My trick I perfected in college is to set my alarm for a couple hours earlier than I would normally wake up and start doing the task right when I wake. My mind isn’t awake enough to come up with any resistance so I start the day with momentum. This worked for studying or projects. It continues on in the work world where if I have tasks I’m low-key avoiding, I’ll set it for first thing in the morning. The more I’m avoiding it, the earlier I have to start in the morning to make sure I tackle it.
Isn’t this what Walgreens, CVS or even Costco do? It’s called capitalism. When you want to invest, build and grow the channel then you can do the same. Not totally sure why people think this is unfair.
I’m glad someone is bringing awareness to the negative aspects of remote work / digital nomadism. It’s been romanticized far too much and encourages too many people to take for granted the structures of an office and fixed work times to provide healthy social interaction and reinforced purpose.
From all the different comments here, viability of remote work clearly varies by personality and personal life state. I’ll just share my story a bit for what it’s worth.
I own my own company and now I work remote. I am actually pretty outgoing and effective at making new friends by jumping into groups / activities solo. That said, I did not think about the need to make extra efforts when making the shift to not having an office with built-in community. My initial reaction was get my home setup with all the coffee/food/workstation so I wouldn’t have to leave (how efficient!), but now I realized that exacerbates the negative aspect of isolation. If you don’t have a family or friends pulling you into activities (older friends with families of their own are not going to be inviting you to activities regularly), things can get quiet pretty quick. I definitely miss the team lunches, happy hours and office off-site days (hell I end up crashing some of my friends' company offsites now). As for work balance, I’m quite self-driven but without a set schedule, it requires mindfulness and discipline to keep work flow in a healthy balance. This is an ongoing effort for remote workers, whereas for most colocated jobs, it’s just built-in when you show up.
I love my work so I don’t intend to find a job (although I have seriously considered it and will continue to keep it as an option) but if given the choice between a remote job working for someone else and being colocated with a kickass team, I’d go with the team 100% at least for this single stage of my life. It’s a lot easier to feel engaged with your work, have a healthy work-life balance (depending on the company), and have healthy social interactions.
I physically kept track of my consecutive day streaks... maybe gamifying it for myself in a sense. But I wrote down the date that I started and put that paper in a safe place. If I miss a day, I start a new sheet with a new date and start over but I keep it in the same place. It took me a few months to hit 30 days, another year to hit 100 days, and I rolled past my 1000 days mark like a year ago and it hasn't been that hard to keep with it since. But I still got my sheets stashed away.
The 30 days, 100 days, 1000 days mastery I got from my yogi who taught me kundalini yoga. She said it's basically a habit after 1000 days in a row. Good luck!
When I was reading about mind-wandering in the article, I couldn't help but think of my meditation practice. I do it for about an hour each day, mostly because it does bring about new solutions and ideas for work and personal life. Certainly, there are some specific things like posture, chanting, breathing, etc. that differ but for the most part it seems to just be a disciplined way to give my mind the time to wander...
Question for the meditators out there, is your practice just time for mind-wandering?
When I meditate, I just focus on the act of breathing, and actually try to keep my mind from wandering. This flexes the be-in-the-now (awareness) muscle such that I have improved attention afterwards. I like this because then I become so much more attentive to the many little triggers of emotions I don’t want to experience. I also might be more creative, but not sure yet.
Nice! I should try to focus on my breath at least for some of my meditation. I forgot about that style. I've been meditating on my own for too long probably.
There's another thing that I do that I found supportive, but perhaps again this is deviating from meditation. I count my breaths to keep track of how many minutes for each meditation that I do and I associate each number that I count with a feeling, memory, or emotion that I want to affirm in my life. It's kind of the opposite of mind-wandering, more like planting or reminding yourself of good thoughts. For example, #9 I think about what it feels like to be grateful even for a seemingly difficult circumstance, it's never going to be quite like this again and what unique aspects of it are actually good.
I've had similar thoughts, and concluded that all of three different modes of mental operation have virtues and are worth spending time on: directed movement (concentration, focus), undirected movement (mind-wandering, daydreaming), and non-movement (meditation).
Flexible: very, 3-25 hours typically after-school times
Part-time Coding Tutor for kids
Do you enjoy teaching and watching kids' eyes light up? Are you a decent coder? I have a coder school for kids in Pleasanton and we could use a wide range of social hackers training the next generation. We have a flexible-curriculum style, which means you'll be able to run with your students in just about any way you want.
Last (school) year, I spent 6 months living with undergrads, attending classes, and getting involved with extracurriculars at UC Berkeley. I'm 30. And a startup CEO (ex TaskRabbit's 2nd eng. /1st product mgr).
This was a design experiment taking observation / user testing to an extreme: complete immersion. I published my notes on VentureBeat, but really would like to hear what the hn community thinks of using immersion as a design technique. Innovative customer development or ridiculous waste of time?
