Productive Remote Work (When Your Mental Health Says “No”)

Productive Remote Working

Remote work is not easy. It sounds like a dream (and it honestly is in a lot of ways), but there’s a darker side to remote work that one can’t understand until they’ve done it.

Here’s the deal. People that work remotely often suffer from suboptimal mental health, and so you’re probably wondering, why on earth do they do it? Well, the fact is, while remote working comes with some very unique challenges, so does not working remotely. The difference is that remote work can offer the flexibility you need to build a lifestyle that suits you.

people sitting at table with laptop

Indeed, remote work isn’t a silver bullet for burnout or wanderlust, but if you do happen to try it out and eventually wind up succumbing to loneliness, or a lack of motivation or productivity (as many remote workers do), at least you’ll have the opportunity to change things up and make things better.

In the eyes of many, it’s the lesser of two evils.

That being said, attempting to diagnose what your mind and body needs isn’t that easy. What might work one day might not work on another day, and what might work for one individual might not work for another individual. Humans are complex, and in the case of remote work, everyday productivity tricks often don’t cut it.

Let’s take a look.

“I feel lonely”

Loneliness is a big issue (maybe the biggest?) for freelance remote workers and digital nomads in foreign countries, but it can also affect those that work in distributed teams (especially when some team members aren’t remote, as one can feel like an outsider at work using this setup). Let’s look at the solutions.

Utilize co-working spaces

Co-working spaces aren’t for everyone. If you teach English, it’s obviously a no-no (not because of the noise, but because the noise would be distracting to other remote workers). If you’re only required to dive into the odd video call, though, many co-working spaces include a few hours of “booth time”.

Throw in super-fast Wi-Fi, free coffee, daily events, and a likeminded crowd, joining a co-working space is like joining a community, and some co-working spaces (such as Hubud) and Dojo Bali) are literally famous! Good vibes = a huge motivation boost.

happy co-workers sitting with laptops on comfy chairs

Work from bars and cafés

Cafés and bars work well too. The noise and seating options might be a tad unpredictable, and when going to a new place one has to find the Wi-Fi password, but all in all the experience is very much the same. It’s still fairly easy to meet other people, as it’s likely that you won’t be the only regular customer.

Pro-tip: download Wi-Fi Map app to get the Wi-Fi passwords of networks near you!

My favourite café — October Coffee Gaya, Kota Kinabalu, Malaysia)

The post Productive Remote Work (When Your Mental Health Says “No”) appeared first on SitePoint.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Visual Studio Code: A Power User’s Guide

Image
In this guide, you’ll learn how to take advantage of Visual Studio Code to supercharge your development workflow. This article is written for beginners who may be using Visual Studio Code for the first time. VS Code, as it’s commonly known, is considered a "lightweight" code editor. In comparison with full integrated development environment (IDE) editors which occupy gigabytes of disk space, VS Code only uses less than 200MB when installed. Despite the "lightweight" term, VS Code offers a massive number of features which keep increasing and improving with every new update. For this guide, we'll cover the most popularly used features. Every programmer has their own tool set which they keep updating whenever new workflows are discovered. If you want to learn every tool and feature VS Code has to offer, check out their official documentation . In addition, you may want to keep track of updates for new and improved features. Prerequisites In order to follow alo
Read more

6+ Best Websites for Free Fonts in 2020

Image
I firmly believe that, in order to strike the optimal balance between minimalism and visual appeal, a user interface should display no more than what’s absolutely necessary while making those necessary elements look visually appealing. Keep it simple, but make the simple look amazing. But, what does simple look like exactly? Well, strip away all of the over-the-top marketing gimmicks, redundant features, and cluttering visuals, and most of what’s left is the UI copy and text content. As boring as this sounds, let’s be honest: this is the most important aspect of any app or website. Information and the ability to navigate it is the entire reason users are using our app or website. So with the right typeface coupled with the right font styles (see “ Font vs typeface: the ultimate guide ”), we can create designs that are quite simple and yet visually appealing at the same time. This emphasizes the most important aspects of the design while usin
Read more

How to Contribute to Open Source TypeScript Projects

Image
If you think of the ideas of open source applied to information in an encyclopedia, you get to Wikipedia – lots and lots of small contributions that bubble up to something that’s meaningful. – Matt Mullenweg One of my favorite aspects of open source is the fact that anyone can contribute! It’s like “productive volunteering” (if you’ll humor me). It’s a fantastic way to build something bigger than you, give back to the community, and level up your skills. In this article, we’re going to talk about practical ways for you to get involved in open source TypeScript projects. We’ll first cover assessing your level then jump into how you can find opportunities. Assessing Your Level Before you get started contributing to open source, you want to find your comfort level. Where are you at skill-wise? What level of complexity are you wanting to solve? How much time do you want to spend? These are important questions to consider before diving in. This
Read more