View from the Mountain

Working from Home Isn't Just Bringing a Laptop Home

The picture to the left is the view from my home office. There are backsteps from my office to our dock where I can drop a boat into the water from the lift that is about twenty-five feet behind the house or just slide a kayak into the waters of Raymond's Gut that adjoin our back yard. My home office is the pinnacle of distractions. Yet, I manage to get a lot of work done there.

I have often joked that this is the favorite seat in my office.  It is the view from my kayak out in the White Oak River. It takes me ten minutes to paddle out there. More times than you want to know I have paddled out there at noon caught a fish (flounder or red drum) and paddled back to our dock. There I clean the fish, then head in for a quick shower, finally I cook and eat the fish while taking less than two hours for lunch. It is far healthier than a two martini lunch.

Much of the time I can see my real office from the kayak.  I have answered a few emails, calls and a text or two from the kayak but obviously, it does not work as well for business as it does for fishing.

I recently wrote a post, Success from Working at Home. As I have seen people struggling with their first efforts at working from home, it occurred to me that people might need more suggestions, particularly with the things that I take for granted and the habits that I have developed over my thirty-five plus years of mostly working from home. Many of these things do not seem special to me.  They are just the way that I have learned to accomplish tasks for decades.

Once you take the step of working from home, the back end system that provides services to your office will become very important.  I worked at Apple for almost twenty years. Most of those years I was based out of a home office.  One of the first things you learn in a home office is that you need good connectivity back to the company's real office.

We advanced to VPN's which allowed us to access file servers on the corporate network.  Over the years, I developed the habit of storing my files during but especially at the end of the day in what we have all come to call the cloud. I have used many of the cloud services including the ones from Google, Microsoft, Apple, Dropbox, and Box.   Apple has never figured out cloud storage so I prefer almost any of the others.  If you also use the desktop client for a cloud drive, you will find that all of them will slip up and be slow syncing at times.

In addition to cloud drives, I have my own 14TB NAS in my office. I am most productive with multiple computers doing different parts of my work life. I pass files around between my two Macs, one Windows machine, one Linux machine, a Chromebook, and an iPad using the NAS.  I could set up remote access to the NAS but I don't travel enough for that to make sense.

Once you have a good back end whether it is a shared drive on the internal network or a commercial cloud drive, you need a good network to access it. Wireless has come a long way, but my home office is a wired connection right off of our Google WiFi router.  When we built the addition that houses my office, I asked the contractors to put in Ethernet connections, none had ever done that. Being as we are at the ends of the earth, I got the electricians to run the wires and I bought the tools and installed the connectors myself.  My office has a twelve port switch with only two or three ports not being used. In addition to all the computers, I have three printers on the network.

Many years ago we did that with a modem and a terminal session on a mainframe. Then it was with a modem, hybrid modem-line sight systems, DSL and now we are stuck with cable modems. My cable-modem Internet connection regularly tests at 480 Mbps down and 23 Mbps up. While having a symmetric 250 Mbps fiber connection would allow for serious video conferencing, this is all that I can get. It is not a fiber connection but it is fast enough to do the work that I do.

What helps it to work for me is that I have Ethernet wired directly to my office from a switch on our router.  If you are using wireless connectivity, your connectivity could be a different story.  We have an almost new mesh WiFi setup. Even with that my wife's laptop downstairs only connects at only 280 Mbps download speeds.  My iPad only does 80 Mbps. While my wife's laptop sounds plenty fast, if you start adding overhead like a VPN and a couple of televisions streaming Netflix, you might notice a difference.  If you are on a wireless network with a lot of other people and your connection is through a cable modem, there are times of the day when your subdivision's copper cable architecture which is shared bandwidth might be slammed.  Sometimes you might not be very successful at getting your work done during busy times of the day.

People who become dissatisfied with their Internet keep our company, WideOpen Networks, busy planning and building fiber networks. Fiber networks give each person dedicated bandwidth usually with symmetrical uploads and downloads. It is what you need if you are serious about working from home.

In addition to a good network, you need a good phone.  It doesn't have to be a fancy one but it should be a high-quality Panasonic or equivalent one. Your phone if you use a bundled Internet phone service is only as good as your Internet connection. Over the years I have had challenges with my Internet phone.  My Panasonic phone system has a paging feature which is useful when my wife wants to talk to me.  She is becoming a texting expert so we don't need it as much as we did.  However, when you are in a conference call, be mindful of your background noise. There is nothing worse than a squeaky chair at a conference call.

Once you have a good network and phone, you can start using tools like GoToMeeting which allows you to have a conference call and share screens and possibly video.  When you are doing a call that involves video, you need to consider bandwidth requirements. It is easy to have a bad experience using an overburdened network.  We rarely do anything more than sharing a screen because only our corporate office is on fiber.  Standard practice is to use our phone lines for the sound on these calls instead of relying on the sound from computers. Years of experience have taught us that sound quality is better using your phone unless it is a cell phone.

Another invaluable tool is Slack which allows you to message each or have phone calls by computer. A good microphone makes a huge difference in Slack phone calls. Slack is amazingly useful and works much better than Skype.  I haven't tried Microsoft's Team and won't as long as Slack continues to be such a great tool.

There are other tools like Basecamp for project management and Outlook for calendar management that can help everyone work better remotely. Everyone needs a good contact management tools.  The development of our tool, Highrise, has stopped but it already has all the features that I need. You might already be using a good CRM tool that can be accessed remotely.

A good dedicated scanner is something that I use regularly. One of my printers is also a copier.  I also have a home Office365 subscription and an Adode subscription that gets me access to Lightroom, Photoshop, and Acrobat. You might not need all of those but when you need one of those tools, you really need it.

Finally if you are going to sit at your desk for hours, you need a really good chair. If you have a few decades on you like me that could cost you between $180 to $200.

If you cannot use your office's standard software, then you should start there first. None of this works without the right tools and the discipline to use the tools properly including sharing, recording or saving your information to the cloud.

 

On The Edge of the Continent

COVID-19 (Coronavirus) is already in Onslow County, just across the river from our home in Carteret County and in Craven County, another adjoining county so we know it is coming.  For just a while longer life here still revolves around the waters, fields, and forests that cover most of the county. Spring is definitely here and we might be doing some social distancing on the water soon.

I work at home like I have for most of my professional career. Social distancing is not going to change that work routine. Our company builds community fiber networks. While this virus will likely be good for our long-term business, no one wants their business to grow this way. Still, the coronavirus may be the shove needed for our country to get serious about fiber to the home which enables or improves a variety of services including telemedicine. We all might desperately need better connectivity in the next few weeks.

While I am worried about our local community which has not completely recovered from Florence, I remain optimistic because this is not your average place.

We moved to Carteret County, North Carolina fourteen years ago. The county is 62% water. The Croatan National Forest and its 158,000 acres are a buffer from most civilization. The almost untouched 56 miles of Cape Lookout National Seashore lies to the east. The 240 square miles Cape Lejeune covers our west flank and the Atlantic Ocean is our border to the south. We did not come to the county to get away from people, but people like the water in our big sounds and rivers are spread mighty thin.

My forty-year-old son declared while visiting us a few years ago that we were living on the edge of civilization. He lives in Northern Virginia, a land of epic traffic jams on multi-lane roads. Highway 58, the main access to the area, is just two lanes as it slices through miles of pine forest, pocosins and fields. It remains two lanes as it crosses the two-mile-long Cameron Langston Bridge to the beaches. It is not my son's favorite road.

As uncrowded as our area is, we are no strangers to challenges. Being on the Crystal Coast portion of the Southern Outer Banks, we have survived our fair share of hurricanes. Our schools were closed for two weeks for Florence which just happens to be the time Governor Cooper closed them for the coronavirus on March 14.

Saturday, March 14, was also scheduled to be the kick-off of our annual outdoor festival season with the Saint Patrick's Day Festival on Emerald Isle. It brings over 30,000 people to our little beach town which has a year-round population of under 3,700 people. It's cancellation this year is a big blow to the local economy. Emerald Isle, the largest of the area beach towns grows to 50,000 people briefly in the summer.  On March 19, Carteret County asked visitors not to come to the beaches. The same day Emerald Isle closed its public access beach parking.

That we are always prepared for the summer surge of people might make us hopefully a little better positioned to do well in the early stages of this crisis. If some areas are food deserts, we are a food oasis. We have six large modern grocery stores within five miles. They're virtually deserted from October until early May. Wednesday night I visited the Emerald Isle Publix, my car was the only one in the customer parking lot. While we have seen some shortages, it appears they are so far minor. One store might have eggs and/or bread, another hamburger, and another chicken.

Carteret County is also a farming area that grows a tremendous amount of produce. Rumor has it that a few farmers are already picking this year's first strawberries.  We know from the past, strawberries will be ripe and widely available in a couple of weeks. There are still people here like us with home gardens. We will enjoy our first lettuce from the garden this week. Many of our other services are designed to handle a short summer surge of business and hardly any of our storefronts shut down for the winter. All of that is good for today.

The long term outlook is unlikely to be so rosy. A coronavirus shock to tourism on top of a slow recovery from Florence will be tough on many small businesses that struggle to survive the winter so they can thrive for a few summertime weeks. A big hit to the early rental season makes our coastal area even more vulnerable to late-season Hurricane scares that also drive tourists away. We have already lost a number of restaurants and the ones that have gone to the expense of rebuilding definitely are going to be hurt by the recent closures.

Watching coronavirus is a little like watching a hurricane as it slowly makes its way towards your area. However, the analogy breaks down quickly since the drill most of us have internalized for hurricanes helps us little against a virus that we cannot see.

With coronavirus, we are following the government directives as we do for hurricanes. We trust that will make us safe.  Carteret County has good information available.  We remain hopeful even better instructions and wide-spread testing will follow. While our location is somewhat isolated, perhaps we are well enough connected to the rest of the world to learn from others' mistakes.

When we put our house on the market last year, we were excited to be moving closer to our grandchildren in the Charlotte metro area. Maybe the slow real estate season has turned out to be a blessing. Carteret County might be a good place to ride out the coronavirus storm. I cannot get very interested in looking for a new home right now.

Success Working from Home

I have been working from home for most of my adult life.  Lots of people joke about how you can goof off while working from home. Fortunately, I have worked in enough offices to know that the biggest goof-offs usually show up at the office every day and leave without ever accomplishing anything. 

Being successful is not defined by your work environment, it is in your hands.

Even before the coronavirus, there were plenty of benefits that might accrue to you if you work from home. However, many of them are closely intertwined with having the right office, good equipment, and the temperament to work from a home office.

For over ten years, we had a cattle farm and while I had a home office for a couple of weeks out of the year during tax season, most of my time was spent on a tractor.  In 1981, we dispersed our cattle, and I got my first home office job.  It is good that I waited until then because it was nearly impossible to do the job without a computer and Apple II+s like I bought were just starting to land on desktops. That job only lasted six months but it led to my first go-to-the-office-every-day job, selling Apple computers and managing the salespeople in five distinct offices.

After two years of that, I landed at Apple and my career of being in the office occasionally while mostly working from home began in earnest. In the next twenty years, I rapidly moved up to the corporate ladder and eventually became director of federal sales. Even then I was rarely in the office more than half the workdays of a month.  I actually credit my home office as one of the reasons that I managed to last nearly twenty years at Apple. Sometimes having some geographic separation from upper management is a good thing.

Technology evolving from email on a mainframe to email on your phone and every other imaginable device has made working from home much easier over the years. Here is a list of what has helped me be successful.

1. Having a dedicated, private physical space has been an unwavering success factor for me. You cannot do great work until you are in a space where you can concentrate.
2. Developing the technical skills to support yourself in your company's specific environment is really important.  You are not going to thrive if you are always calling someone for help.
3. Using the right equipment to match your needs and the requirements of your company is essential.
4. Creating a routine that matches the needs of your company can actually help you do better than office-bound personnel.
5. Communicating frequently and often with others in and outside your company is a lifeline to sanity and success.

At times the right equipment can be daunting.  When I started managing an Apple higher education team in 1993, my office had three phone lines, one for talking, one for a data connection and another for someone calling in when I was on the other line. Creating a network in the early days was no picnic and there was no cloud for storage or collaboration.

Today, Slack, one phone line, and a reasonable Internet connection handle my communications needs. It would be even better if I had a fiber connection with symmetric up and down speed for better video conferencing.

I have found that having multiple computers is a benefit. Because I can get pulled in different directions, I like just being able to swing my chair around to another task. My desks have two Macs, one Windows 10 machine, and one Linux box.  I have my own NAS, three printers, and a scanner. I did my own Ethernet cabling when we built this addition where my new office is but most people might be fine with wireless. My office uses wired Ethernet. I wouldn't have it any other way. My own personal computer is a Google Pixelbook which almost never comes to my office. Keeping personal and work computers separate also helps. 

I keep slightly offset hours compared to our CEO. That means when he is at lunch, I can work on materials that need to be finished with a joint effort later in the day.

Being successful in a home office does not require putting on a suit every day, but it does demand sticking to what needs to be done, using the right tools, and approaching the job with the right mindset.  I have been very successful with shorts and a t-shirt for many years.  I don't miss the ties or the modems of the early years.