Being Fully Remote

I knew there might be some extra challenges with attending remotely. Time zone differences. Communicating solely via Zoom and Zulip (a messaging app a bit like Slack).

During the application process somebody had given me a friendly tip: as a fully remote person I should make sure I put effort into making myself visible by messaging people on Zulip, attending events etc. People who were physically in the hub would naturally bump into each other and chat, get face-to-face time and collaborate on physical/hardware projects. None of that applies to a remote participant.

As expected, I had a little, manageable, trouble with the time zone difference. Your batch is a full-time commitment and you’re expected to be there for full (at least 6 hours) days on average. The calendar events happen on New York time, which for me in the UK meant that the RC core hours started at 4pm and ended at 10pm.

I’m naturally an early riser, usually up around 5am and it’s not a quick or easy task to adjust your sleep schedule. This meant I’d be doing long days. I spent the first week or so finding my footing.

My daily routine

In the UK during my batch we were 5 hours ahead of New York. Eventually I settled on a pattern.

07:00 - 11:15	Morning coding	Work on whatever my ‘main project’ was. A good time to get in flow with something I was relatively comfortable with.
11:30 - 12:30	Body doubling	While very beneficial in itself, as a daily practice this also became a useful separator between my ‘morning coding’ and my ‘RC day’.
13:00 - 15:00	Food and nap	Make a point of laying down with the curtains drawn for an hour. Sometimes I’d sleep, if not I’d at least get a rest from the screen and a little body/mind relaxation.
16:00 - 22:00	Main RC day	Activities from the RC calendar, coffee chat and ‘outside my comfort zone’-coding.

Although I wasn’t pushed into it (there’s an understanding that people in different time zones may need to deal with things a little differently), I decided I wanted to be present until 10pm every day. I knew I was putting in the hours in the morning and getting plenty of code written, but still I wanted to aim for a ‘full RC day’ for my own discipline.

I managed to stick to this commitment pretty well, and on the few occasions I bunked off early it was by minutes rather than hours.

The later, evening, hours were sometimes a bit less focused than my morning coding — this core RC time would naturally be broken up by activities or chats, and I’d tend to be working on exploratory stuff, things that were more new and unfamiliar.

One small concession (or at least scheduling compromise) I made was that I avoided Zoom calls in the last few hours of my day. Although I can code ’til bedtime no problem (like most coders!), I did notice that it was harder to whip up the social energy for face-to-face chats in those later hours. This was partly because I worried that through tiredness I might have a flatter demeanour, seem disinterested… or keep yawning!

Ultimately though, everything worked out fine.