DEV Community: Wilson Reyes Collado

Over a year of working remotely; These are the top things that I have learned about thriving as a remote worker.

Wilson Reyes Collado — Wed, 02 Sep 2020 13:39:07 +0000

Working remotely can be a blessing or a curse. How much you can make out of it will depend on your approach. Recently, many people have been pushed to work from home without the necessary preparation or the right mindset.

I have been working from home for over a year, and I think that I can share with you some realizations about remote work that I’ve learned through experience and research that could help you thrive as a remote worker. It doesn’t matter if you are doing it voluntarily or as a consequence of the circumstances.

Let’s begin to talk about what you came here for; there are many things that I can address about working on this modality, but I will focus on the top things that I think can make the most impact.

Focus!! 🧠

What am I talking about? It can be kind of obvious, but this is an essential aspect of effective remote working; People are not designed for multitasking, so the best thing that you can do is modify your habits to address one thing at the time.

The goal of addressing one thing at the time is to achieve what Calvin Newport calls deep work, but what is that ** “Deep Work”** thing?

“Deep work is the ability to focus without distraction on a cognitively demanding task. It’s a skill that allows you to quickly master complicated information and produce better results in less time. “

as this quote says, our goal with trying to focus is to achieve more results in less time.

That’s easier said than done. It can be challenging at the beginning to maintain a high level of concentration for long periods of time. But practice makes masters.

Which actions can you execute to improve your focusing skills and begin to be more efficient?

Make a to-do list, sort the list from more straightforward to more challenging.
Turn off the internet connection of your phone or turn on silence mode.
To improve one step by step the amount of time that you can focus, use some time distribution techniques like Pomodoro to define the concentration-time and the break time. I recommend you to play with this methodology and begin with smaller periods of focus and then increase the time progressively. (e.g., 25 minutes of focussed work and 5 minutes of rest, and then rise to 50 minutes of concentration and 10 minutes of rest and so on)
Save Calls and meetings to a specific time of the day ( if possible ), meetings tend to disrupt your rhythm, and usually, you won’t be able to make the most out of your deep work time if you interrupt yourself constantly. Regaining your concentration can take some time, avoid distractions!

Keep your skills sharp. 🪒

Skills are the most valuable knowledge asset you have. As a remote worker, your skills have to be outstanding because it’s not enough to be excellent in comparison to your local community; you have to be exceptional in comparison to all the professionals in the world that can apply to the same positions that you can.

So, if you want to maintain yourself relevant, you have to take the time to improve your skills and acquire as many relevant new ones as you can. As you may guess, this is not remote specific; if you want to thrive on any professional endeavors, you have to sharpen your skills. This will increase your probabilities to maintain your job and continue advancing in your career.

But how can I do that? You can take a look at my previous article to know how you can build new skills efficiently. 😉

Be Proactive! 💡

Being proactive is an essential characteristic of great professionals, especially remote workers. The fact of addressing things passively or proactively can make a pretty big difference in your outcomes. But, what do I mean by being proactive in this context? I think that it is necessary for all of us to cultivate our ability to predict future needs, anticipate problems, and seek new solutions for these needs and concerns.

However, conceptually identifying future needs and solutions isn’t enough; you have to make things happen instead of waiting for them to happen. Take action, begin to solve the things that you already identify as things that you can solve, propose you to address that issue that the team needs to solve, but nobody has taken the initiative to do it.

Don’t let your comfort zone to establish how much you can accomplish, neither for fear of failure nor for being comfortable with your current situation. “Just do it!”

Work and Life Balance 💻❤️

An essential part of being able to be productive and excel as a remote worker is to maintain your physical and mental health in peak conditions.

Working from home can make these issues pretty challenging. Why? because when working remotely, the difficulty of drawing the line between your job and your personal life increases. At first glance, It doesn’t sound as serious, but not handling this effectively could lead you to catastrophic results. Some people may experience things like burnout, isolation, depression, and many other health issues related to being exposed to stressful situations for long periods of time without taking time and actions to relax.

There are some actions that I think could help you to have a better work-life balance and, as a consequence, increase your probability to stay physically and mentally healthy over time:

Working out: When working remotely, we can become even more sedentary than in normal circumstances, and even when most of us know that working out can positively impact our physical health, we tend to let the laziness or excuses beat us. Working out consistently will not only contribute positively to your physical but also your mental health.

There are plenty of studies out there that stand out how physical exercise can increase our cognitive performance and also act as a stress reliever. Take some time to work out!

Socialize: It’s effortless to feel isolated when you are working from home because your social interaction with your work partners is pretty limited in comparison with working in an office. As a consequence socializing will need a conscious effort from you.

Which things can you do to socialize? (If possible)

Go out with your friends, family, or significant other.
Work from coffee shops or a Co-working space
Meet with other remote workers sometimes.
If you can’t go out, make some video calls, or organize some video game parties.

Designate a work Schedule: a work schedule can be really helpful when trying to effectively establish the end boundaries of your work time and the beginning of your personal time. This can help you to be more productive while maintaining your stress levels on check. You need to focus on achieving as much as you can while working and relax as much as you can when you’re not.

However, your work schedule shouldn’t be written on stone; you can be flexible if you need it. But remember that if you continuously overwork with the intention of achieving more results, the price will be that over time you will achieve less. For this matter, Consistency > Intensity.

Establish realistic expectations: your expectations for a workday should be proportionally similar to your actual capacity to get work done. You need to establish an achievable to-do list at the beginning of the day. If you don’t do this, you will end working more time than you expected, not achieving what you planned to achieve, and with a feeling of deception. That, over time, can lead you to feel more and more unhappy.

Get your own workspace: 👨‍💻

Getting an established workspace doesn’t look like something essential at first glance, mainly because it can be expensive, could need extra space, and would need some work to get it done. The ergonomic of your work environment, and also how enjoyable it is to work there, play a major role in your long term well being and productivity.

There are many things that you can do related to set up a great workplace environment, but let me tell you some things that you can do begin with:

Establish a designated workspace in which you can work comfortably, and this preferably should be a place in which you can avoid noises and interruptions.
Invest some money on ergonomy, buy a good working chair, some monitors placed at the correct high, some noise-canceling headphones, etc. You have to take care of your body long term and also make working as comfortable and enjoyable as you can.
If you live with more people; Let them know your expectations about how they should communicate with you when you are working; Something that you can do is to agree with them with a set of rules on how to approach you while working. For example, if I close the door, please don’t interrupt me unless it’s absolutely necessary.

Communication 💬

Maybe one of the most significant subjects when it comes to working remotely. As you may guess, effective communication plays a significant role when working through digital tools because we are more limited than we are communicating in person due to the lack of non-verbal cues. As a consequence, you have to invest time to think about how you are communicating both verbally and written.

When communicating through digital tools, you have to make a conscious effort to be as clear and concise as possible with what you want to share and also on how you want to do it.

There are so many things related to communication while working remotely that this little section of this article is not enough to begin to address the matter. But at least I will share with you some actions items that you can execute to improve a little bit your overall communication:

Be kind, treat people with respect.
Be clear and concise with your text messages. Provide as many details as you can when you are explaining something or reporting your progress. Bonus: Use emojis to give some context to your text messages 😉
Take into account the time zones and working schedules of people which you are working with. Don’t expect someone to get back to you immediately.
Be transparent with what you do and what you are working on.
If you have to discuss a complex issue, use audio or video calls to avoid misunderstandings.
Use quality devices to improve audio/video communications, like a good microphone and video camera.
If you are not a native speaker, You can invest in tools to help you improve your writing skills. (Grammarly or any other grammar correction tool )
Communicate your progress effectively and your availability to work on new things.
Be available; try always to respond as fast as you can messages that are requesting information from you. It doesn’t mean that you should be working all the time, but at least you can provide feedback if needed.

There are plenty more things that you can do to improve your communication, but I think these are a good start.

Maintainability of you work-ability 🛠️

If you are planning to work remotely long term, or if you need to do it. It’s necessary to take long term measurements. As usual, your income is your primary source of wealth, and you will need to take the steps required to ensure that you can continue producing value in the majority of the circumstances.

These are some simple measures that you can take to improve your reliability:

Get an Internet backup ( Having two different internet providers for example)
If you live in a country in which it is common to have electric issues, you will need a backup power plant or any other way to ensure you have access to electricity almost all the time.
It would help if you had a backup computer in case of you losing your main computer. Murphy’s Law. A rule that states, “If something can go wrong, it will.” In addition to this law reads, “and usually at the worst time.” Your computer can fail at any time, and you don’t want to be unable to continue working while you repair that one you have or while you get a new one.

There are so many things that you can say about how to make out the most about working remotely; these are just the main ones that I have been able to identify. I would love to know yours. Let me know in the comments if you have any suggestions or questions.

Until next time ✌️

Top 3 Things That I've learned in my journey as a Software Developer.

Wilson Reyes Collado — Sun, 11 Nov 2018 01:38:16 +0000

Everybody has a list of things that they know and would have loved to learn them before they actually did it. This list has some of mine, and it will be a pleasure for me to share it with you guys.

1.What to learn and How to learn it.

One of the most critical pieces of knowledge that I could have obtained through my career as Software Developer has been “What to learn and how to Actually do it.” Before going deeper into this idea, I believe it is essential to know why this skill is so important.

We live in an era usually named as “The Information Age” and as you can guess information represents an important asset. But with all this information available there are some pitfalls you can fall into. For example: because of the information is highly accessible and there are almost an infinite amount of resources available to obtain it, the value of the knowledge has significantly decreased and the value of “skills” is going through the roof (People are paying people for what they can DO not for what they KNOW), if we don't know this, we could be wasting our time without even realizing it.

These are some of the reason why is essential to learn how to filter information effectively, learn what to learn and learn how actually to do it depending on what our goals are.

Okay, Okay, but... How can we do that?

First things, first. We have to learn what types of knowledge are out there and which of them we need to achieve our goals.

For this topic, I will use the Pluralsight course “Learning technology in the information age” as a guide. I entirely recommend to go and take it.

Dan Appleman says in his course that there are four types of knowledge:

Fundamentals

As you can guess “Fundamentals” refers to the essential knowledge of a field, the roots or whatever fit best for you. For example, in Software Engineering you will need to learn Data structures, POO principles, etc.

Pros: Fundamentals usually maintain its value through time.
Cons: Fundamentals are not so easy to learn.

Information

The information’s refers to the specific knowledge about some technology or tool, for example, the syntax of Kotlin or how to implement X specifically on the Android Framework.

Pros: Information is more easy to obtain and is usually more profitable.
Cons: Information is less durable through time.

Skills

“Enter the Skills” Maybe the most important of the four types, the skills are the ability of actually DO things, I mean, the way in that you take the fundamentals and the information to solve a problem or build something. As I mentioned before in the introduction; in a world where the value of information and knowledge has significantly decreased because everybody has access to almost all the information needed to do something, the value of skills (how you actually do things) has increased a lot.

Pros: Really valuable, more skills = more profits.
Cons: Difficult to obtain.

Innovation

Innovation!? Yes, when you get to a certain level on the other previous types of knowledge respecting to a specific domain, you will unlock the ability to see what is need it in your field of expertise and then you can use this ability to create new knowledge or tools. Basically, if you are on top of an area regarding knowledge, you will have an idea about where that field should or may go.

But, why so much effort?

Because the real cost of learning is not the monetary value of the course or book that you are consuming, the actual cost is the time you invest in it. As you may know, time is your most valuable resource.

So, let me tell you something, If you want to be efficient, be the best that you can be and put yourself in a position to be successful; You must define what you want to be, what type of knowledge you do need the most, and after that, you have to strategize and organize which piece of this knowledge are you going to learn first.

Making the Strategy.

After you have the list of things that you need to learn to reach your goals, you will have to define the Strategy ( How you are going to do it ). You can do this whichever is the way that fit the most for you, but I will give you a recommendation based on what has worked for me.

First thing is to prioritize quality, you will have to find the most valuable resources. We should do it in the same way that we look for a new smartphone or gadget. I mean, You have to compare the resources that you will study using the number of reviews, stars, recommendations or any system that the platform uses to rate the content.

After defining a list of “What" I recommend you to distribute your study sections in small chunks above big ones. The reason for telling you this is because is way better to be consistent through time than euphoric one day. You have to prioritize Quality above quantity, is better to study for one hour every day than seven hours one day of the week. Why? Because each time you study a material your brain has to make “the connections” so that you can access this knowledge the next time you need it. In other words, for this task is more efficient an everyday joggle than a one-day marathon.

2. Build Something.

Yes, build something. Simple, isn’t it?

One of the many mistakes that I have made through my software career is to get trap in the called “Tutorial Purgatory.”

I remember when I began to work as a software developer; I was so focused on getting to the next level that I was consuming a ridiculous amount of blog posts, courses, tutorials (Information) without any practice (Skills Development). All this effort as you can deduce this results in me forgetting a lot of what I “learn” in less than you can imagine.

So, If you feel you are trapped in the tutorial purgatory, you need to escape from there, that doesn’t mean that you will go and start building things like crazy without documenting yourself, that could be a waste of time too.

So, How can we do it!?

You “Just” have to practice, you have to find a way to apply those new shining things that you are learning and create something, Why? for two main reasons:

If you don’t practice, you’ll forget about it.
If you don’t do something, you will have nothing to show.

What can we do to improve regarding these points?

Create a side project to translate that information that you recently got into skills.
Do the exercises of the courses that you watch.
Explain what you have learned to others.

3.Personal Image

“The ability to express an idea is as important as the idea itself.” - Bernard Baruch.

In this context, the ability to express what you know is as important as your knowledge itself. Why? Because “Perception is reality.”

This was something that I wasn’t too into not so long ago. But through experience, I have learned that If nobody knows about you, you will miss out a lot of opportunities because you will always have to prove yourself to get what you want, and the chance of showing what you know is not always on the table.

Is important to say, that some Developers are not usually interested about their image or about selling themselves to get what they want, they typically think that just with the technical knowledge should be enough, and I respect that (I was one of them). But my perception changed after I got to work into some new exciting projects and increase my income significantly, just by investing some time in my online presence and getting people to know what my skills are.

Nowadays some of the most significant professional opportunities get to people by referrals and not necessarily by applying to a public job offer. For example, two of my three currents jobs/projects get to me by a referral, and the third one got to me through LinkedIn.

But don’t get me wrong even that the perception of others is significant because can affect your life for good or for bad; there is one thing that is even more important and always will be more critical, Your self-image perception because your own opinion can hold you back and block you to achieve the things you could accomplish.

"Whether you think you can or think you can't, you're right." Henry Ford.

Sometimes we are that person that discourage us from excel or to be whatever you want to be. So before you care about other people perception, remember that you have to trust in your abilities so that the other people can trust them too.

What we can we do to improve this!?

Well, even when I’m still working on this, I can mention some things that have worked for me until now.

Create a portfolio where you will put all the projects that you think give a good sense of what you have done, the professional experience that you have and the recommendations that people have made about you.
Maintain your relevant profiles up to date, Linkedin and GitHub are good examples.
Invest in your interpersonal communication skills.

I hope these things can be useful for some of you or at least that this post awakens in you the curiosity to search more about these topics.

Until the next time!✌