Last week I posted in our Community Slack channel and asked the question, “If you could give yourself one piece of advice when you were a novice remote worker, what would it be?”
The results were awesome and definitely tips worth sharing. Here is the advice from our Workfrommers:
“Don’t feel like you need to overcompensate in working hours to convince others that you’re “doing enough”. Use strategies like frequent status updates, logging progress on tickets/cards, etc to raise your visibility within a reasonable set of working hours.”
– Pete Johanson // @petejohanson
“Never assume. Be overly explicit in written communication.”
– Katerina Bohle Carbonell from NetNigma
“Don’t constantly think that people are judging my work output.” + “Take a sick day if I’m sick”
– Daniel Parker // @CodyMcCodeFace
“I do not need to be constantly available”
“I suggest asking your mgr / client what info is important to them so they feel up to date on your progress – and how often theyd like to receive it. Managers and clients are all different. Nip the surprises and disappointments before they take root. Anytime these folks think dont know what you’re doing (remember, its their perspective on this that matters), its not a good thing.”
– Mark Riffey // @MarkRiffey
“My advice would be to practice creating boundaries and explore daily routines. over communicate where you can, and truly take advantage of the freedoms remote work provides (often overlooked).”
– Darren Buckner // @darrenbuckner
And my advice to myself was about my productivity…
“I’d recommend to make a Trello board to visually organize all my projects. It took me way too long to figure out that for a birds eye view, lists weren’t working for me. Trello gives the visual aspect I needed to be able to organize my thoughts and feel a lot less stressed.”
From this I got 31 responses with tool recommendations including a tip from Alex to use a Bullet Journal, he says “that step of not being on the computer to organize my thoughts has helped a bunch”. Katerina also gave us a recommendation for a sweet notebook called ‘Nomatic‘.
Responses
While this might be tedious, try to make and fund your nest egg while traveling. For me, my expenses vary from place to place and because of that, I try to make a rough estimate of a budget for that place. However, I don’t make it too constricting to the point that I cannot enjoy my traveling and new experiences.