Remote work challenges and ideas to overcome them - Part II
What can we do about internal interruptions? What's the next challenge?
I’ve mentioned on Part I that remote work is no silver bullet and it presents some challenges that we need to be able to overcome to be effective. The first challenge is about how to get things done which is hard due to external and internal interruptions. In the previous post I mentioned some ideas to face external interruptions.
Handling internal interruptions - part II
I’m sorry, but now we start to talk about things that are more delicate, because we’re talking about how to do something that, deep down, we don’t want to do.
We’re now close to the self-help frontier, because we’re talking about how to convince or force ourselves to do something that’s hard for us. This is always complicated.
There are lots of different reasons for our interrupting ourselves with doing things we aren’t supposed to do instead of what we are. This is known as procrastination and we can find ten gazillion articles about possible causes and potential solutions. I won’t talk about the standard procrastination theory, but I will mention an uncommon vision. It’s Nassim Taleb’s on Antifragile:
Few understand that procrastination is our natural defense, letting things take care of themselves and exercise their antifragility; it results from some ecological or naturalistic wisdom, and is not always bad -- at an existential level, it is my body rebelling against its entrapment. It is my soul fighting the Procrustean bed of modernity.
In other words, he’s saying that if we procrastinate something it’s because we shouldn’t actually be doing that thing: if we see a hungry lioness 20 feet away we won’t procrastinate our fleeing. It’s an interesting vision that allows us to rethink how necessary and important are the things we’re doing or the work we have.
We’ll likely have time to decide if and how we must change our job to one where most things we do we want to do. But that doesn’t help us do the things we have pending today.
What can we do today?
Depending on your specific problem, I think at least one of the following things can help you:
Remember to fight against the external interruptions and prepare your environment.
If things you are supposed to do slip between your fingers and you are entering a pressure increasing loop because things start to pile up, a simple and great method to improve the situation is the method Tom Limoncelli recommends on his book “Time Management for System Administrators.” A great thing about this method is that it avoids some of the typical problem zones other organization methods have. And that it’s so simple you can later pile up some improvements for your specific situation. Anyone can apply this method and you don’t need to be a programmer or system administrator at all. All you need is something to write on, even a PAPER NOTEBOOK (ideally with an erasable pen, but even that’s not mandatory) or a simple text editor such as Notepad or TextEdit.
Determine the tasks you need to do in priority order. First make room for the big, important, high impact things. Otherwise the small, urgent but low impact stuff will literally eat all your time. Ideally set up a specific time slot and make it a routine.
Make a daily list of things and mark things done as they are finished.
Monday October 25th, 2032
- Task 1 DONE
- Task 2 DONE
- Task 3 DONE
- Task 4The day’s over and we got an unfinished task. We just move it to the next day. That way we prevent forgetting about it and we have some flexibility.
Tuesday October 26th, 2032
- Task 4
- Task 5
- Task 6What if we see a new task appear? We just add it whenever we consider it appropriate and tell the requestor about the date
Tuesday October 26th, 2032
- Task 4
- Task 5
- Task 6
Friday October 29th, 2032
- Task 7If the requestor says that the task’s actually urgent, we can then move it up a bit on the list and then some other task might fall off to the following day - or not. But now it’s your conscious choice, not a guilt driven decision.
Tuesday October 26th, 2032
- Task 4
- Task 7
- Task 5
- Task 6How to decide when to stop? Every day, an hour or so before the end of your workday, check the list. There are basically four options.
If there’s no deadline, move the task for the following day.
If the deadline was for today:
Negotiate a deadline extension. Many times it can wait without an impact on the business or your reputation. Ask, explain and try to understand the actual situation.
Delegate to someone else (next shift, or a teammate)
Work late. If there’s no alternative, work late but it’s been decided on actual facts (you couldn’t get an extension, you understand why and there’s nobody else that you can delegate it to.)
If what happens is that there’s no intrinsic motivation at all and you can’t get the task moving, you can go to one or a combination of extrinsic motivation, tagging, social pressure or self deception:
Extrinsic motivation such as promising yourself rewards after starting, making progress and finishing what’s hard for you. Set reasonable limits as success criteria. Start slowly and go with bigger challenges as you progress and feeling better about it.
Tagging: Think of yourself as what you want to be. If you are writing something think of yourself as a writer, not as someone trying and failing at it. If you want to run, think of yourself as a runner, not as someone who’s too lazy to wake up and get out.
Self deception. Convince yourself you’ll just do a bit and see what happens. If you’re lucky, you’ll do much more than you set out to do. Even if you are not lucky and did just a bit, you can use that bit to motivate yourself to finish. Rewards may help here too.
“I’ll do just the first step”. Here you can find some obstacles and prepare to face them.
“Beat the clock” - How much can I do in 10 minutes?. You might see yourself two hours later with lots done.
Social pressure, you say? In the midst of a pandemic? Sure! For example we can use Focusmate to pair up randomly with someone on a videocall where you both work 50 minutes (no talking other than to say hello at the start and bye at the end.) In this same vein you can just open Zoom or Google Meet with teammates without an agenda, you all work at the same time but with the comm channel open, talking only when there’s something to say (work related or not.) This doesn’t have to be formal, you can just get with one or two teammates who also like social pressure.
Be your own boss
If you work on a remote environment where there’s low supervision, developing the skills to be able to set your own objectives that match the company’s and be able to achieve them without supervision is extremely useful. 37signals said it in 2008: hire managers of one. Doing that we all can work more and manage less. How can we develop these skills? This is a huge subject, far deeper than I can go here. As a clue: communication and leadership and some keywords you can use to start on that journey.
Be proactive to be productive
One characteristic many people share is the “I don’t want to bother” fear. We don’t want to interrupt a teammate a second or third time because we feel we’d become a nuisance.
In a remote environment where there’s different teams involved, inefficiencies grow just because people are either too concerned of becoming a nuisance or because nobody owns a task or process and it lingers on for far more than it should. If your next task is not clear or you have it half finished and are blocked by another team or even a teammate, you must take the initiative and insist, even if it seems that you’re becoming a nuisance. You may even need to talk up the hierarchy (only do that if necessary, after some time.) It’s in this sense that being proactive is very important to have a productive team.
I hope this ideas are useful! In Part III we’ll talk about challenge #2: How to have a life if we live where we work? To be continued…