Remote work

In April this year we decided to close our office in town and implement a distributed work model. We set up a small office at home for some of the team and the rest of the team would work remotely.

It was quite a change as our previous office was fully serviced. We had loads of space, shared conferencing, boardroom and kitchen facilities along with multiple redundant high speed internet connections.

It's been about eight months working mostly distributed and I can honestly say it was one of the best things we've done for the business.

Nicholas alone saves close to 40 hours a month due to time he previously would have spent commuting.

Our working hours have changed in the sense that we used to have office hours and everyone would be together for the whole day. We still have a general framework of business hours, but the remote team work with a lot more flexibility.

Now that the office is at home I am essentially at the office 24/7.

This has introduced some changes, Amelia and I don't leave the house much. We work pretty close to 18 hours every day and we work on weekends although we used to work long hours anyway.

I used to have my day split into sections, leave home, grab a coffee, go to office, fetch Amelia from work, grab food, go back to office work till wee hours and then go home.

Now days my routine is pretty much, fall out of bed and work. Grab food or coffee whenever I get a chance, but otherwise work.

On the one hand it's allowed us to do some things we couldn't usually do, like hang up laundry during the daytime, on the other hand, we literally work all of the time.

I have definitely found that there are times in the evening when I otherwise would have just slept that I now get up and go work. Having an office area set up outside of the bed room, means I can work late in front of a large multi colour internet connected light bulb and not have an impact on Amelia.

Amelia is also working longer hours than she's ever worked before because it's so easy to just hammer away and get things done.

The team is busy growing and this month we're trying our first remote internship.

It's probably quite unconventional to go from having an office for six years to working with a distributed team and not the other way round.

I still see value in having a central presence but more often than not, the in person time is not spent working or being productive, remote time seems to be optimised and focused on achieving results and not fluff.

Interaction with the team is more intentional and I think this is good as it forces us to think before interrupting someone.

I hope to have a team event soon to get everyone together in one place and catch up in person.