Work

General

This page tries to by the “style-guide” for your life :)

Working in a distributed team can be fun, challenging but not everything is fun and joy... and not all the time.

A distributed team is scattered across different locations, and everyone works wherever they are. People can work from home (bedroom, living room or home office room), from co-working places or any place they feel comfortable.

If you have always done your job “at work”, the transition can be rough. Working remotely isn’t for everyone, and it can take a while to adjust to it. Ask for advice from your team members, they have also been through this and can share their experience.

While we don’t work from the same location, we are all located in a 2 hours difference time zone.

We don’t have fixed working hour but our customers expect us to be available from 9 to 5 from Monday until Friday GMT. We try to adapt to this requirement and don’t work on weekends.

We don’t impose a fixed amount of work hours per week and you should work to an amount with which you care comfortable and really willing to work.

The amount of work differ greatly from one person to another, but we do get suspicious if someone want to work more than 40 hours per week for an extended period of time, as everyone needs time for itself + sleep.

You are in control

When you work in a distributed team, you are in control. You plan your schedule and decide where and when to work.

Most difficult part is to find the motivation to work. Hopefully you enjoy what you do at work and genuinely care about getting work done for the project. Otherwise you might need to find another project or recognize that distributed teams are not your style.

There is nobody to tell you when to work, how to work or to check that you are at work. It is your own style to work and you need to find ways to improve the way you work.

The sustainable work hours number varies considerably by person so take the time to observe your limits.

Define and respect boundaries between work and your personal life. Realize your work throughput limit and stop working as soon as you hit the limit. It will be best for you and the project.

There is no correlation between work hours and experience level. Working hours is a personal choice, you decide how much energy you want to spend for the project and for yourself/family/friends. More energy spent for the project will translate in less energy for yourself.

Stay focus on what you do

Try not to mix “at work” activities with “after work” activities. Make a clear distinction between when you are “at work” and when not. Otherwise you might be working or slacking non-stop.

When you are “at work”, it does not matter how much time you spend sitting at your desk or staring at the screen. The only thing you have to show for your day is that you’ve actually got something done.

Define a time when you work and a place where you work. Let others know about these boundaries. When at home, other members of the house might find it hard that even if though you’re around, you’re actually “at the office” working.

Same boundaries apply when you are not at work or on leave / holiday. Dedicate the weekend for non-work related activities. Refrain from checking work email, colleagues progress or project status. Take that time to disconnect from work, recharge your energy and motivation, interact with your friends... just do something else.

Asynchronous tasks

Distributed or asynchronous work requires a completely different way to handle tasks, in comparison with the 9 to 5 methodology.

We are a team, so we still need to collaborate in order to get a task done.

While working on a task you will have to wait for feedback from one or more team members. Example review request, help with some idea... etc Since we are not at work in the same time it will inevitable lead to having multiple opened tasks in the same time.

In order to reduce the number of parallel tasks, we need to provide quick feedback to our team. The feedback should be no more than 2 working days, preferable 1 working day.

If you need urgent feedback, mark the feedback request as such, ex put a big URGENT tag on the review or the subject of your email.

Take notice of weekend days as most people will not work in weekends and so weekend will not count as working hours.

In case a team member is delaying the feedback, get in touch with him/her and try to hurry the feedback.

Try to keep the number of parallel tasks to a manageable size of less than 5 tasks.

Make sure you have the right tools so that switching between tasks is easy and fun:

  • the tools should provide good support for switching between environments or operating systems, sharing configurations or environment.
  • review comments should be clear so that you will always know what you need to do next.
  • changes after review should be easy to detect and focus.

Staying Healthy

Staying healthy, both physical and mental, is harder when you are on your own.

When you work from home or bedroom you tend to do little physical effort. Fitness is something you have to pay close attention.

Make sure you have a comfortable desk, chair, keyboard, mouse and monitor. Any of these can cause short or long term injuries. There is also the option of working from a standing desk.

Being alone at work is probably the hardest part. When you work from home, the only person you talk to all day are members of the house. It can get pretty sad.

Disconnect yourself from the work, stay away from the screen and feel more like a social human being. Be pro-active and invite friend for lunch, coffee, dinner, game night, pasta night, drinks. You shouldn’t be dependent on work for social interactions.

Communication

Use a dedicated account (email, chat, skype) for work. This will help you filter the work related communication.

Use “away” and “busy” functionality of you instant messaging tool to let other know about your status.

Since we don’t work based on fixed working hours you will receive email, review request, feedback when you are outside of your working hours. Ignore them and don’t feel the obligation to read or respond then.

When you talk to someone face-to-face or voice-to-voice, you get a lot of contextual information and unspoken messages, and information is exchanged pretty quickly.

When communicating using text messages many or these unspoken messages are not received. Always acknowledge that you have received and understood a text message. Be as clear as possible and avoid subtle irony or local culture jokes. Use emoticons to hint for mood, e.g. This is a silly joke :) Avoid ALL CAPS as much as possible, otherwise people will feel that you are shouting at them. Use the appropriate text markup to **emphasize** something.

Since most of the communication is done using text, get proficient at typing and get good tools to help with typing (ie a good keyboard). You will write many code, emails, documents, text chats.

The process of writing should encourage you to slow down, organize and clarify your thoughts before sharing them with someone else.

When things get too complicated, don’t hesitate to switch to voice chat. After a voice chat don’t forget to document what was discussed by updating a document, sending a follow up email, updating a ticket or creating new tickets with new up tasks.

Document everything in public places. Folks can look up the information they need to see how a project’s going, how to do a task, and someone can quickly step in when a colleague is away.

Well documented, small tasks based work

It feels flattering to be essential to the project. But that usually also means that project won’t make rapid progress without you.

This is not a good thing. Both for you and the project. What happens if want to take a (spontaneous) vacation or get sick? Or some work gets delayed and overlaps with your great vacation, scheduled many months before.

If you are critical to the project, there’s no slack left for anything new or urgent. You can not prevent new or urgent things from showing up, they will, you may count on it.

To handle this, break all your work into small tasks as described in a previous section and make sure each task is well documented so that it can be continued at any time by another team member.

Tools

Make sure all development tools are on your laptop.

Buy a good headset and microphone.

Verba volant, scripta manent. As main communication is done using text, you can keep track of all past conversations. Configure your instant messaging client to keep logs of all previous conversation and archive your emails instead of deleting them.