Even before we fled our workplaces amid the COVID pandemic to set up at home. Yob Van Dervolt was convinced that remote working was the future.
He's the founder and.
CEO of Remote and was previously the VP of Product at git Lab, so he knows a thing or two about remote work. Job's philosophy is that the easier it is to start doing your work, the easier it is.
To actually do your work.
Home offices should be built for comfort, efficiency and reliability. So in this interview we go deep into the ultimate home office setup.
The first half of this.
Interview goes into gear, gadgets, software. It's a bit of a nerd fest, so if that's not your thing, maybe skip to the second half where we get into some super cool strategies and tools that Job users to motivate and communicate to his company, who are of course us all working remotely. My name is doctor Ramantha Imbat. I'm an organizational psychologist, the founder of behavioral science consultancy Inventium, and this is how I work, a show about how
to help you do your best work. So something your believes in very strongly is that remote working can give you a far better life than being chained.
To a physical office.
So let's start by looking at how do you actually get a better life through being remote.
Well, I guess you get a lot for free when you start working remotely because you don't have to commute it anymore. You win a lot of time in a day by not having to commute and just having work be really, really close.
The one thing you do have to.
Make sure of is that now that work is so close, you create a clear separation between what is work and what is the rest of life. I think the best way to do this is to create a specific place for you your house or wherever you do your work, to do work and to not be there at times that you're not working. And then from there just limit the amount of time that you are actually working, like create a schedule and stick to that.
What does your schedule look like? Out of interest?
So usually I start at around nine nine thirty am in the morning, and I've blocked most of my day until about seven pm, and I've blocked lunch as well, and so that's usually the times that I work. I have two small kids at home. We're in lockdown, so sometimes I move things about, but that's basically what I.
Stick to now.
I know that you've thought a lot about your home office setup, and I want to spend a bit of time talking about the nitty gritty. I'm a little bit obsessed with home office setup and I've thought so much about my own. So one of the advantages of working from home is that means that you can totally take control of your workspace.
And I know that you've.
Written about what you're set up here is then I'll certainly link to that in the show notes. But why is thinking so much about your home office space and the atmosphere so important?
I always think about these things as what is the total cost for you to do something? Like? What is the threshold for you to start doing work? The easier it is to start doing work, the easier it is to do your work.
The more you can focus on the work itself.
And so that's why I focus on I think for me, I built my home offers around comfort first and efficiency and reliability. I have zero patients for things that don't work or don't work well, or are not fast and snappy. I could never work with a slow computer, so that is what I optimize around, and to me, that makes a huge difference if I never feel frustrated and everything just works.
I guess when we're thinking about working remotely and the importance of having a good setup for all the communication that happens virtually.
Why is that so important?
Because I know it on the majority of zoom calls that I'm on camera angles, a terrible lightings bad people just don't.
Think about it.
So why should listeners be thinking more about this setup.
I am on two mindst on this. On one end, I think that the kind of setup that I have is overkilled for almost everybody. I do it because I like it, and I see it almost like a hobby, and I'm happy to maintain it and I'm happy to
invest in it. But on the other end, when you see someone face to face, the amount of information you transmit and the presence that you feel when you are together, that a lot of that is lost when you were having a video chat with someone, and that's exacerbated by having a poor connection or a poor camera angle, or getting the feeling that someone is not looking at you.
It's such a simple fix to make sure that your camera is right in front of you so that you roughly look straight at a person when you're looking at the screen. That's such a simple thing to do, but it makes a huge difference. And so if you build your office, if you build your webcam, your zoom setup around the idea of I want people to feel close to me and I feel like it's I am really here, that can make a meaningful difference in how people perceive you and how you perceive others if they have a
similar kind of setup. For one, I always feel very frustrated when I'm calling with someone and the connection is choppy, or even if just the video freezes, you can still hear them talk.
Technically, we can still talk with.
Each other, but it's definitely not the same experience, and so that nonverbal communication that's in that moment completely lost. And I think the better your setup is around these kind of things, in essence, the more data you can transmit between each other.
So having the camera at eye level is very important. Can you tell me what tech you use to produce a really great quality image?
And again I'm going to link.
To your blog because you've got a picture of how you look on screening video conferences and it looks very very good. So can you talk me through what your setup looks like for producing that great image.
Yeah, and I think it looks much better today because I made a lot of change. I've replaced most of the things that you see in that picture. So I have Sony A sixty four thousand recently upgraded because it don one broke, which and I use that one as webcam with a thirty five meter one point eight lens.
And the lens is really the trick, right, Like the camera is just the thing that produces image, but having a good lens with somewhat of a short depth of field that helps you create this really nice blurry background and so it focuses on you. So that one is connected to a KEM link, which allows me to to actually use it as a webcam. Then nowadays, what I have,
it's one of those key lights from El Gato. It's one of those large lights that you connect to your desk with a triple and you can connect it with the stream deck the little buttons in front of me, and so that makes sure that even if it's a little bit dark in my office, I'm well lit and it works extremely well.
I think that's it for how I look.
Part the rest of it is, you know, I make sure that in my office, I just the light. So I have spotlights in my office. There are all Phillips you lights, so I can address them individually. And so one of the things that I do is I turn off the light directly above me because it casts dark shadows on your eyes. It makes you look very tired, so that when I turn off and the rest of
the ones in the room I dim. And then nowadays, because in the picture that in a blog, my desk is turned in one way, I now turn it to the wall. So my background is you look further into my office and you don't see very much because it's blurry, but you see some little details and it gives a nice effect.
And so you've got the Phillips huge lights. Do you use any kind of automation with those lights? Given that they're smart lights?
Most of the time I control them with my stream deck, so I just manually adjust them, change them throughout the day to match the daylight.
Color or how I feel.
So in the beginning of the day, I always turn them really white to wake me up, especially because it's.
Still someone dark outside.
And then throughout the day, especially near the end of the day, I started to turn them a more orange lights, so you get a feeling of like, okay, now it's see the end of the day. I don't do too much automation around lights. What I found is that if you do that, you spend a lot of time thinking about an ideal scenario and then reality is always very
different from that. So in the past, for example, I would always turn them on at a certain times turn them off at certain times, and I found that the reality never matches that either I end up turning them off earlier or turning them on earlier. It's surprisingly hard to have like a perfect automation.
But we have these lights all throughout the house.
And the one super useful thing I always find is that if you have a few of those motion detection detectors, so that if you walk into a house, it does turn on the lights here and there.
I love the idea of the lights changing hu during the day.
That's so cool.
Now you have mentioned the Elgado stream deck a couple of times, and I must say, after I read your post, I got one of those. I also found out that my dad has one. So my dad is a computer programmer and also does all the sound engineering for this podcast and I'm in love with my stream deck, and I'm imagining most listeners have no idea what we're talking about. So can you talk about what this stream deck thing is and how you use it.
Yes, it's a tiny keyboard.
On each key a little screen, and what you can do is you can decide what you want each one of those keys to do, and then you can actually decide what it looks like. Because it's a little screen, you can display a particular thing. And then the nice thing is is it comes in a little dock, so you can mount it at forty five degrees, so it like sits in front of you and it looks at you.
And I have the stream Deck XL, which has thirty two buttons, and so what I do with it is I map those buttons to different actions.
It can be context aware.
So for example, if I have Zoom open, it shows me all the typical controls of Zoom, like music, myself, turing my camera on and off, etc. However, for most of the day, the default screen that I have does a few things. I have buttons to control the key lights or the light that shines on my face.
I turn it off.
Whenever I'm not in a zoom call because it's very bright. And then I have a whole bunch of buttons related to things to control on my computer. I always have media control, so the ability to turn off and on Spotify. I have a single button that opens my calendar because I have a lot of meetings, so I can express
that and it opens my calendar. I have several buttons related to scanning and printing documents because in my work I actually have to still print a lot of PHYSS called documents, wet sign them and scanning scan them again. So I just put them all in my scanner and I press the button here and it runs through them. And then I have a whole number of automations that I've made with keyboard Maestro that do all sorts of things in my computer. For example, one button re arranges
my screens so that in a way that I like them. So, for example, I always want to have I have two screen series, so I want to have Slack on my left screen, I want to have my browser on the main screen, I want to have Roam on.
My mainscreen on the right.
And if I press it one button, it just rearranges them all at once. And I have another one for example, that cleans my local download folder. Because I have to download a lot of things and I don't want to manually sort them out. So what I do is I download things, I work through those documents, and whenever I'm done, I just pressed it one button and it automatically rearranges all the files in my computer and sends some of them to the cloud and trushes some others.
I'm quite inspired hearing about all the different shorts that you've got, because I don't have anywhere near as many as that. I feel like it's one of those things where you kind of become aware of all the repetitive actions that you do during the day, but then just investing five minutes to go okay, I could say so much time just through taking the time to program that on to stream deck that for some reason something sometimes just stops me. So I'm definitely going to invest some
time tomorrow. I'm quite inspired. Now you mentioned Keyboard Maestro. What is Keyboard Maestro.
It's the ultimate automation suite for Mac. So you previously and you still have Automator for example, this is a little bit hard to use, and so keep it. My stow is made by one individual I believe, and it's a not very good looking tool that allows you to essentially automate anything that happens on your Mac give it the permisions to do so. So the way it works
is you set some sort of trigger. So that trigger could be a manual action you clicking somewhere, you click on a button, or pressing a particular key, or in this case, for example, me pressing on a key on the stream deck, but it could also be a change in your computer an event for example, I add a
new file to a particular folder. So you set that trigger, and then what you can do is then based on the trigger, you can do all sorts of actions, and those actions the standard actions that are available in Keyboard Maestro. As first, they seem somewhat limited, but you quickly discover that they're actually very powerful because you can essentially do
anything you could do with your hands without automations. For example, if I want to find a particular place in the screen to click on, I could say, well, I want to click at a particular coordinate. But you can also do is you can have Keyboard mysto search for an image on your whole screen and then click on that image. So that you don't have to rely on your screen speining a particular place. It's incredibly powerful and you can
virtually automate anything with it. And to give you an example, the latest thing I automated, well, I get a lot of images through WhatsApp, and I want to save those images. But there's not a real easy way to do this, especially not if you have a lot a lot of
them hundreds. And so what I did is I created the keyboard maestrow automation that essentially opened WhatsApp, selected the contact from which I want to download the images, and then one by one go through each image, click on download, saves it to the right location, waits until that's done, and then goes to the next image, and it just
does that for however long I wanted. And so once I set up that the automation I tested to with like three images, I turned it on, I did like three hundreds, and then a minute later I couldn't touch my computer in this time, though, but a minute later it had downloaded all those things. And it would have been very tedious to do by hand, but it was actually very easy to automate. It took me maybe five minutes or something.
Do I need to be able to write code to automate within keyboard my story or is it for non coders like me?
No, not at all. That's the beauty of it.
I think it's good to have an understanding of loops, so understanding what does how does loop work?
And such?
So having some sort of like a mind that likes the program things certainly helps and it will make you easier. I also think it's worth while just exploring online, like sometimes it's worth to just look at examples online. If you do want to code, you can actually coach. You can write JavaScript, or you can write automator in there, and if you want to do very specific things or things that are on a command line, then you will
need to do that. But actually, I think none of the automations I am using today uses any kind of code, So no, it's it's really nice.
Now.
Just before we started recording, I said, you sound so good, and I would expect nothing less. Can you talk me through what your setup is for sounding so great and clear?
I spend a lot of time thinking about this, and one of the things I learned very quickly was that if you want to control the acoustic properties of your space.
You have to invest in immense amount of time and effort and money to be able to do that, and I essentially decided to not do that, and rather than having spending time on acoustic insallation and echoic things, I decided, I'm going to build a setup that works around like one really good microphone that is someone close to my mouth and then I don't have to worry about the echo. And so that's exactly what it is I now have.
I think it's called an Electro Voice r E twenty microphone, which I can obviously not expect anyone to buy the same one. It's very expensive, but it's a very popular microphone, especially in the recording industry. It's really really good because you don't have to be too close to it. You have to be someone close to it, and you basically the ultimate sound quality and that is connected to a
microphone arm and a microphone arm. I don't remember the brand, but it's a nice one because it has the xcel R cable insight so you don't have to lose cable wiggling about. Honestly, that's all the money that I spent on that that's worth it, and that into the perfect USB microphone interface. It's a USB pre too from sound devices, which again is OVERKO for ninety five to ninety nine
percent of all people. The nice thing about this one is is that it's essentially indestructible and mega reliable and doesn't require any drivers. So this whole setup is, I have a really good microphone. It goes into a box, and a box doesn't need any drivers. I just plug it into my computer. It would work on any computer. The device is like fifteen years old. They haven't changed it in many years. They haven't released any driver updates
to it. It's just super solid. So I'm really really happy with the audio setup I have today.
Yeah, I think that you used to use a slightly more affordable microphone, am I right inside that you used to use an Audio Technica I TI twenty one.
Hundred, Yeah, the twenty one hundred USB. And it's still really good.
Like if I for some reason I have to record multiple audio streams at home, which is like one in the Blue Moon, then I have two of them. I bought it for fifty dollars when I was visiting New York. Once it was hard to shipt Europe. But yeah, and it's incredible. I think the difference between the mic that I'm using now and that one is that that one really has to be close to your mouth. You really need a pop filter on it, and the dynamic ra INNG is a little bit less, but it is almost as good.
Now.
I know that you're not a fan of bluetooth headphones. Could you talk me through what you do use and why?
Oh yeah, I also recently upgraded all of that, so I'm not like I. Fundamentally I use Bluetooth headphones all the time. I use airports all the time. I have a set of Airports Max and all more order. But for my own setup, it's not reliable enough. I have days where I have seven hours of meetings sometimes and none of them do a good job. And like, I don't want a hassle with losing connection to it, so
I always use wired headphones without any exception. So today I use by Bayer Dynamic nineteen ninety pro, which is open back headphones, which is my preferred type of headphones because then I can still hear myself when I'm talking like I am now, and also I find the sound
quality much better. People have concerns that the sound leaks too much through them, but I find that that's not really the case, and those are connected to a sheet audio deck and amp which is on my desk, and that's then connected to my Mac.
I want to geek out for just a little bit longer, so please indulge me, or rather I should say listeners, please indulge me in this, because I could just talk for hours about gear. Now, keyboards keyboards are not created equal. Talk me through your view on your preference for keyboards.
A long time ago I got into mechanical keyboards, like I think many people in the tech industry start to discover them at once, and I used all sorts and then I.
Saw someone use a split keyboard.
So split keyboard being a keyboard, it existently exists of two separate part one for your left hand, one for your right hand. And actually, I don't know if you heard that, that was me moving it. And so I've used an Ergo dogs Easy for a very long time, and today what I use is a Moonlener, which is their new split keyboard, and it's a split keyboards and it's also Ergo linear, so that means that the keys are in neat rows and columns, so rather than like
being offset. Like a normal quirty keyboard, they are in very straight column. So essentially, if you want to move from the J to the you, for example, on your right hand, you go straight up instead of going slightly to the left or to the right. And so this keyboard,
for one, it's my favorite keyboard of all time. It's truly incredible when you drop your arms next to you and you just stick out your hands straight forward that is where each half of the keyboard is, rather than moving them to the center in front of you, and so actually in the center in front of me, I usually have my coffee and I touch type. And the nice thing about the keyword is is you can program it, and you can program it in a sense that you can add multiple layers to it.
That means that.
If I just type normally, if I keep my hands on the home row so with my left, the next thing on the F, and am I right on the J, it's just a normal quality keyboard. I don't use any specific other arrangement. But then if I, for example, press on the key next to the A, which traditionally you have the cap slope for me, it activates a level switch and now every key on the keyboard is mapped to something different, and because it's programmable, I can choose
what it is. So in my case, it means that if I press on that key so that it is to the left of the A on my right hand under my index and middle finger, I have parentheses and square brackets and curly brackets, so things I use very very frequently, and so they are very easy to reach. So I don't have to press shift and then reach up with my hands now. Rather they are under the home row and I can really quickly type particular things.
I have not layer switch on the other side of the left hand where each key is mapped to.
I don't even know what.
Kind of key combination, but it essentially allows me to move windows around. So if I press my index finger on one and then I usually use my ring finger on another key, I know that it can really quickly move a window to the left, or the screen to the right, or screen besides, et cetera.
Now, but I've got a normal, just a Mac keyboard that's sort of Bluetooth connected. If like thinking about the keyboard setup that you have, I imagine most people don't have that setup. How difficult or challenging would it be for people with a normal keyboard to move to what you're using where it's essentially split in half.
I have a lot of friends that start using this and actually yesterday or a friend of mine body exact same one.
And I here two things.
One is it took me about a week or two weeks to get as fast as a normal keyboard, and I love it and I don't want.
To go back.
And I've had several friends that were like, this is not for me, and I'm turning it or stop.
Using it, and so I personally spent I think.
It was one week that it was like a bit of work and I missed a few keys and I had to remap them. I kept hitting the wrong key for the bee. But more and more I see, especially people in my company, for example, using this kind of keyboard. It is much more organomic and had the advantages of having a program or keyboard are hard to understate.
It's really really quite powerful.
And how about your mouse or I should say misce I believe what's your set up there?
So I used to mice on the right. So I used to be a die hard track pad user for.
A long time.
I started getting pain in my hand, and the moment that happened, I immediately decided to no longer use a track pad as my primary mouse. So I'm right handed, so on my right hand I have a Logitech MX Master three, which is a really great mouse, and on my left hand I still use the Magic track Pad two from Apple. I have the black one that came
with the Macro. And the reason I use both is that a normal mouse is good for almost all normal day to day computer use, and this one, in particular is really nice because it has like this horizontal scroll wheel. It has a few extra buttons, which I don't use, by the way, but it has them if I were to use them. And then on the left side I have the trackpad for gestures. You know, there's a lot of really nice gests, like a three or four fingers
swipe up to have xpos A open. But in particular, we use fig masks designed to add remote and moving around like a virtual environment like a two D space is infinitely more easy with the trackpad because you can just put two fingers on it and you can move in X and the Y dimension, and you can pinch to zoom in and out, and that is something that with a mouse and regular mouse is significantly harder. And so what I do is like, on my left hand, I navigate around. On my right hand, I click on
things and resize things, and it works so well. I tried to convince more people of using the same setup.
I like that a lot because I use a normal mouse and I've actually put my track pad away in the draw. But since learning about your setup, I'm like, oh, maybe I need to become ambidexterous in my mouse setup. Now I imagine that there are you know, a lot of listeners going wow, that sounds like an amazing setup, but it's going to be overkill for me, or I don't have that budget or my organization would not fund
all that amazing gear. What would your top two or three tips be for listeners that are on a budget to get the biggest bang for their back in terms of improving their home office setup and how they're communicating visually an auditory with the rest of the world.
If you ask me specifically, like the whole home office may advice is always one. Get a good chair. Spend all your money on that. It can get your back back right. This is the one thing where you should really optimize for an external monitor. If you are set with those basics, I think the next step it's nice to have mechanical keyboard. They are not expensive. You can get like a great mechanical keyboard for the equivalent of
fifty dollars or so nowadays on Amazon. And then it's what I said, like, try to optimize the little thing so you can get an inexpensive webcam and put it on your screen in front of you if you have an external screen, so that you look straight at the webcam. Make sure you have some sort of headphones whenever you're in a zoom call, so that there's no chance that you have that echo effect where which zoom actually cancels out really really well. But not all video clients do
very well. It's very easy thing just put on headphones. If you already have some lying around, that works fine. And then if you still have some budget left, you can always look into getting an external microphone. It tends to make quite a big difference, especially if you just get one and put it somewhat close to you. The closer to your mouth, the better it will sound. That's like then the price of the microphone doesn't really matter.
If you put it really close to your mouth, and again you can get like a great one for fifty to one hundred dollars, which definitely is an investment, but it is also worth it if you spend a lot of time in video calls. And then the one thing I always say is like, get a wired Internet to your desk, like remove the latency of Wi Fi and the chance that your Wi Fi goes down or you have problems with it all together by just putting a
wired directly to your computer. You probably need a dong all if you use a MacBook, but.
It's so worth it.
It will cost you, I don't know, twenty dollars to do so at most, and you will forever get rid of all your latency problems with zoom calls.
And what sort of chair do you have? Given that that is the most important item.
Chairs are really personal choice. Years many years ago, I sat on a Herman Miller Errands chair and I thought to myself, I've never said this comfortably, So that's what I'm sitting on an error chair.
Yeare moving away from tech talk. I know that you used to be at git Lab and I actually had Darren Murph on the show a few months ago, and I got to say that was one of my favorite interviews of last year and just learning about how things are done at git lab, and I know that asynchronous
work is the default at git lab. For those that haven't come across the term asynchronous, can you just briefly define what that means, because I know that at remote dot Com, I assume that your default to asynchronous communication there as well.
Yes, we do.
Asynchronous work essentially means that work can continue in the absence of being together in the same place at the same time, So you work in a way that doesn't require you to have a meeting with someone, that doesn't require you to be working on something at the same time, and things can still continue. That is fundamentally what you try to achieve with asynchronous work. When you think about specifics, it means that you'll write down rather than things being
in the air. Right in a normal office, when you work together, it's often the case, like what is the status of a project? You can shout it in the air and then the person in the other desk might say,
this is what it is. In asynchronous work, this is not acceptable because that means that it relies on you both being working at the same time at the same place and communicating with each other and asynchronous work essentially states that, well, if there is a status to be had, it's accessible to everybody, and you don't need to bother someone else to be able to get that status. If you want to read what decision was made and why it was made, that is accessible, you don't have to
ask it to someone. And all of this to eventually allow you to build the team that is distributed and it can work whenever they want and continue with their work at whatever time they want without needing to sync with other people.
Now, I am curious as to what the differences are in the way you've chosen to work and build the culture at remote dot com. But before we go there, for listeners that haven't heard of remote dot com, which I imagine is quite a few listeners, can you talk about what your company does and why you created it.
Yeah, of course.
So if you are an employer and you want to employ someone in a different country, that's actually pretty hard to do. You need to have a local office, you need to have a local entity. Then you need to hire someone locally meet the local laws in terms of labor laws, and employment laws, and then you need to run local payroll and pay them out locally in their local currency.
That's a lot of work.
If you choose to not do those things, you are a non compliant. Like you can't just hire someone in another country and say you are now an employee of my company, which is an American company, even though you're in Portugal.
That's not possible.
And we face this problem at get lab many many times, and we never found a great solution to it, and so Remote specifically solves this problem. So what we are we are a global employer of record and we take care of exactly this problem. So we take care of payroll and benefits and compliance for international teams. And we do that by, among other things, employing people locally for other employers. So if you have a company in the United States you want to employ someone in Portugal, you
can do so through us. We take care of all the bureaucratic stuff and we just send you an invoice every month and you treat that employee like any other employee. So that's what Remotes does.
What a brilliant problem to solve.
And I want to know, given you spend a lot of time at GitLab involved in their culture, and I'd say for those that are not familiar with that culture, I will link to my interview with Darren Murph in the show notes because that goes into a lot of the choices that GitLab have made in terms of creating the culture that they have there around Remote Works. So what are some of the things that you've chosen to do differently in terms of being a remote first company.
I think there's a few fundamental thing we started to do that I'm not sure we get LEB does, but one notable example is what we start to see is that having a single moment with the whole company together is of course very hard to achieve. And when you have people all over the world and you want to have both ability to bond with your colleagues independent of where they are, and you want to also especially if you're a leader in the company or if you have some news to share, to be able to do that.
And so what we started to do is we started to explicitly separate those things. So now what we have at the Remote is we have six bonding calls a week. So these are calls and their only purpose is to spend time bonding chatting with each other, maybe doing you know,
those icebreaker questions, or just having fun together. So it's six calls, but on three different days, and then one for me it's in the morning, and one for me it's in the late afternoon, so that essentially the whole planet can at least attend one of them, and then we still have an all hands meeting where we try to all get together, which is a shifting time. But what we figured out was that this all hands for one, we don't like to schedule long and many recurring meetings,
so it's only thirty minutes. So rather than using that time for updates, what we started to do is require every team to record their updates in a LOOM video.
So what people do is they we have a page on Notion where everybody posts their updates and it can be either written in a little Notion page or it can be loom or sometimes a combination of both, and people tend to stick to at most five minutes, so these are really short updates and it gives you a really nice ability to quickly see what is happening across the organization, and of course we categorize those so if you want to see like what is the latest in
sales at Remote? Even on your first day, you can just go to that list and you can see, oh, there was an update two days ago. You can watch
it and you're fully up to date. And I'm quite proud of this because this solved so many problems, and it took a while to encourage everybody to start recording this, but now that people are doing it, it's an incredible source of information because it moves away from the requirement of having to really search the deep through documentation just to get a glance of like what is the current
status of things. You can just watch a video or even just read the transcript, and it still gives you somewhat personal thing because you can put a face to another department or a face to a particular task, and so you actually get to see all the people that you know. Remote we spend a lot of time on international expansion. You can actually see the people that are working on this, and I find it very very cool for.
Listeners that haven't come across Loom or Notion, Can you briefly explain what those two pieces of software do, how they work.
Of course, Loom is just a way to record videos. You can record a video of your screen, you can record a video of yourself, or a combination of the two where you see a winnow in your computer and a little image of you talking. Incredibly easy way to quickly record and share videos. And I am personally using it all the time, and it just released a feature
to have transcripts, which is quite good. So, for example, yesterday I had a new colleague starting and I recorded a few LOOM videos for him because I want to share all this information with you, but we don't need to necessarily set up.
An hour long meeting. I can just record a bunch of videos.
And then what he did is he actually just read the transcripts and he says I prefer to read, and the transcript was really good, and then that worked well enough for him.
So that's LOOM.
It's a really really great tool, highly recommended, especially for any kind of remote company. And a notion is a really popular tool. It's a tool in which you can write, so you can document things, you can have databases. Essentially, it's a way to collect, organize, and read a lot of information. It's really powerful, it's really expressive. It makes it very easy to write, it makes it very easy to add particular kind of content and it's really great
as a single source of truth. So getleb, for example, has its handbook. We have a handbook as well with ours is in Ocean, and actually part of it is public online at handbook dot remote.
Dot com handbook dot remote dot com. I'll link to that in the show notes and tell me what are some of the other things that you do? And by the way, I'm loving the sound of six bonding meetings perbect, but what else do you do at remote dot com?
We wanted to do more because just putting to get people together in a call it definitely works, but it also makes it a very easily skippable event. So we wanted to do things where we engage people. And so what we started to do is we started to organize things to play games together, so at least every Thursday. But what I'm starting to see more often people organize themselves are there are specific moments in the calendar to play games together, and those games can be all sorts
of things. People play pictionary together, they play video games. We have a Minecraft server, for example. There are people
playing all sorts of online games. There's dungeons and Dragons group nowadays, and then a while ago I bought the Ocalist Quests too, this VR headset from Facebook, and I found the experience just so incredibly good compared to anything what was before, and so we figured we're going to set up an initiative we call it Remote Labs, to try out new ways of communicating with each other, and this was one of the things that we tried out. So everybody at Remote gets one of these Ocallest Quests
VR headsets and actually hang out in VR. Sometimes it's just a really nice experience because again it helps you feel more present and feel closer to people, right rather than just seeing someone on the screen, there's a physical element to it where you feel the actual presence in three D space of someone else. Now today, I think we did that a few times, and people everybody Jones
Remote will continue to get one. The reality is though, that most people are now playing Beat Saber, which is a really nice music game in VR, and there's a very intense competition going on where every time someone breaks your record, you get a notification on your phone and I get several day of that, so it's pretty fun.
What do you think the future holds in terms of remote working, a more company is going to be doing this or is it just a phase thanks to this global pandemic?
What do you reckon?
I think there's two very strong forces that will make sure that remote working will only continue to grow. The first one being is the need for talent. It's simply there's simply not enough talent in the neighborhood around the office to ignore remote work, right. You know that Now, if you're an employer you want to hire the best person, you can just find them by saying, well, it doesn't matter where you live or where you want to live, we will hire you.
And so that's the first one.
It's like the hard need for talent and the need to just look outside of the direct vicinity of anybody particular offers. And the other one is because of the pandemic and many of us were forced to work from home, the secret is out that you can actually do most jobs from home or do them remotely. And so independent of what an employer might decide to do post pandemic, they might say, well, everybody has to go to the office.
Each individual knows that remote working is a thing that is possible, and it is a thing that you can do so even if your current employee forces you to go back to the office. You know that well, if you like this, or if you see the potential of hey, if I work remotely, I can move somewhere else or I can travel well working, then you are going to think to yourself, well, maybe I'll look for a different job.
And there will be plenty of jobs because again, the need for talent will make it so that employers will try to do what is what people actually want, and many people want to work remotely. So yeah, I'm absolutely sure that this is not only a trend that will stay. I think it will only grow, and I think it's almost any knowledge worker over time will work partially or fully remotely.
It's interesting what I'm saying happening in Australia is that but a lot of organizations are encouraging their staff to come back to the office, which is actually the opposite of what we've done at Inventing. In my consultancy, we have gotten rid of our Melbourne and Sydney leases and
we are now officially a remote first company. But you know, is there a difference between being a remote first versus just a remote friendly company where people can work from home, but they're kind of encouraged to come into the office at least a couple of days a week.
Yeah. Absolutely.
I think it starts by the fact that in one of these two scenarios, if you're remote friendly and you still encourage people to go to the office, you take away the freedom of living anywhere, right. I think that's I think there's a large component. I always think that remote work fundamentally and remote first companies give you more freedom.
And so if you are going to restricted freedom by saying, well, you have to be in a particular location, that immediately implies that you also have to work in particular hours, because most people work during the day, like I do, between nine and five, nine and seven or so. So you immediately restrict that, and you immediately limit that. And then if you also require them to actually come into the office, it means that they can't actually move anywhere.
So I don't think it's remote friendly if you call it like that. I think it's about encouraging or requiring people to be closed to the office that is the real problem here. And then if you don't allow people to actually far away and fully work remotely, you're not remote friendly. You just want a business that sometimes people
can work from home. And lastly, of course what happens is that your company culture will not be asynchronous, it will not fully embrace remote work, because people are going to rely on their moments to being together in the office. It's a natural tendency that we have because communicating in person is much easier than communicating through a computer, and so it requires much less work for you to just
talk to me rather than writing something. It requires much less work to just walk over into the office rather than setting up a meeting when I'm remotely. And so if part of the company or all of the company regularly meets in in the office, they are going to lean into the time that they're in the office and using that to communicate and using that for meetings and will it will essentially means that if you work remotely,
work isolated, and it's a bad idea to work like that. Okay, I think you either have to accept like everybody works remotely all the time and there happen to be offices where you can sit and work some of the time, or you have to say, well, we are just not a remote company.
Personally, I'm very happy to not be going into an office again.
And look, finally, are there any other general.
Tips or advice that you have for the average work from home person to improve their productivity and just have a more enjoyable experience working remotely.
When I talk to companies about remote culture and making it work, the one thing I would say is don't accept the status quo as like this is the way we're going to work. Keep iterating on that, and I would say the same two individuals. It is not easy to especially if you work at home, right, which is not avironment for remote work. You can get an office, you can work in a co working space or whatever else.
But if you work at home, I think it's worthwhile to spend a lot of time thinking about how can I improve this? Am I happy with how it is today? You should not feel like work is your life. Rather, it should feel like work is a small facet of life and that happens sometimes throughout the day or sometimes
throughout the week, and I optimize around that. I think that is very important, and the best way to deal with that is to, as you said in the beginning, create a specific time, specific places to do your work. Make sure that work space is ergonomic. Make sure to separate work and life by not having notifications on your phone for example related to work. Those are simple things, but they make a huge difference in the way you will perceive work in a way you will perceive the
rest of life. But you don't want to feel like you're always working, and I think that is the most important thing. And then if it comes like little productivity things and little tips, those are very personal. There's so many productivity tools. I am completely in love with Rome Research right now, and I would recommend everybody to use it, but I know in reality that's not how it works.
It is not for everybody.
I've had great things about Rome, but I haven't tried it. In a nutshell, can you describe what it is.
It's a note taking tool that is quite opinionated on one end and very customizable on the other end.
On it's simplest.
What it is is that you take notes, and every time you have a term or a person, you can put double brackets around that and it will link to every other instance of that term or that person, and then it essentially builds a giant database that links itself and it can link to other things.
It's really quite powerful.
So for example, what I do is every time in the beginning of the day, I put my whole calendar there, and I put lock brackets around all the people I'm meeting and the companies that relate to them. So for example, for today, for this morning, I have here me how I work podcasts. Those are two separate terms, and if I click on one, it will link to the other and any other reference I have of you or your podcast,
for example. And this might be the first time that appears, but in the future, if I listen to another podcast episode or I think about it, then I see, oh yeah, no. It was on February nine that I listened to this, and these were my thoughts on that day. It's really powerful and it works a little bit the way most people think, as in like it becomes one big graph. I think it works best if you spend time customizing it, which is not super simple.
There's not an.
Inbuilt tutorial there somewhat of it, so you have to actually spend time wanting to learn it, which is why it's not the most accessible too. But once you get into it, there's nothing really that competes with it.
So I really love it.
Awesome and my final question for listeners that want to connect with you and remote dot com.
What is the best way for people to do that?
So if you neither services, you can just go to remote dot com. You can also just email me directly at yop atromolticom. So does job atromoticom. I don't mind it tw when people email me if you want to ask me things about my setup as much it's messagers reached out on Twitter, it's at yop foul so jobfo fantastic Yo.
I have loved our chat.
I've loved geeking out and I've loved hearing about your views on remote work.
It's been awesome. Thank you so much for your time, Thanks for having me. That is it for today's show.
I hope you're feeling all inspired to level up your home office setup.
I know that I spent a lot of.
Time thinking about mine, and I've definitely taken some of Yob's advice, definitely checking out keyboard my story, which.
I thought was an awesome recommendation.
Now next week on How I Work, I have Kate Morris on the show, founder of Adore Beauty, a little online beauty e Taylor that last year listed on the ASX for six hundred million dollars. We talk about how Kate manages her energy and motivation her beauty routine, after all, she is immersed in the world of beauty and has been for two decades, and the importance of outsourcing tasks at home to actually be able to juggle it all. Subscribe to How I Work to be alerted when new
episodes such as this one drop. How I Work is produced by Inventingum with production support from Dead Set Studios.
The producer for this episode was.
The amazing Jenna Coder, and thank you to Martin Imber my dad, who did the audio mix and makes everything sound better than it would have otherwise.
See you next time.