I’ve been working from home full-time for well over a year, but the coronavirus pandemic has got me questioning everything I thought I knew about working remotely.

Working from home under lockdown is completely different to doing so in normal circumstances.

And despite everyone’s very best efforts to keep sane and productive , it’s fair to say that it’s easy to lose track of time and let week days blur into weekends.

But it doesn’t have to be this way — here are several tried and tested tips to help you gain control of your time while on lockdown.

Stay away

If you’re fortunate enough to have a separate workspace or office , then avoid it during the weekend — literally shut the door on work on Friday afternoon and walk away until Monday morning.

If you don’t have a home office and you’re making do with your laptop , carrying it around your different rooms, try and put everything work related away when your weekend begins — and keep it locked up.

Disconnect

If you have Slack on your phone , log off , and turn your emails on your phone off too.

If you use Twitter for work, try and avoid it during the weekend. If you still want to use the platform, you could create ‘weekend’ lists and only scroll through the ‘fun feed ‘ at the weekend. Go one step further and mute ‘work related’ topics on Saturdays and Sundays.

The temptation to check in throughout the weekend is real, so make sure you do whatever you can to avoid it.

If something urgent comes up and you’re expected to be on call, try and minimize contact and emails to set times during the day. If you have no self-control (like me), there are specific services that lock down apps for a certain amount of time and there’s no shame in using them.

Treat yourself

Do something you wouldn’t otherwise do during the week: binge Netflix , read, listen to podcasts , go for a walk (if you’re allowed to exercise outside), soak in the tub, take a long shower, bake…. You can see where I’m going with this.

Do you like to paint? Or do you prefer building stuff? Whatever it is that you enjoy doing, do it.

Think about what gives you joy and plan to do it at the weekend — this way you’ll keep yourself busy but it will also give you something to look forward to during the week. I like to plan video calls with friends and family and spend as much time outside in the garden as possible.

If you’re single, you could even plan a virtual date .

‘Dolce far niente’

It’s easy to get caught up in everyone’s apparent willingness to keep busy.

I don’t know about you but my Instagram feed is filled with people doing all sorts of activities in an seeming attempt to keep busy all the time (and looking great while doing it, damn them).

By all means work out, or clean your fridge, if that’s what you really want to do but remember there’s nothing wrong about being idle — especially when you’re busy working from home all week!

In fact, the Italians even have a phrase for it: Dolce far niente , pleasantly doing nothing. Embrace it.

3 personal growth tips I’ve learned in my 12 years as a developer

My first real job in programming started on July 5, 2007, which means I have just over twelve years of experience as I write this. It’s a lot more than nothing, but probably not much more than something.

Ten years seems to be about the right amount of time to get good at something, though some amount of natural talent or sheer drive can make it go faster. But growth is not as simple as waiting it out and talent does not supersede the need for experience.

But before we delve into what I’ve learned from those 12 years, let’s look at my French proficiency. It matters, trust me.

The mistakes we make when acquiring skillsets

In fifth grade, I went to a school where I was required to take a French class. I showed no particular aptitude or interest in the language, but was happy to pass through the lessons.

After two years, my family moved and I started at a new school where I was able to choose Introductory French or Spanish. I chose French, effectively repeating the previous two years. I have little to no memory of these classes, but I believe I passed through them with ease.

After those two years, we moved again and I went to a high school. I was offered a choice of languages to study and I elected for… a year of Introductory French. I was the star pupil of the class, having repeated “Je m’appelle Pat” and “Où est la discothèque” as required for the previous four years.

The following year I entered Intermediate French and the skill gap between myself and my peers immediately dwindled. Despite my five years of experience, I didn’t advance much beyond a few simple phrases and a halfway decent accent.

I muddled my way through the next two years, but squandered my experience and gave up learning the language after high school. Many of us make this same mistake in our careers. We optimize for a skillset that is easy to gain or stay within the confines of limited expertise.

There’s not a right or wrong career path. Some find a natural niche as leaders and work into management positions where they end up leading teams and designing career paths for others. Conversely, some thrive and become leaders by developing their own paths as an individual contributor.

Quite a few folks just don’t get the opportunities they need to grow as individual contributors. I have found a few strategies that have helped me grow, and I’d like to share them along with some ideas about how you might apply them.

1. Assume you are smart enough to understand

In my first job out of school, I worked with some of the most brilliant folks I’ve ever met. Most were affiliated with Yale via either its computer science department or its high performance computing lab.

During my job interview, Nick Carriero asked me if I was familiar with Junit and I tried to pretend I knew what it was beyond a window in Eclipse.

I was surrounded by very experienced, very educated, and very accomplished folks. The one benefit of this was learning that in those walls I would never, ever, be the smartest person in the room. To follow along alone was an accomplishment.

Those folks were much more than smart. They were mostly twice my age or more, had studied rigorously in academia or cut their teeth on hard industry problems, and all had a tremendous work ethic. I didn’t have their innate talents or that experience, and I was in no danger of being able to do what they did. But that didn’t mean I couldn’t follow along and learn.

So I tried to ask dumb questions and to restate things until I got them right. Being wrong or not knowing something hurt still, but it hurt a little less every time the light bulb finally went off.

Most of what you need to follow the work of those around you is just patience and curiosity. When you encounter things in your work that you don’t understand, ask someone to help you figure it out. It could be a piece of code, a system design, or even a business concept like margin.

Now you won’t become a quick expert but you will gain a breadth of knowledge. More importantly, you’ll learn how to ask questions and learn from those around you. Give yourself space to do good work.

Real talk: everywhere you go there will be haunted forests, tech debt, and organizational challenges. Every opportunity comes with constraints. Often, those constraints lead us to choose the lesser of two evils or the best of a bad set of options.

In my experience, it’s easy to over-dramatize the evil or inherent badness, but the point is that it feels bad. When you consistently do work that you don’t take pride in, it’s challenging to invest yourself in growth.

Most people in this situation often begin to imagine some panacea that would fix things. If only things were functionally pure or fully asynchronous, then we could do things the right way. Or so the thinking goes. We convince ourselves that we are talented and great, if only we weren’t limited by the things or people we cannot change.

Don’t get stuck thinking that you can’t do good work unless something you can’t control changes. Find opportunities large or small to try to do something in a way that you are proud of. This can be as small as contributing to a minor project or running a larger team in an exemplary way.

When I’ve done this, I’ve found that some of my great ideas were great and some were pretty sketchy. If I hadn’t put them into action, I’d have missed the opportunity to figure out which ideas had merit.

2. Focus on the outcomes

Many of us experience frustration in our jobs because we are forced to reckon with ambiguity that our coworkers and peers can shrug off.

Earlier in my career, I used to say that there was nothing more terrifying than a meeting that ended in agreement because that just meant you hadn’t figured out the details yet. That’s a pessimistic extreme, but it’s also a fear born out of experience.

By and large, the conferences we go to, the blog posts we read, and the conversations we have focus on the “how?” As engineers, we talk about programming languages, databases, agile methodology, distributed systems papers, or GraphQL. But for most of us, those are tools to help us do something else.

Our stakeholders don’t care about the tools, they care about the outcomes. The earlier you are able to focus on outcomes, the more you’ll be able to connect with your stakeholders, learn from them, and then help them succeed.

This is a huge topic and a never-ending quest, but you can start by always knowing the answer to the following three questions:

What problems am I trying to solve for my stakeholders?

How do I know when I’m done?

How do I know if it solved the problem?

No matter what process you use, or don’t, and no matter who your stakeholders are or how big your organization is, if you know the answers to those questions, they will guide towards a path that is focused on generating outcomes rather than just generating more details.

3. Do whatever you want, but do it loudly

I was a year or two out of school when I first heard the phrase “It is better to beg for forgiveness than ask for permission.” It’s an old phrase, sometimes attributed to Grace Hopper, but variations have circulated for many years.

There are some organizations where creative thinking and empowerment are still frowned upon, but I think this quote misses the mark nowadays. It’s still true that asking for permission will likely get you stuck in the mud.

The receiver of your request will likely feel the need to do due diligence on the request before passing judgement and, well, it’s not likely their top priority or they would’ve been asking you for the ideas. It’s the request that slows things down, not the knowledge of the approach.

I’ve taken to using a variation of this phrase: “do whatever you want, but do it loudly.” If you feel confident that you have a great idea and know how to complete it, go ahead, but first announce it to anyone who will listen. You want to avoid surprise and rumor. By keeping everyone abreast of your actions, you are giving them the knowledge they need to provide you with feedback and a mechanism to do it.

I often provide a little space for feedback even, by saying “Unless I hear from you by the end of your day tomorrow, I’ll be proceeding.” I’m not asking you to vet the approach for me, but if you know I’m headed towards dragons, let me know.

Stay focused on growth

No matter what strategy you choose, as soon as you have the security to do so you should start thinking about your growth. “Where do you want to be in five years” is a great question, but sometimes it’s impossibly difficult to answer.

These strategies won’t help you pick a direction, but they’ll help you get the most out of wherever you are right now. If you find you can’t use these strategies, either because you don’t have enough support from your peers and management chain, or because the work model is so inherently broken, it’s probably time to look for another opportunity when you are able.

Along the way, be proud of your growth and what you’ve achieved, but never give up on challenging yourself.

Why you can’t base business decisions on numbers alone

Boris is the wise ol’ CEO of TNW who writes a weekly column on everything about being an entrepreneur in tech — from managing stress to embracing awkwardness. You can get his musings straight to your inbox by signing up for his newsletter!

I absolutely hate it when people disagree with me. Yes, it’s good to get more perspective and ultimately any idea is improved with critical feedback and I do everything in my power not to bully concepts through. But in that exact moment, when I’m stating my case, I can’t believe the other person can’t see my side of the argument — especially when I think the ‘numbers’ are on my side.

There’s a great cartoon that very efficiently captures this awkward moment in meetings, when different perspectives clash. The cartoon shows two people fiercely arguing over whether the number on the floor between them is a 6 or a 9… and they’re both right.

Credit: LensShift I think many business decisions are hampered because people are looking for the facts and the proof — the absolute truth — so they can make the right decision. Unfortunately, life is more complicated than that.

You could base all your decisions only on the facts, stats, or A/B tests, but we all know the answers you can get from them are only as good as the questions. They can also be affected by the person asking the question or the purpose behind asking the question.

Statistics and metrics are often represented as being unambiguous. “Numbers don’t lie!” they yell to your face, holding the printouts of the latest A/B tests between ‘beige’ and ‘beiger’ for your logo.

That’s one view… but here’s mine: numbers lie like a motherfucker.

Or rather, they can be made to lie. Numbers are like jelly, taking any form their holder wants to. You can cherry-pick the metric you think shows you the absolute truth, but deep down you probably know that the bigger challenge doesn’t boil down to this one single number.

Actually, I wouldn’t mind owning a shirt that says “Lies, damn lies, and statistics” with an asterisk behind statistics for “facts, numbers, and A/B test results” (quick note to self: start selling those).

The truth is life is fluid and unpredictable, and even the simplest decision can have a thousand variables that all impact the outcome and complicate the plot.

You could decide to only rely on facts or trust the numbers, or you could dig deeper and look into why you put your belief in this particular metric in the first place.

Is there something outside this number that made you reach your conclusion? If there is, it might make your argument even stronger, as nothing in life can be explained by a single number. Or it could unveil you were actually approaching the problem the wrong way.

At the end of the day, your 6 could very well be my 9 — it all depends where you’re coming from.

Can’t get enough of Boris? Check out his older stories here , and sign up for his newsletter here .