Disclaimer: This article contains my own thoughts and feelings on the topic of working remotely. Everyone’s situation varies, so please take what you feel works, and leave what you feel doesn’t. As always, the opinions expressed in this article don’t necessarily represent the opinions of my employer, and shouldn’t be construed as such.
“We like to give people the freedom to work where they want, safe in the knowledge that they have the drive and expertise to perform excellently, whether they [are] at their desk or in their kitchen. Yours truly has never worked out of an office, and never will.”
— Richard Branson, Founder and Chairman of Virgin
Remote work is a hot topic right now, with many companies looking beyond co-located teams in order to expand the available talent pool, and offering their employees a potentially better work/life balance. I’ve had the opportunity to work for Bleacher Report remotely for the last three years, and wanted to offer a glimpse into my experiences over that time.
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I’m going to take a Twitter break, maybe permanently. I would normally Irish exit, but I wanted to write down some of my thoughts since Twitter has been a large part of my life over the last ten years.
I joined Twitter in March of 2008 while doing some homework for my “Object Oriented Programming in Java” course. Twitter was (of course) smaller back then. We often participated in “Follow Fridays” where we suggested interesting people to follow. We regularly encountered the Fail Whale. We tweeted all-lowercase status updates, standardized retweets and @mentions, and fought over which link shortener to use. I made tons of friends, many of whom I went on to meet in person, and some I have yet to.
I remember those days fondly, but lately I’ve found myself spending far too much time and attention scrolling through updates that I largely don’t care about. Retweets, quote tweets, memes, hot takes. (And yes, I know I’m likely guilty of polluting your feeds with the same.) The signal-to-noise ratio of my feed has deteriorated to a point where it’s no longer worth the time and attention I was giving it.
As a replacement, I’m hoping to spend more time reading and writing longer-form content.
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It’s only fitting that the first post on this new site should be about yak shaving.
For those of you unfamiliar with the concept (as defined by Wiktionary):
Any apparently useless activity which, by allowing you to overcome intermediate difficulties, allows you to solve a larger problem.
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