Due to the circumstances and people being "forced" to work from home I have decided to write about my experience because this might help some of the newbies. I started to work from home in July 2019 when I moved from my role as a BIM Manager for Lendlease, working on site, to work for Autodesk as a Product Manager.
I have to admit this was one of my biggest concerns when I joined Autodesk: a home based position. I had experience working from home back in 2018. Early that year I broke my Achilles tendon and that required surgery and a lengthy recovery process. I had to stay at home for almost two months barely moving and working. At the time the experience was a nightmare. I am also a really active and social person so being at home was definitely not my cup of tea.
In July I joined Autodesk, I work daily with teams based in different geolocations and timezones: Switzerland, other areas of England, US East Coast and US West Coast. From day one all the tools needed were there and I was really impressed with the way of working but let's touch on that later. So let's talk about my rookie mistakes and some tips that work for me:
1. Working from since I woke up
When I used to work in Construction my work schedule was from 8.00 to 5.30 so I am used to wake up at 6.00, so does my partner. At the beginning I would wake up, have a coffee and directly sit down to work. DO NOT DO IT. As I learned when I lived in Scandinavia: work smarter not harder. This massively prolonged my working hours and reduced my efficiency. Instead, now I still wake up at 6.00 and start my day around 8.30 but what I do instead is the following:
make a cup of coffee
take a shower and change into some different WFH outfit.
read or watch the news
write a blog
have some breakfast
breathe!
Twice a week, at least, my day starts with a CrossFit gym sessions but not now due to COVID
2. Take breaks
Solid first week at least, I would not even stop for lunch, instead I would just keep on going, this probably was because I was a newbie and eager to do everything and learn everything. But once I travelled to meet my team in Switzerland I realised their routine and I did something similar. This involves mainly:
a break in the middle of the morning to have a cup of coffee around 10is. This is between 5 and 10 min.
a proper lunch break where I generally do one of these options: I cook my own lunch, go out to buy lunch, a walk around the neighbourhood or a gym session. If I stay at home and cook I generally listen to a podcast too or watch a comedy show since I am alone and it gets really boring.
a break in the afternoon 3.30 or 4.00 where I stop like 5 or 10 min and have a fruit, sometimes I use this break to do some breathing exercises or meditation (no, I am not a hippie but breathing helps massively to regulate your body and stress levels which impacts in your hormones levels which... Mens sana in corpore sano)
3. Track what you do!
I love lists, I have been like that since I went to university. Working from home it felt fundamental to track task and activities to not drag them during the day. There is lots of tools you can use to do that but also a simple way is blocking time in your google or outlook calendar to complete task. I generally also track my task from Monday to Friday checking what I need to do first.
4. One team one dream
Can I first say how lucky I always am regarding the teams I get to work with? Everyone in my career has been awesome. In Autodesk my role is Product Manager, to explain it to other no software people, in resume it's kind of a Project Manager for software. There is a lot of differences between working as Product Manager in software and Project Manager in construction but I think the biggest one and fundamental is that software development generally adopts Agile Management. The teams I work with combine Kanban and Scrum and I am not going to explain how we work, that will require an entire blog entry, but let's mention the things are super helpful when WFH:
- daily 15 min catch up. We start every day with a quick 15 minutes catch up. We are around 10 people and it doesn't run more than 15 min. We quickly talk about task for the day and it's also used to set up specific 1:1 catch ups with team.
- there is specific disciplines catch up meetings during the week.
- at mid week we evaluate our performance and delivery progress and pivot if necessary.
- all our task and activities are recorded.
5. Everything is digital & in the cloud
From day one that my laptop arrived everything was ready for remote working. Let's start saying that Autodesk has been working across different geolocations for the last 20 years or I don't know how long.
All the documentation is published on a wiki page in the cloud. All the documents generated are available and editable by the team in the cloud. All meeting are conducted using Zoom and most of the communication is by Slack. Slack is amazing to manage and structure in specific teams. All the task are tracked using jira...
To give you an idea:
I haven't send an email to an internal colleague since I joined. Not one email in 8 months.
I have barely saved a document on my computer drive - mainly downloads.
Not one conference call has failed.
6.Track also your physical activity and be healthy
Stand up often, stretch often and maybe do home work outs? Generally if we were not in this special conditions I will work out 3 times a week or more between football and CrossFit but now I will repeat a home work out that I generally do while I travel. Happy to share it if anyone wants one.
Also will do one hour walks listening to some podcast after work if I didn't train.
Watch what you eat as being at home calorie consumption is massively reduced. Maybe is time to try intermittent fasting?
Overall I am aware these circumstances are different to my usual home based life and everyone is in an anxious mood. But what I can say to people once we move on from this storm is (and we will): after almost 8 months working from home I became more healthy, less stressed and also I felt more efficient, bright and productive than ever before. If anyone has any question please go into the "hola" section happy to go in depth.
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