Articles
Latest articles to inform and inspire designers who work remotely
Browse articles Suggest an articlePointless work meetings 'really a form of therapy'
Meetings at work should be seen as a form of "therapy" rather than about decision-making, say researchers. Academics from the University of Malmo in Sweden say meetings provide an outlet for people at work to show off their status or to express frustration. Professor Patrik Hall...
We were supposed to be living in pod houses
Pretend itās the ā60s and youāve been tasked with building the house of the future. You might ask yourself, Whatās the most futuristic thing imaginable? Space. Who lives in space? Aliens. What do their houses look like? Flying saucers. And so your prediction might look a lot like...
Will the office be obsolete by 2030?
Remote work isn't niche anymoreāit's everywhere. Anyone who frequents a coffee shop knows that. At this point, companies of all sizes are implementing remote work policies. A number of forward-thinking companies have quietly grown to hundredsāsometimes thousandsāof completely...
Remote Work - Asynchronous Communication
Recently Iāve started a new role at a company where we are all working remote. While we are remote, some of the other companies we are working with are not, so I started thinking about what makes you able to work remote. Iād like to pass on some of what I think makes you a better...
Should You Work Remote as a Designer?
Workers are seeking a better work-life balance and an option to work on a more flexible schedule rather than the standard 9ā5. Designers need to do a lot of collaboration with their co-workers, and communication is essential to get the results. So is it possible to work remotely?
10 things about remote facilitation we wish weād known sooner
For many, facilitating a meeting or a workshop may seem like a dreadful task. Facilitating a remote workshop ā even more so. Thereās something inherently challenging about not being in the same room with your team. You canāt really revert to small talk when the atmosphere gets...
Remote work is more than a job perkāfor people with chronic illness, itās life changing
Remote work is so much more than just a job perk for digital nomads. Going to an office daily isnāt a possibility for some people. Their minds are fine, but their bodies donāt cooperate. Remote work allows people who are chronically ill to have full time jobs & excel in them....
I Thought Wilderness Was A Place To Find Myself, Until I Spent Four Months Living In It
My first forest fire was a mushroom cloud blooming in the rearview mirror of a pickup truck. The driver, a ranger named Joe, was unfazed. The US Forest Service named it the Two Bulls fire, the inaugural spark of the summer of 2014, burning an area of Oregon forest about half the...
5-Hour Workdays? 4-Day Workweeks? Yes, Please
A German entrepreneur named Lasse Rheingans has become a subject of attention since The Wall Street Journal recently reported on a novel idea he has put in place at his 16-person technology start-up: a five-hour workday. Mr. Rheingans is not just reducing the time his employees...
The Managerās Schedule Is Holding Back Remote Work
For some, the idea of working remotely is equivalent to laying around, watching Netflix (while working, of course), and going to happy hour by 3 p.m. For others, they canāt imagine driving into the office, being constantly interrupted, and leaving at the end of the day without a...
I Just Took the Worldās First 20-Hour Flight. Hereās What It Did to Me
Iāve just endured the worldās newest longest flight, a 16,200 kilometer (10,100 mile), nonstop ultra-marathon from New York to Sydney. It took about 19 and a half hours, and was almost as demanding as that sounds. The record-breaking Qantas Airways Ltd. flight touched down early...
Digital Nomads: The Big Picture
A comprehensive look into the lifestyle where you travel and work your way around the globe. While browsing YouTube, I came across Conni Biesalski and Chris the Freelancer. They identified as Digital Nomads and their videos give deep insight into their daily lives. They cover a...
What has the road looked like for you during your rise to being a digital nomad?
I just wanted to thank everyone for commenting on their experiences. I'm looking forward to working hard and really needed some inspiration to keep going. It's been a challenge to develop my web dev skills and trying to get good enough to work remote. But I am bound and...
What a Compulsive Email Habit Does to Your Mind and Relationships
Every morning when I wake up, I roll over and check my email. Usually thereās nothing that canāt wait: some press releases about new studies, the occasional email from an editor, and plenty of spam. The checking is a compulsion Iāve adopted in the past several years ā one that...
Out of Office
Most employers want you to be in "in the office." They want you sitting at your desk, looking at your screen, tapping on your keyboard. You have to show up to meetings. People expect you to answer your email. But all that changes when you go to a conference. When you go to a...
Overcoming Jet Lag - After Years of Travel, My 5 Tips to Minimize Jet Lag
After years of long-term travel, I have yet to find a way to fully avoid feeling the effects of jet lag. Colleagues have said that they barely notice changes to their circadian rhythm, and long-term travel leads to more of the same. But my own body is different. As an insomniac...
Youāve landed your dream design job - now what?
Youāve landed that dream design job after all those interviews! This may even be your second or third offer. In either case, good on you for coming this far. The hard work paid off and the tables have turned. Before you accept the offer, do some homework to set yourself up for a...
The Freelance Life
Freelancing is a compelling opportunity for skilled professionals who are seeking independence and a greater connection to the value they can create for a business. It can be a lucrative, exciting, and exhausting pursuit. Weāve put together some insights to help you be a happier...
How Remote Work Impacts Employees With Disabilities
āJust getting off of a bus, I stepped out into a pothole because I wasn't able to navigate the whole walking thing well, and I ended up breaking my ankle.ā Matthew Ramir is a senior developer at Bounteous, a digital consultancy, who lives with cerebral palsy. This story is from a...
Open Offices Are a Capitalist Dead End
What was We thinking? Thatās the only question worth asking now about the clowncar start-up known as The We Company, the money-burning, co-working behemoth whose best-known brand is WeWork. Whatās a WeWork? What WeWork works on is work. The We Company takes out long-term leases...
The Most Important Question in a Job Interview, and How to Answer It
Youāve done everything you can to nail this interview. You trawled obscure parts of the companyās website and absorbed its social media feeds. You arrived 15 minutes early for the interview (the perfect amount of time, according to experts). In answer to the dreaded question...
Why you should have a side project
I often advocate people surrounding me to build their own side projects. I believe they can fulfill you in so many ways: for your career, your relationships, or your independence. Buffer, the company I currently work for, was itself a side project. Iāve built myself multiple side...
Three Hard Realities of Remote Working & Freelancing
I believed in the stories. You know what Iām talking about, and if youāre a freelancer, remote worker, or digital nomad, then you believed in it too. You too probably heard about the crazy lifestyle that seemed unbelievable. The life of working from home in your pajamas,...
How To Scale A Remote Team Without Losing Your Grip On The Reins
The remote work trend is growing by the day. In a recent survey from Buffer, 99% of respondents said they want to work remotely at some point in their careers, and 95% would recommend it to others. Whatās more, 91% of businesses reported that they intend to support it, an...
How to design a productive routine when you work remotely
The biggest difference between remote work and co-located offices is where work happens. According to our State of Remote Work survey for 2019, 84% of remote workers work from their home. That means that most of us work and live in the same place. This results in the biggest...
Ask HN: Cons of Being on a Remote/Distributed Team?
I know there are plenty of benefits of working remote such as flexibility. I would love to know about some of the issues you face and how you/your company works to address them.
Company Socializing Has Become Work
In the era of the virtual office, when even workers who are physically present often wall off their senses with oversized headphones and rely on Slack to chat with colleagues sitting in desks next to them, forced fun at the corporate level may represent the last, best hope for...
Young People Are Going to Save Us All From Office Life
When Ariel Coleman, 28, quit her last job, as a project manager in the corporate office of a bank, it wasnāt because her new employer offered her a raise, a different role or more seniority. āThe work-life balance is just much better,ā she said. At her new company, Omfgco, a...
Why I quit my day job researching happiness and started cycling to Bhutan
Iād had enough. It was October 2017, and Iād been wondering what the point of my job was for far too long, and while Iām sure there was something meaningful somewhere and to someone in what I was doing day-to-day, it had certainly lost meaning for me. For all the good that...
To Do Better Work, Change Your Environment
On the first day of his new job at Pittsburgh Municipal Hospital, Jonas Salk was introduced to his office: a basement laboratory, 40 by 40 feet, next to a morgue. According to reports, the researcher would put in 16-hour days ā even on weekends ā to work on a polio vaccine. But...