Tip: Have your own work space or room

In our house I am fortunate enough to have reserved the ‘box room’ bedroom for the sole purpose of serving as my office.  This gives me an opportunity to enter ‘a work environment’ and close the door on home (and vice versa at the end of each day).  This focuses the mind on work matters and keeps me from being distracted by the massive amount of DIY work that remains incomplete in our house at the moment.  I recall reading articles before I asked for this arrangement with regards to habit fields, and really am a believer in this concept.  I think I would find remote-working so much more difficult if I had to sit somewhere that also served as a relaxation area.

Tip: Set up your working environment properly

Set up your working environment as if you were in an office for a company.  By this, I mean everything; ranging from the bare bones of your work environment to your software setup.  Actually pay attention to health and safety regulations with regards to monitor and keyboard/mouse use; make sure your chair is correctly adjusted (and is adjustable at all! Don’t work on a dining chair!) – in my early days as a freelancer I used to sit on a non-adjustable chair for about 5 hours a day and ended up needing physiotherapy on my lower back as I was in utter agony.

Try not to compromise on your software setup either.  Install the same FTP client you use at work, and configure your IDE or text editor in the same way as your work, including indentation and layout settings; it’s amazing how a little effort to get the environment consistent can make your life so much easier.  My advice extends to, if possible, having a computer for work and a laptop for pleasure.  This further extends the separation of work time and play time; if this is financially not viable then a good compromise is to have two users on your desktop machine; one for work and one for personal use.  I’ll bet your bookmarks for work in your bookmarks toolbar are substantially different to the bookmarks for home in your home bookmarks toolbar!

Keep work and pleasure separate in your software environment too

Moving on from that point, I used to have all of my bookmarks for freelancing and general interests in one bookmarks toolbar folder, meaning BBC News was mixed up with the PHP Manual and a bookmark to my phpmyadmin directory.  This made it too easy to see the BBC news bookmark and check the news for 5 minutes.  5 minutes turns in to 10, in to 15, etc.  Now, I keep my bookmarks separate, by using different browsers. I use Mozilla Firefox for work; and Firefox only has my work bookmarks in it, and I use Google Chrome for pleasure; this has my personal bookmarks in it.  Largely I won’t even use my desktop PC for ‘play’ or ‘relaxation’ and try to reserve that stuff for my laptop.

Don’t get work done in your house when you’re supposed to be working

For the first two days of the remote working arrangement we had ongoing building work.  It is very difficult indeed to get good runs of concentration with the noise, and interaction with the tradesmen.  If you’re having any considerable work done to your house my advice would be, if possible, to go in office for that period.  It’s much quieter and you’ll be much more productive.

Communication

Assuming you are moving from an office environment, you will be used to being tapped on the shoulder and asked questions, and being asked for updates on the state of work on a fairly regular basis.  Though these distractions are often labelled unnecessary and irritating, they naturally lessen in frequency if you’re not in the office.  This doesn’t mean that you should make yourself completely impossible to contact!  I ensured I invested in an unlimited call plan on a home number so that I can call the office as frequently as needed to ask questions to which I need immediate answers, and so that the office have a reliable line on which they can contact me.  Thus far I have more than made good use of the phone line!

Your project manager will largely appreciate frequent, detailed updates of your progress.  There’s nothing worse than having a developer working for a solid few days with no good indication of where they are at with a project.  It’s good to say “all’s going well and we’re on time” and it’s responsible to inform if you’re having difficulties and look to be struggling to deliver for the target time.

Work Time

Something said fairly frequently to me is “oh so you can work whenever you want then”.  I’m not sure that this is entirely true, and my advice would always be to try to be at your desk between the hours that your office would normally be open (in my case 9am to 5pm).  This means:

• You are contactable via email and on the phone all day, should you be needed.
• You maintain a fairly normal working life and have similar spare time as other people (provided your friends work normal hours!)
• You are guaranteed to put in the required number of hours per week.

Quick advice for those who do freelance work alongside a full time job

• The hours of 9am – 5pm are strictly your company’s time.  Make your freelance clients aware of this. Break the rule for noone.  In my opinion, to freelance when you’re being paid to work by someone else is criminal!
• You will find it much more difficult to motivate yourself to freelance after having spent 8 hours each day working in your own house (I used to find working 12 hour days fairly easy if 8 hours were in-office and 4 hours at home).  My solution to this is to work in my office for work, and to move to the sofa on a laptop to freelance.  This does break slightly from my laptop == pleasure rule but at least gives me some separation in terms of the type of work I do!

Summary

Overall, it took me a week or two to get in to the swing of working remotely full-time, but I’ve got there now, and it feels good! I get distracted a lot less on an hour-by-hour basis and feel that I get more done in terms of pure development, and also the three segments to each working week really help me with maintaining my productivity at a high level right from Monday morning to Friday afternoon.  For any employee with the option of working remotely: give it a go, but only if you can separate work and home properly!

But before I get in to all of that, let me just cover a little bit about me.  I started “writing web sites” in 2003, when I owned and managed my own Championship Manager and Football Manager fan site, called “Assistant Manager”.  At 14 years old, I wasn’t financially equipped to pay anyone to work on the site, so I learnt HTML, CSS and Javascript to create my own static pages.  As the site grew, I saw the need to have a content management system, and eventually ended up learning PHP and MySQL to build my own basic content management system.

As time went on it became clear that the web was something I enjoyed working with, and in 2006 I started to take the work a little more seriously.  I read and researched web standards and best practices – primarily those “written by” or mentioned by the w3c.  I started to do small projects as  PHP freelancer, and through word of mouth managed to build a sizeable “freelance” client base.

After studying Maths, Physics, ICT and English Language at Hereford Sixth Form College, I was presented with a fantastic job opportunity with Right Dynamic – a small but rapidly expanding company based in the beautiful county of Shropshire (and later Herefordshire).  During my time at Right Dynamic, I was responsible for converting designs to HTML and CSS layouts, and also for developing the Content Management Systems on which the web sites we built were based.  It was during this time that I realised that I enjoyed the challenges and rewarding aspects of creating bespoke software using PHP, and in March 2008 I decided to specialise slightly, and accepted a more development-focused role at Hughes Media Internet Ltd.

This pretty much takes us to where I am today.  Over the last 2 years at Hughes Media I have developed my knowledge of working on the “Linux command line” as well as learning to use version control systems such as subversion or cvs.  In addition to gaining vital “real life” commercial experience whilst working in a large range of industries, I have also benefitted from working in a team of highly experienced and knowledgeable individuals, whose specialities include Project Management, UI and Graphic Design, and Search Engine Optimisation and Marketing.

I hope that you enjoy reading this blog in the future – and most importantly of all I would like to take this opportunity to welcome all feedback  – positive or negative – to anything I might discuss on this blog.