The idea of working remote has always appealed to me. But those times I've actually tried it, not only did I enjoy it, but I was genuinely surprised how much more productive it made me. Apparently, I'm not the only one. The words "work from home" carry a certain image of bathrobes and fuzzy slippers, of generally taking it easy. I found the truth was much different. Rather, like most developers, I enjoy programming, and want to do it well. Working remote brought tremendous freedom, and that included the freedom to do my job better

Freedom from a commute

Our time is the greatest thing of value; maybe the only thing of real value, that we possess. For most of us, commuting is the single biggest waste of time in our day. Time spent in commuter traffic is neither restful nor useful. I've often thought how much I could get done if I only had an extra hour each day. By saving me from the commute, working remote provided that extra hour. I found that when I was on a roll with work, I could just keep coding through the time I would normally spend commuting. Other days, it gave spare time to devote to continuing education. But I found that even if I devoted that extra hour to things which had nothing to do with work, it still helped my productivity, by letting me be better rested for the next day.

Freedom from distractions

Programming is a kind of work which requires deep concentration. We do our best work when entering a state of "flow", a mental state where everything except the project recedes into the background of our minds. It's not a state that we can just enter on command. The best we can do is to create a set of circumstances where it's likely to happen, and then do our best not to resist it. It's like falling asleep. And like sleep, it's easily broken by interruptions. Even a relatively private office space with high-walled cubicles is still filled with interruptions: Loud conversations a few cubicles over, unnecessary meetings, the noise of people passing in the hallway. In open-plan offices, the situation is much worse

Freedom from looking busy

In my experience, the best way to get into sprints of flow is to take genuine, totally disengaged breaks between sprints. This is difficult to do in an office environment. In a crowded office, there is always pressure to look busy.

With coworkers always watching and the boss walking by once in a while, I feel self-conscious even browsing the news for five minutes, or staring at the ceiling and thinking. By contrast, while working remote:

• I can go outside and exercise. In most corporate offices, there's not even much space to stand up or walk around, much less get down on the ground and do some pushups. During the project where I was working from home, I was surprised how often I could turn an unproductive day around by closing my computer and going for a run mid-afternoon.
• I can go for a change of scenery. Again, sometimes leaving my normal working space and heading out to a coffee shop or a library is just what I need to break out of a rut and get the creative juices flowing.
• I can lie down and take a nap for half an hour! Degenerate, you say? Maybe it is.... but... look, I don't stay up unreasonably late partying on work nights. But we all have those nights where sickness, or family needs, or plain old insomnia prevent us from getting a full night's rest. It's far, far better for my overall productivity to nap for half an hour and come back recharged then it is to lurch through the day, my flag flying at half-mast, my body doing little more than warming my office chair, trying to do the bare minimum of work to survive until 5 PM.

There's something all of these have in common. They boost my productivity for the day, but they fail to look busy. In other words, the need to look busy is an impediment to productivity.

Freedom of trust

I remember back in college, the least challenging classes were the ones which counted attendance as part of the grade. It makes complete sense. There are only a hundred points to go around, and every point which is counted towards something easy like attendance is a point NOT counted towards something difficult like exams or projects. In a typical office role, the evaluation of an employee's performance might look like:

• 5%: Wears proper business attire
• 15%: Submits daily status reports that are detailed and prompt
• 20%: Is in his cube during core hours and beyond. He's there when you arrive at 8:30, and is still there when you stay until 6:00
• 20%: Looks earnest and business-y whenever the boss walks by. You never see him browsing Facebook, listening to music, or watching clips on Youtube
• 15%: Is polite and agreeable
• 20%: Meets deadlines
• 5%: Displays leadership

This unintentionally creates an environment where its possible to meet 80% of what it means to be a perfect employee without producing anything of value

Remote work places less emphasis on the appearance of being busy. Without that crutch to lean on, there's only one way to prove my value to the company: Actually getting stuff done. This sounds like it would be a lot of pressure. My experience has been the opposite: That it is tremendously liberating. The fact that I'm trusted simply to accomplish the project by whatever means I think best, gives a whole different perspective. It gives a greater sense of ownership, a feeling of confidence that my input into the project matters. If I'm trusted to use my time wisely without a manager checking in to see if I look busy enough, it gives me a desire to continue earning that trust.

The challenge of isolation

"Fine", you say. "I can see that working outside the office might be better for individual productivity. But what about collaboration?"

I think we've all been in this meeting before. You file into the conference room with the other attendees, all except for Ted, who's working from home today. When you arrive, you find the meeting organizer deep in concentration over the speaker phone in the center of the conference table. Finally, after 5 more minutes of false starts, amidst a couple suggestions that maybe she should just give it up and get started on the meeting, the connection goes through! There's an electronic beep, and everyone hears Ted's voice coming out of the speaker phone.

Well, after a fashion. You can make out what he's saying if you really concentrate, but the sound quality is not that great.

But now the meeting is underway. When Kim has a question for Ted, she leans into the phone and speaks with the loud, slow voice she would usually reserve for her hard-of-hearing great aunt. But after the meeting gets rolling, everyone more or less forgets about Ted. Despite their best efforts, he's really more of a bystander. It doesn't help that he has trouble hearing anyone who's more than a few feet away from the speaker phone.

In our business culture, "Phoning it in" has become stock phrase for half-hearted work. While Ted will still receive a full day's pay, the whole experience leaves everyone with a sense that it's kind of an easy day for him. He's probably taking care of his sick kid, or has some sort of doctor's appointment, so that his mind isn't totally engaged with work. If you need an in-depth discussion with him, its best to save it for Monday when he's back in the office.

I believe that even in an environment like this, it's still possible to thrive as a remote worker. The benefits of productivity still outweigh the difficulties of collaborating, if I go the extra mile to make myself present. It is still important to come into the office at least occasionally for meeting and socializing. I need to make myself gratuitously available via instant messenger, via phone, and particularly via video chat and screen sharing. There's also an educational component, of teaching my colleagues to be comfortable using these different media to communicate with me.

Remote First

But for a company to maximize the benefit of remote work, it's better if they create a remote-first culture. We discovered years ago that the way to make webpages work on smartphones isn't to start with a full-size web page and try to shrink it down. It's to design the mobile experience first, and add additional content as it scales up. In the same way, the best way to get the most out of remote workers is to design systems of collaboration with remote work as the default, and build out from there. Speaker phones for meetings have been around for 40 years. In this age of ubiquitous high-speed internet, with a high-definition camera embedded in every laptop and smartphone, we can do better. The best solution is to have all meetings take place over video conference by default.

At first glance, this sounds like a second-best to in-person meetings. I've found that, much the same way that designing webpages for mobile often makes the desktop experience better as well, remote-friendly meetings are usually better meetings. They tend to be more tightly focused. They make it easier to use visual aids via screen sharing. If you need to grab one person's attention for a quick question, you can do it via IM, rather than by taking the entire meeting off topic.

The best solution is to have all meetings take place over video conference by default.

IM tools like Slack allow people to keep in touch throughout the day, in a way which is less intrusive than dropping into their cubicle. For code review and collaborative programming, screen sharing technology has advanced by leaps and bounds in the last few years. Tools like Google Docs, Screenhero, Cloud9, or VS Code's Liveshare allow multiple people to edit the same document at the same time, by giving each person their own cursor.

Talent Pool

From the perspective of a business owner, I can see the pluses and minuses of remote work. Technology can go an awful long way in reducing the difficulty of collaborating, but there will still be times where it lacks something compared to sharing a room (Though I'd argue, being remote is always going to be better for collaboration than an open office where everyone hides between their noise-canceling headphones). On the other hand, the individual productivity gains are pretty undeniable. But there's one extra factor which ought to tip the scales for any software-oriented company that's considering remote work. Hiring is tight right now, especially for developers. Unless you are one of the FAANG technology companies, you are almost certainly having trouble finding and retaining talented people. Developers like working remote. Allowing remote work costs nothing, and it is so desirable that it puts your company in the running against the Facebooks and Googles of the world in the war for talent. It expands your hiring pool from your particular city to the entire English-speaking world. It takes courage for managers to relinquish control and allow their employees so much freedom, but those who do so will see tremendous payoff.