Ask HN: How do you stay motivated when working remotely?
It&#x27;s a bit micro-managey, but since my performance did drop substantially with WFH, I&#x27;ve been sending updates to my boss more frequently. It helps to keep me going on days when I&#x27;m struggling with motivation. At the end of the day, I don&#x27;t want to send in a report that says: I did nothing.<p>My anxiety has also been a bit worse (understatement) through all of this (I don&#x27;t do well in social isolation). I&#x27;ve also had to force myself to do what should be habit, but breaks down when stressed. When I&#x27;m stressed I have a hard time viewing an activity as a set of smaller activities, it becomes a monolith. This stresses me out even more, even for stupidly small tasks. So I&#x27;m explicitly writing down the steps I intend to follow, where in normal times I wouldn&#x27;t have to. This gives me smaller, more tangible things to accomplish. I&#x27;ve also increased my accountability. Not just with the boss, but with colleagues. I&#x27;m writing a paper and I&#x27;m sending out short snippets to everyone periodically to review what I&#x27;ve done (as I&#x27;m still relatively new, their feedback is important anyways to ensure accuracy). So every couple of days I want a section completed (draft) to send out, and I take their feedback and update the previous sections. Repeat until done. Even if I only get a couple people sending me feedback it&#x27;s something that helps.<p>Anxiety makes me hypercritical of my work. Getting positive feedback on my work gives me a bit of confidence back (it shouldn&#x27;t be lacking, I&#x27;m a competent technical writer, but anxiety wrecks me). Seek out those small victories, and break things into smaller tasks to make them a bit more frequent. Waiting a month for feedback is not going to keep me motivated, but days or a week is perfect.<p>Another issue for me is just <i>starting</i> work. Once I&#x27;m moving I&#x27;m moving. The office gave me a delightfully crappy laptop for teleworking that struggles with even a handful of open applications, but I suffer the sluggishness and keep working copies open in the appropriate editor. Even small amounts of friction can have a major impact so removing it (by keeping the documents or source code or whatever) open and just an alt-tab away makes a big difference for me. I minimize reboots to once or twice a week (which really makes it struggle after a few days) for the same reason. Getting back into a good working state is friction, so always have the system in the proper state.