Dr Alex Samuel’s recent article on wsj.com is one of that massive global website’s best read pieces. So I was delighted to get a positive response from the Canadian author after asking her to share some practical tips for South Africans suddenly made to give up their daily commute and water-cooler gossip. Here’s the result – a fascinating half hour masterclass on how to make the most of the Covid-19 lockdown with its forced embrace of a lifestyle that has become a preferred option for tens of millions worldwide. – Alec Hogg
And it’s across to Vancouver which is always a challenge for South Africans given the nine hour time difference. Thanks very much to Dr. Alexandra Samuel or Alex as you like to be called – author and the writer of a piece that appeared in The Wall Street Journal this past week; top read story on The Journal, which really takes some doing, and it’s all about working from home. You’ve been doing this Alex for 22 years?
___STEADY_PAYWALL___
It’s true – on and off but, for the most part, yes I have been. I had my first remote gig when I was 26 or 27 and the majority of my career since then has been spent working from home.
According to The Wall Street Journal article – certainly many people read it, and I was wondering what kind of response you’ve had from friends or associates or just people wanting to know more.
It’s been really lovely actually and I’ve heard from a lot of different readers with quite a range of reactions and I violated the most important rule as a writer – which is to never read the comment threads – and I actually read the comments on the story yesterday and they were really constructive and part of what I think is so extraordinary about this moment is of course there are people who are ordinary, that’s life, but so many people are really embracing this attitude of mutual assistance in whatever way they can and in the context of this story; what that has meant is that all kinds of people, when they’ve shared this story, have added an idea like ‘here’s one thing you miss that you might want to suggest to people’. So, somebody pointed out on Twitter that a really important practice if you’re working remotely is to make sure you do something creative every day and I hadn’t thought of that because I’m a writer and so my work’s kind of intrinsically creative, but I thought that was a great suggestion. Somebody else wrote me and said she read the article with her teenager because they realised that the advice I had offered was just as applicable to remote schooling as it was to remote work, which again I hadn’t thought about. So I just really appreciate the way people are responding with such generosity and being so constructive and offering additional ideas that will make remote work easier for people who are new to it.
I’d add to your wonderfully comprehensive list: recharge with creativity. Alone or with family it’s important play time. #photography #painting #singing #writing #art #dancing #yoga
— Tom Sommers (@tomsommers1) March 30, 2020
In South Africa we’re a little behind the curve in many things but certainly with the remote working. It hasn’t taken off here quite to the extent that we’ve seen elsewhere in the world. With Covid-19 – there’s no doubt that it will as we are in a lockdown – day five of twenty one. For those who’ve suddenly found themselves at home; where do they start? How do they start rearranging their day?
It’s a great question and one of the things I should mention is that, in a funny way, I think that might put you in an advantageous position that it’s new to people because one of the things that I think is challenging in places where there are more remote workers, and I would say this for me personally, is that a lot of the strategies that remote workers use in normal times – for myself I make a point of going out and working at a coffee shop so that I don’t get stir crazy – obviously at this moment that’s not a viable strategy. So the kind of things you need to do as a remote worker at this moment are quite specific to the challenge of being bottled up in your house 24/7 and one of the most important pieces of that is to start by just changing your idea of what a workday is. So when you work in an office – a lot of us have a tendency to feel like my workday is that time from when I walk in the office until the time I walk out of the office. That might be 9:00 to 5:00, it might be 8:00 to 6:00, some people might check a little email in the evening, but basically your workday is described by the hours in which you are physically sitting at your desk. When you’re at home, that is a terrible way to measure your workday because you will go insane. Part of the reason you will probably go insane is that eight hours sitting alone at home at your desk is way more work time than eight hours at the office because; when you are in an office you are talking to people, you’re getting up and you’re going to get your cup of coffee and you’re running into somebody in another team and having a little chit chat or even just going to the washroom might take you 10 minutes to walk across the floor and then come back. When you are at home; there are no meetings, there’s no chitchat – you are just on. Even if you do have meetings via zoom or Skype, often they are much more to the point. So, without all of those little bits of time – and I wouldn’t consider them wasted time, I actually think a big part of the value of face to face work are all those informal contact points – but it means that your eight hours at home is probably more like 12 or 15 hours in an office. So I really encourage people to let go of the idea of the eight hour day and to focus instead on what they need to get done and work on that in as focused and efficient way as possible so that you actually have time left in the day to regenerate yourself.
Do you take breaks every hour or every two hours?
That sounds like a really good idea. I should probably try and do that. No, I do not. So again, it sort of depends on the kind of person you are and the way your work is structured and the type of work you do. My own work is sort of peculiar in that, even though I live on the west coast of Canada almost all of my work is on the East Coast of the United States. So by the time I wake up in the morning my clients and colleagues are already hard at work but by the time it’s 2 o’clock in the afternoon here they have all gone home. So I tend to kind of buckle down by eight thirty or nine and power through for five hours in which I actually go pretty straight full on and then I take a break; have some lunch, do a little more work, take another break, go for a walk. That’s the pace that works for me but I think it’s really important for each person to think about what’s the pace that works for them given their own kind of metabolism, type of work, colleagues and so on.
And not to feel guilty if you’re doing five hours work because you’re actually doing the same as a full day in a working environment.
I think it depends on the person. I always joke with my husband that in every respect we’re like the tortoise and the hare. So, if we each sit down to our desks at eight – I am a complete empty wreck shell of a human by two o’clock in the afternoon – and he just ticks on, you know – go go go. He just works slowly and steadily all day, but I get as much done in my six hours as he does in his 11 hours because he does take those little breaks; he checks in, he reads the news. So you have to be honest with yourself about whether you’re somebody who does better by burning and going super hard for a shorter time or whether for you – you do need that longer period of the day.
That’s quite an interesting point and I saw in your article that your husband started working from home as well four years ago. In South Africa, there’ll be many couples who’ve been thrown into this environment by force. How do you manage that relationship – being in the same working space as your significant other?
This is a big secret and I should say we also have the other piece of the equation that’s new to a lot of people which is one of our two kids has been homeschooled for that whole time as well. So our lives have changed remarkably little considering. We have one more child who’s at home during the day now but other than that, things are pretty much the same. How have we not killed each other? Well, to be entirely honest, my most important secret is that I’m married to the nicest person in the world and that’s not just meaning sentimental – this is objectively true. Everybody always says this of my husband. And I think that there is something to be said if you are married to somebody where you get on well even in normal times, there can be new stresses when you are working together at home for the first time. I should also say my husband and I used to run a business together so we’ve had lots of experience co-working in different contexts. I think that there’s probably two really important secrets to that. One is to have a conversation about domestic workload because I think that in a lot of households what happens is that one partner will end up taking care of a lot of the domestic stuff during the course of the day and then that can end up making you feel resentful if you feel like, ‘wait a second – I’m losing tons of my workload to the domestic stuff, why isn’t my partner doing that in our household?’ My husband is the nice one who does the dishes in the middle of the day, but we have a very explicit understanding about how that division works out. The other really important ingredient for happy marriages right now is noise canceling headphones. Noise canceling headphones are really essential if you are going to have to share workspace with somebody who is on calls throughout the day – that will drive you bananas. In our house it’s kind of an amusing thing – I’m the only person who doesn’t have noise canceling headphones because the apple ones hurt my ears, but the rest of my family blocks me out and since I’m the loud and annoying one – it seems to be working ok.
What other tech tools do you use – you mentioned Skype earlier or Zoom. How do you connect – do you use Slack? Take us through your tools.
Well, it’s funny because I have this really weird work structure overall in that, six months of the year I am a solo freelance writer type who barely has to collaborate with anyone – I send an article to an editor once or twice a week and I just live in my little bottle. Then, another six months of the year I have an annual project I do with a company based in New York where I’m super collaborative; I’m on phone calls every day – multiple times a day, Skype – the whole nine yards. And it happens that this is the period of the year where that’s what my life is like and so this would all be a lot easier if I was in my quiet bottled period of the year. But Slack is a huge part of that and what I like about slack is it gives you this sort of sense of ambient collegiality; so it’s sort of the technological equivalent of that thing where you run into your colleague on your way to the coffee machine. It gives you a chance to just sort of check in, you can see whether someone’s available and it’s not too intrusive but it’s a little faster than email, so slack is definitely a big part of my life. The other tool I’m really disturbingly obsessed with is a platform called Coda – Coda.io., because it’s kind of like a radically better version of Google Drive. If you’re used to doing work with people in Google Docs and Google Sheets, you might have found the problem I’ve always had when so much of my work involves collaborative documents which is that it’s kind of hard to keep it organised; it ends up really messy, you have folders for every project and it’s hard to find which is the file you just worked on. Coda lets me create what they call a doc but it’s almost more like a notebook for each of my projects and then I have my spreadsheets in there, I have my task list in there, I have all my notes on my meetings in there and, I’ve only been using it for a year but, it’s totally changed the way I work. At this moment – when everything I’m doing is remote and collaborative – we have a code for each of the main projects I’m working on and it is my lifeline.
Okay, so that’s the work side but what about the health side? It must be pretty tempting if you’re at home and you’re stuck in front of a computer, well not always stuck because there’s so much that the Internet can bring us, but how do you manage to keep that balance – the health balance?
Here in Canada or in British Columbia we’re really fortunate that we are not in quite the degree of lockdown that you are. So right now we have social distancing measures in place; you’re not allowed to be within six feet of anyone, and in our household, we’ve been serious about that for longer than the population at large. We actually pulled our kid out of school a week before those schools shut down. That said, part of the privilege of being a journalist is I can find articles that give me excuses to talk to people and so I decided to do an article a few weeks ago about the impact of this situation on social isolation and that allowed me to talk to a couple of infectious disease specialists who reassured me that it is fine to see other humans as long as you’re outside and you keep six feet apart at all times. My biggest mental health trick is that I go out for a walk every single day. Vancouver is a beautiful city and I’m really really lucky to live in walking distance from a couple of beautiful beaches and so I go out for a walk. I try and go at a time of day when other people aren’t there so that it’s not as hard to keep away, but you know Canadians are notoriously courteous and so everybody jumps out of one another’s way and keeps their six foot distance. I often go with a friend to see one human who isn’t in my family on a regular basis, get outside, get into the woods, get down to the ocean… just the physiological thing of keeping active – all of that is enormous.
If I were not leaving the house, and this is what I recommend to my friends in cities who are now in shelter and place orders, is; there are so many exercise classes you can do online, you can figure out your own workout routine – you don’t necessarily need any equipment. One of the things I learned from the last time I switched from working in an office to working from home; I gained 20 pounds the first year because even though I hadn’t been a gym money or anything when I was at the office, just getting to work, walking around the office throughout the day – I had such a reduction in physical activity when I started working from home and, of course, the food’s all there – that it was an immediate impact. We all have to be aware – the problem is that when you gain a lot of weight quickly it can have a real impact on your your brain. So, I do think people need to keep active; we know it’s the number one most reliable way to prevent anxiety and depression, we know we sleep better so, if you do nothing else in the way of self care at this time, stay active.
Ok, so we’ve got the health sorted out. We’ve got the tools sorted out. But now planning your day – time management. If you’re working from home, that’s also surely got to be one of your priorities – that your day is properly managed.
It’s true. It’s funny because I’ve been doing it for so long – I forgot how hard it was when I first started working. I also hate task lists. I know a lot of people do really well by making a list of all the things they need to go do and checking them off and I hugely respect people who do that – it’s not me. I keep track of my tasks in two ways. One is; I try and think every morning what are the two or three things that I really need to prioritise today. It might be; I need to get a new set of story ideas to my editor, I need to do a second draft of this article and I have to send these three invoices that I haven’t bothered to put together yet. I might not always get all three of those things done every day but if I know what the three most important things are, then I can fit the rest of the stuff around it and I don’t have the problem that can otherwise arise where I’m so busy responding to emails and slack and Twitter – that I don’t actually get to the stuff that’s most important. So that’s number one – even if you just pick one thing a day, every day get super clear – what is the most important thing or two that I have to get done today.
The other thing that really helps me is voice dictated reminders. I will never look at a task list but if my phone or our home assistant, we have Amazon Echo, tells me to do something – I always do what the robot tells me to do. So I will have little reminders. If I know that tomorrow I have to remember to send an email to somebody I will just say ‘remind me to send an email to John at 9am tomorrow’ and then the echo reminds me and then it just doesn’t slide off my radar. So between the focus on my big tasks and those little reminders that pop up throughout the day – I seem to be able to get stuff done and I don’t tend to forget things.
Alex, how has life changed for you and maybe more so for people that you know – your friends and associates – by Covid-19?
Well, I think there’s probably three big things. The first is just day to day social contact. In my pre-Covid life, I made a point – because I’m a remote worker – of having regular dates with a few different people in my life; I had a friend who I co-worked with two or three days a week, I had another friend where we would get together once or twice a week – otherwise I would get very isolated. So I really miss those right now. The flip side is that I used to be limited to having my social interactions with the people who happened to live in Vancouver and now I keep this app running on my computer or call the house party – which has really taken off since the pandemic started. It’s an ambient chat room where people can drop in and, if you and your friend are both online at the same time, it will let you know and you can just have a quick video chat. The really cool thing about that is that I’ve had these spontaneous conversations with people in Montreal, in San Francisco, in Germany – people who I would not normally talk to in the course of a year even, but were getting to spend more time together because of the remote shift. The other big way our lives have changed – I think for a lot of people – it’s the family peace. I really feel for – I was talking to a friend yesterday who has a 7 year old and she wanted to know what the secret is. I said the secret is to have teenagers rather than young children. My friends who have young children – it’s so brutal – because trying to get work done when you have children in the background is not fun and I know that because the reason I homeschool my kids is my youngest is autistic and even before all this; I had been known to occasionally deliver client pitches while sitting with my back against the door, holding the door closed, my son’s pounding on the other side, I’m trying to have a client meeting. That is not fun and in our family we were already pretty set up for that but, even just having my eldest child at home now, it’s really hard to find a quiet corner of the house when I need to do a call.
But, it’s so much easier for us than it is for people with young children and I just think we all really need to extend some compassion and patience because your phone calls and Skype meetings are gonna get interrupted and that’s just the reality and we need to be patient with one another.
When you started working at home more than 20 years ago, how long did it take before you believed this was better than going into the office? I’m just trying to work out how the world might change for many people who are being forced into this way of life and they might actually like it.
Totally, and I’m working on another project right now to dig into exactly that question. So, the very first time I did this I did not think about the difference between an eight hour work day and an eight hour home day and I was quite young; I had just moved to Vancouver, I didn’t have any friends here yet, and I was working for a company in Toronto – which is three hours ahead in terms of time zones. So, I would wake up in the morning at 7am, I would feel super stressed because everybody else in my company had already been at work for an hour – so I’d sit right down on my computer and I would work from 7 o’clock in the morning until 3 or 3 thirty every afternoon without taking a break and then I was just totally dead. I had no ability, no energy left to go out, meet people – especially in that early stage where I was new to the city, so anybody I might see was kind of a new friend and I became really depressed – like super super depressed and I ended up actually going on medication for the first time because I was so depressed So, after that experience I really shifted how I approached remote work. I made a point of taking more breaks. I made a point of working to what was my set of goals for the day instead of feeling like I had to put in hours. I made a point of booking a social interaction with somebody every day and I think that one of the most important things for people to recognise at this moment is, even if you hate remote work right now, this is not what remote work is like in normal times.
Most people I know who are remote workers spend a lot of their time – they either l work in a co-working space, they work at coffee shops, they make dates with friends, they make a point of booking a lunch date every single day – every single person I know who is a remote worker has strategies for staying involved in the world and so I think the thing to look for if you’re new to remote work is not so much how you feel about it or how it affects your mental health – because that is just going to be hard all over right now. It’s good to try and take care of it but you can’t judge based on this moment. What you can maybe judge is how it affects your productivity.
If you’re somebody who is able to focus intensely and you like being able to work in a burst and then take some downtime and work in a burst and then take some downtime – remote work can give you a lot more flexibility to follow your own energy cycles than what you might experience in an office. And so, for people who find that actually they’re more productive without being at the office, even if they feel a little lonely, it might really be worth considering that this could be a good long term approach for you once you’re allowed to actually leave the house during the workday as well.
How do you think the world’s going to change after this; after companies have seen perhaps higher productivity from their staff, after people have seen well it really suits me not to have to go in the commute for an hour or two a day? Do you think there’s going to be much of a difference in the ‘New World’ – the post-Covid-19 world?
I love that you ask this and this is one of the things I have to remind myself all the time and I remind my friends all the time as I think a lot of people respond to that uncertainty with a lot of chaos catastrophe rising rate – it is really easy to be like- ‘what if my job never comes back, what if my company implodes, what if unemployment stays at 30 percent forever’ – all these terrible what ifs, but the thing I like to remind people is – the world we had before; maybe it isn’t coming back but a lot of us had some pretty serious complaints about that world, including a lot of complaints about the pace of work. ‘I can never go off line – my boss expects me to reply to email all the time, I don’t get enough time with my family’ – and so I think this is an inflection point where we have the opportunity to reshape the world so that the world that comes after actually fixes some of our biggest problems with the world before and I do think that remote work is a big part of that for a couple of reasons.
One is that there is an environmental footprint to having everybody get in their car or on a bus every morning. And when you stop commuting, you just take a big piece of that out of the equation as well as a big cost. A second piece is the family and sort of work life balance – at least here in North America.
Most most people I know – Vancouver is kind of an exception – but most people here work just crazy hard long hours all the time now and I think it’s really hard for people to have healthy family lives, being physically and mentally healthy when you’re working 14 hours a day and I hope that the discovery of how much you can get done when you’re working on your own schedule might lead to more people working remotely having more flexibility for family needs, having more time for themselves. And I think that would be really helpful. The third piece that I have to say I’m personally really excited about is the impact on social inclusion. So my perspective on a lot of these kinds of questions is shaped by the fact that my youngest child is autistic and he’s a really bright guy. All kinds of things I think he’ll be able to do when it comes time to get a job – working in an office has always felt like a stretch for him. And one of the things that’s been really interesting in the conversation I follow – a lot of autistic people on Twitter – and a lot of them say ‘gosh you know we’ve been telling you for years that we need to work remotely and you always said it was impossible to accommodate us and now it turns out actually it’s just you didn’t bother’. And so I think that the discovery that so many people can work effectively from home and maybe a cultural shift towards remote work is going to open the doors to workforce participation and fuller workforce participation for a lot of people who are or have been shut out of the workforce and I don’t just mean autistic people – that’s definitely a big group – but there are a lot of other people with family obligations people, with certain kinds of health conditions, that make it difficult to necessarily work a five day week. Now, we’re maybe going to make a little more room in our working lives for people who need to work a little bit differently and when you think about the range of talents that we have wasted because we’ve been so fixated on work as this thing that happens for eight hours every day in an office building – changing that vision, broadening that vision and making room for people to work in different ways – I think that’s going to have profound and positive effects on our productivity and our growth as, not just as an economy, but as a society.
