27;d start at around 7PM in earnest and finish by 4AM (!). If you have a family, this is not a sustainable situation, so I had to fix that. It was surprisingly difficult to fix - I&#x27;m a night owl naturally, my best work is done late in the day, the later - the better. But I go to bed at 12AM now, which isn&#x27;t too bad.<p>Another very real issue is the separation of work and life. That I dealt with by only doing work in one place at my house. I have a separate &quot;work&quot; desk, and a separate set of hardware there (computers are provided by clients), and I don&#x27;t do work anywhere else. I also have different login keys on client hardware and SSH password login is disabled, so I can&#x27;t log into them from my personal laptop even if I want to. Finally, I have a separate GSuite account for work Gmail, and Chrome profile, and there&#x27;s no &quot;work&quot; chrome profile on my personal laptop. This solves the problem reasonably well, without the expense of renting an office, and time sink of adding a commute. This would have been an intolerable situation if I had small kids or a needy spouse though. I&#x27;d have to rent an office then.<p>WRT &quot;mental health&quot; issues, I feel like I&#x27;m doing all right on that front. If anything, visiting the offices is more stressful than not going anywhere. It&#x27;s much noisier and much harder to focus when I&#x27;m there. But I suspect the transition would be a lot less clear cut if the office arrangement were more humane, like it was at, say, MS in early 00&#x27;s - individual offices where you can close the door, library noise levels. I had one of those as late as in 2009. It was heaven compared to what you get now (including at MS). I kept my door open most of the time, but when I needed to really focus, I had the option of doing so.<p>I think one important thing is to keep a conversation going with whoever manages you and with your direct teammates. You don&#x27;t have to get into everyone&#x27;s face, but a low traffic, async Slack channel is pretty indispensable IMO, as is the brief weekly report on what&#x27;s been done and what remains to be done. If this is not done, it could appear that you aren&#x27;t doing much: people won&#x27;t naturally make the consistent effort to go and look, and even if they do, it&#x27;s often not easy to see the difficulties you&#x27;ve experienced. I.e. you could spend a few days debugging a gnarly issue in TF 2.0 (of which it has a surprising number), and the fix might be one line. That could very easily appear like you&#x27;ve been slacking off most of the week if the only info the other side has about the fix is a brief blurb in the PR.<p>Finally, another issue is that I feel like remote is more suitable to the kind of work which is not speculative in nature, and where you can deliver results of a predictable size at a roughly even cadence. With some of the best work I&#x27;ve done in my career that hasn&#x27;t been so: delivery was very uneven, and I&#x27;d sometimes not submit anything for weeks on end just because I was thinking of (and prototyping) how best to do what I was trying to do. I imagine that&#x27;d be problematic in a remote arrangement, especially if you change a steep hourly rate, like I do.<p>If someone has found a solution to this last problem, please share.