CAREER

The last few weeks have seen a massive shift towards working from home because of the various “stay at home” orders being put in place around the world—a trend I consider healthy in the larger scheme of things. Of course, there has also been an avalanche of “tips for working from home” articles. I figured I’d add my own to the pile.

A bit of background—I first started working from home regularly around twenty years ago, while on the global Escalation Team at Cisco. I started by working from home one day a week, to focus on projects, slowly increasing over time, ultimately working from the office one day a week when I transitioned to the Deployment and Architecture Team. Since that team was scattered all over the world—we had a few folks in Raleigh, two in Reading (England), one Brussels, one in Scott’s Valley, and one or two in the San Jose (California) area, we had to learn to work together remotely if we had any hope of being effective. Further, we (as a family) have home-schooled “all the way through”—my oldest daughter is nearing the end of high school, currently overlapping with some college work. I have always had the entire family at home most of the time.

So, forthwith, some thoughts and experiences, including some you might not have ever heard, and some myth busting along the way.

Probably the most common piece of advice I hear is you should set a schedule and stick to it. On the other hand, the most common thing people like about working from home is the flexibility of the schedule. Somehow no-one ever seems to put these two together and say “hey, one of these things just doesn’t belong here!” (remember that old song, courtesy of public television). When you are working from home, setting a fixed schedule similar to being in an office is precisely the wrong thing to do. This is a myth.

Instead, what you should do is to try to intentionally carve out several hours a day of “quiet time” to get things done. This might be different times in the day for your house, and its not likely to be consistent on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. The most productive times of the day are going to shift—get used to it. Most of my family are late sleepers or tend to get up in the morning and do “quiet things,” so the mornings tend to be much more productive for me than the afternoons. This isn’t always true; sometimes the evenings are quieter. There are few days, however, when there isn’t some quiet time during each day.

The key to scheduling is to plan project work for these quiet times, whenever they happen to be. Given the schedule of my house, I get up in the morning and immediately dive into project work. I leave email and reading RSS feeds for the afternoon, because I know I won’t be able to concentrate as well during those time. On the other hand, I try not to get frustrated if my routine is broken up—just put off the project work until the time when it is quiet. Roll with the punches, rather than trying to punch against the rolls, when it comes to time. The only fixed point should be to think about how many hours of quiet time you need per week and figure out how to get it.

Don’t worry about having 8 hours solid, or whatever. Take breaks to eat lunch with family or friends. Take breaks to have a cup of hot liquid. Run out to the store in the afternoon. Exercise in the middle of the day. Take advantage of the flexible schedule to break work up into multiple pieces, rather than being glued to an office desk for 8 hours, regardless of your productivity level through that time. This is not the office—don’t act like it is.

The second most common piece of advice I hear is find a space and stick to it. This is not a myth—it is absolutely true. I have a table in the basement in one place, and a dedicated room as an office in another. When we go on vacation as a family, I either make certain to have a large enough room to have space to work, or I scope out someplace I can “set up shop” someplace in the hotel. Space is just that important.

Sometimes you hear get the right equipment. This, also, I can attest to. Tools, however, are a bit of an obsession for me; I will spend hours perfecting a tool, even if it does not, ultimately, save me as much time as I originally thought. I am a stickler for the right monitory, chair, desk space, footrests, and keyboards. I play with lighting endlessly; I have finally settled on a setup with a dim monitor, dim room lighting, bias lighting behind the monitor, and a backlit keyboard. I’ve concluded that reducing the sheer amount of light being poured into my eyes, across the board, helps increase the amount of time I can keep working. Some people prefer two monitor setups—I prefer a single large monitor (31in right now). I don’t use a mouse, but a Wacom tablet. I’ve recently added an air purifier to my office space—I think this makes a difference. I don’t have a trash can close by—its useful to force myself to get up every now and again. Your physical environment is a matter of personal preference but pay attention to it. This will probably have as much impact on your productivity as anything else you do.

Overall, don’t let other people tell you what tools are the best. I’ve been told for more years I can remember that I should stop using Microsoft Word for long-form writing. You should switch to markdown, you should switch to Scrivener, you should use FocusWriter… Well, whatever. I’ve written … around 13 books, and I have two more in progress. I’ve written thousands of blog posts and articles. I’ve written thousands of pages of research papers, and I’m currently working on my dissertation. All in Microsoft Word. I’ve tried other tools, but ultimately I’ve found that Word, with my own customized interface settings, to be just as fast or faster than anything else I’ve worked with.

One thing you almost never hear is a team change. If one person is remote, act like everyone is. There is nothing more disruptive, or less useful, than having one person on the phone while everyone else is sitting in a conference room. If one person has to dial in, everyone should dial in. Setting up times to “just hang out” as a “meeting” is also sometimes helpful. If you have a fully remote team, dedicate “in real life” time to doing things you cannot do on meetings, and dedicate meeting time to things you cannot do through email, a chat app, or some other means.

Finally, some people are neat nicks while others are sloppy. I tend towards the extreme neat end of things, arranging even my virtual desktop “just so” (I actually do not have any icons on my desktop at all, and I’m very picky about what I put in my start menu and/or command bar).

The key thing is, I think, to pay attention to what helps and what doesn’t, and not be afraid to experiment to find a better way.

Over at his blog The Forwarding Plane, Nick Buraglio posted about embracing change and how technology is mostly unimportant. In the technology-driven world networking folks live in, how can technology be mostly inconsequential? One answer is people drive technology, rather than the other way around—but this misses the real-world consequences of technological adoption on culture. To paraphrase Andy Crouch, technology makes some things possible that were once impossible, some things easy that were once hard, some things hard that were once easy, and some things impossible that were once possible.

There is another answer to this question, though—the real versus the perceived rate of change. When I was a kid, I would ride around with my uncle in his Jeep, a 1968 CJ5 with a soft top and soft doors. He would take the doors off when he took the top down, and—these older Jeeps being much smaller than current models—you could look just to your right and see the road passing by just there under your feet. What always amazed me was I could make myself think I was moving at different speeds just by changing my focus. If I looked across a field at a telephone pole in the distance, it didn’t seem like I was moving all that quickly. If I stared down at the white line on the side of the road, it looked like I was moving very fast indeed. By shifting my focus from here to there, I could adjust my perceived speed.

Here is where the focus on details becomes critical in networking. We do tend to focus on the details. To make matters worse, the average network operator tends to be something of a generalist. Being a generalist focused on details can be a frightening experience.

If you live entirely in the world of Ethernet, then you see past and future changes in the context of the history of Ethernet. This is something like looking at an object a few hundred feet off the road, perhaps. Things are moving quickly, but they aren’t insanely fast, blurry, up close and personal. If you live in wholly in the world of routing protocols, you are going to have a different picture, but the apparent speed is going to be similar, or perhaps even slower.

If you’re a generalist who focuses on detail, though, you’re going to be staring at the white line—at all the features, physical form factors, and products created by a combination of the changes made in routing and Ethernet. If there are two changes in Ethernet, and two in routing, product marketing will create at least four, and probably eight, new features out of the combination of these two, across twenty or thirty product lines. Each of these features will likely be called something different and sold to solve completely different problems.

Staring at the white line is fun at first, then mesmerizing, then it is frightening… then finally it is just plain dull. But let’s talk about the terrifying bit because it’s the scary stage that makes us all reject change out of fear for the future. And, trust me, a kid sitting in a car with no doors staring down at the white line while his uncle drives 60 miles-per-hour is going to be frightened from time to time.

The point Nick is making is we should back off the details and embrace the change. This is great advice—but how? It can feel like you’re going to run off the road if you don’t keep staring at the white line. The answer lies in putting your eyes someplace else—on the posts way out in the field. Ethernet still solves the same problems Bob Metcalf designed it to solve, and it always solves those problems using a small’ish set of solutions. Routing still solves the same problems it did when Dijkstra was mulling around toy problems to show off the processing power of a new computer some 60-odd years ago, and it still solves these problems using a small set of tools.

If you stop looking at the white line and start looking at the poles out in the distance, you’ll not only save your sanity, you’ll also permit yourself to start looking at the sociological and business impacts of new technology, including what matters and what doesn’t.

Two hundred years ago, if you wanted to get from Memphis to say… Lake Providence, Mississippi, you could take a boat directly between the two. Today you would take a car, and the only paths between the two are pretty round-a-about and “small country road” sorts of affairs. On the other hand, getting from Memphis Tennessee to Atlanta, Georgia, is now easy, while a couple of hundred years ago would be a big deal indeed. The sociological changes wrought by moving from rivers to roads are almost impossible to fathom. But you wouldn’t know that if you just stared at the white lines.