Suddenly working at home? We’ve done it for 22 years — and have advice, Ars Technica

Have a default activity for when you need a break from work — something you shift to easily, without having to spend the time thinking about what you want to do. One of the big problems for me is that I usually need a break when i’m already feeling drained and not thinking clearly, so the last thing I want is to have to start an internal debate about what I want to do.

Location, location, location: Timothy Lee , Senior Tech Policy Reporter

It’s Slack, not slacking: Lee Hutchinson , Senior Technology Editor

In my experience, what helps more than anything to have coworkers who are also virtual. At a past job I held a role for a year or so where I was the only remote teammate in a large Bellevue, Washington-based administration team. On the upside, this meant I could work from home at need; I had access to a physical office in my city, but I was just as remote from my team there as at home. On the downside, it meant that I missed out on a huge amount of communication. Everyone was in the office, catching each other in the hall for informal communication, sticking their heads over cube walls to ask quick questions or hash out ideas verbally, BSing around the coffee pot, and all the other normal office things one does. Unless someone specifically called my desk phone or hit me up in an instant message or email, I was more or less isolated.

Working at Ars with a fully remote team means the majority of our interaction occurs within Slack, including the informal goof-off stuff that’s so important for building shared experiences and reinforcing team cohesion. The “time-wasting” aspects of Slack that might make it a questionable fit for teams using it to supplement a physical office are important when that’s (more or less) the only socialization you get with coworkers. So I guess that’s a long way. of saying that at least some kind of human contact is a must. Everybody’s got days whene they need to be head-down on a project and don’t want to be bothered, of course, but having someone in a similar situation as you, with whom you can share a dumb link or have a quick laugh over a shared joke, is absolutely vital to mental health. Shelter in its many forms: (Jennifer Ouellette) , Senior Writer

I have spent much of my career working from home long before I joined Ars, and I absolutely agree it makes a huge difference having everyone working remotely. It’s the same kind of bonding via shared experience that takes place in a physical office, only virtually. When it was just me, I still found ways to build online communities, e.g., through a group of science-writer friends (including Dr. Timmer). We started out with an email list, then graduated to a Slack channel (which I visit far less frequently these days because I’m spending all my time on the Ars Slack — it meets the same need).

I honestly have never really struggled with working from home. It suits my temperament more than your standard office setting, and I’ve always been good at establishing my own daily routine and structure. But I noticed early on that without some regular social interaction in meatspace, it was way too easy to get lost in my own head and get a bit “tweaky.” Case in point: my spouse, Sean, was on a speaking tour in Australia for two weeks last month, and I made sure to schedule some time with friends a couple of times a week until he returned: meeting a fellow writer for tea and carbs , for instance, having a girls’ brunch and movie outing, or stopping by our local animal shelter to pet some rescues and help out for an hour or so. (We adopted our two cats from there, so I feel invested. 😊)