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More people are working remotely than ever before. If you are in one of those professions which allows you to work remotely, consider yourself to be really lucky. Many of you may not have enough experience in such remote only setup or even in such isolation.

From previously being a remote only developer, I found some routines and practices to be useful, some of these apply even when you are in a real office…

• Pick a room or a corner of your home to consider your office. Never carry around the laptop wherever you go
• Follow the strict schedule, as you would if you were in a real office
• To start your day, take a walk around the block to come back home, will give you sense of commute
• Dress-up like you are going to office
• Create a TODO list for the day
• Get an extra screen, a keyboard and a mouse
• Take the same breaks as you would in office… lunch, snack, coffee and walk
• Do not interpret or assume too much from the Slack messages, always confirm your understanding before making any change
• Use audio or video call, whenever you need to discuss something at length
• Keep your Slack messenger status up-to-date
• Make sure to update the TODO list before signing out

Hopefully these help you bring some order to your work and give you more time for things you should be doing as well, like… playing with your kids, watching your favorite shows or movies, exercising, reading books and taking naps.

To conclude I will just add an excerpt from the book about Newton…

“He built bookshelves and made a small study for himself. He opened the nearly blank thousand-page commonplace book he had inherited from his stepfather and named it his Waste Book. He began filling it with reading notes. These mutated seamlessly into original research. He set himself problems; considered them obsessively; calculated answers, and asked new questions. He pushed past the frontier of knowledge (though he did not know this). The plague year was his transfiguration. Solitary and almost incommunicado, he became the world’s paramount mathematician.”

Book : Issac Newton, Author: James Gleick