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

Imagine a garden; well maintained with different kinds of trees and plants. Some are native some are foreign to the land. Small, big, tall, short of all different sizes and colours. That’s what makes the garden so vibrant.

Everything is growing every day, some rapidly, some gradually, few are taking shelter under a bigger tree but, still growing. But no tree is overshadowing any other to halt its growth. On the surface, everybody appears to be fighting for the sunlight but underneath, all the roots are connected to each other and sharing everything.

Every tree produces something, at its own pace. Sometimes one thing produced by one becomes the food for the other. Occasionally it gets battered by a hail storm and at others with an excruciating heat or biting cold but it keeps producing.

New trees are planted in a way that neither the garden nor the tree loses its symmetry. Old ones though leave sometimes; none leaving without keeping traces of their roots intact.

Picture a planned garden, it has inviting little pathways which are well defined. Benches to relax and even a play area. One of those rare things which look as beautiful from the close-up as it does from the distance. Nothing seems out of its place. If you were to describe it in one word, you would call it harmony.

This quote would explain the importance of that word in this context …

If we are to live in harmony with ourselves and with nature, we need to be able to communicate freely in a creative movement in which no one permanently holds to or otherwise defends his own ideas.

Legendary physicist David Bohm

Now. Imagine a workplace…

Its been a year working at LEAP Dev, I don’t have to untangle the vines of my metaphor. You get the point. It just has been delightful to be a small plant of this garden.