Habits to Form as a Remote Developer - Reading Time: 4 Mins

📅 March 08, 2020

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⏱️5 min read

Introduction

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Remote work has been a hot topic for a few months now due to the coronavirus outbreak. I start to stumble across talks or articles surrounding remote work. Especially how developers in my social media deal with it when they are working from home.

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One such story, was my friend's cat was lying in front of his screen waiting with the cute and adorable look to play with me. Which he promptly relocated the kitty to another location so that he could focus on his work without being disturbed by the cat's cuteness to wanting their owner to play with them.

Why Should We Built Habits for Remote Work?

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I think one of the key things for remote work is to learn to build good habits and to discipline yourself to help to facilitate to get things done. Unless you had established your own set of routines or daily rituals going remote work. Just shows you in plain sight on the need to establish new habits to help in your remote work routine.

For me, having been working remotely in these past few months had helped me to understand the importance of these habits. Especially in me to start picking up my kettlebell to exercise daily to do turkish getup.

I found out that tackling one habit one at a time every month, it compounds to massive changes as the months goes on.

Good Habits

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Here's my list of good habits that I believe are useful for remote work. Which I had personally experienced that had best worked for me that might be useful for remote work.

Turning off your notification - Take a chill pill and complete your task one at a time. You can check it during your break as well to catch up on what you had missed in the world.
Creating your weekly plan the week before by setting aside time to plan - I would usually dedicate about 25 mins or a 1 Pomodoro session to plan out my weekly work that I will be working on the next week.
Review and make daily modifications of your daily plan. Before you start your work for 5 or 10 mins. - They help to let you modify your daily tasks as new information arrives to adjust the priority of tasks.
Adopting time management systems like Getting Things Done or Pomodoro Technuique - This helps you to establish a routine with a schedule and stick to it to get things done.
Taking time off to rest and recharge - I found that not resting makes me hate myself. This result in me getting off the rails or having negative self-thoughts. That starts to creep up in not working anything at all the next day.
Documenting down your process & refining it - This allows you to outsource your non-high-value task to a virtual assistant in the future. So yes having this inplace builds upon your foundation to get work done even among your team members.

Bad Habits

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These are some of the bad habits that I had and still working on it as I knock it away one at a time as transiting to remote work became more magnified significantly due to these poor habits.

Not eating well with non-processed food - Since November last year, I'm had been doing one meal a day (OMAD) which I started to eat clean as much as possible for better productivity, focus and health for myself.
Not exercising daily - I found out that it helps you to sleep better and become more healthy without the usual sickness that affects my body that much.
Staying up late - It affects your productivity, mental health and general health for yourself. Not forgetting the amount of time you lost due to not waking up early.
Not setting a boundary of your working hours - Having a set period of your working hours can help establish order to yourself instead of being overworked or procrastinate on tasks.
Procrastination of tasks - This happens to me a lot. Due to the freedom of remote work and tons of distractions which allows you to procrastinate. I feel like punching myself in the face as I failed to complete the tasks that I had planned for the day.
Not finding time for social activities - We are social animals by nature. Doing remote work can be lonely therefore please go out there and do some social activities be it going for local meetups, company online gatherings or catching up with your friends can help to address this loneliness.
Not spending the effort to communicate well & being tactful - Written communication is one of the popular ways for remote workers to collaborate in an asynchronous nature. Therefore I suggest that you should brush up on your written and other communications skills to reduce problems. When you are communicating with your colleagues or other people that are non-technical in background. You can read books like 48 Laws of Power, How to Win Friends & Influence People, Writing Well to help you on it.

Conclusion

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Remote work has its perks and benefits. Which can be daunting for those who are not used to it. Your habits play a huge role in how to be an effective remote developer.

Which is why I believe you should always seek to overite bad habits into good habits. By one at a time to transform yourself to become a better & effective remote developer.

References

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