With visa complications and travel challenges, this is the very first time that my team – whom I’ve been working with for the last year – have ever all been in the same country, all at the same time.
You can do a lot in a distributed work environment. But sometimes you just have to come together… in celebration of your achievements, in anticipation of what you’ll do next, and in aid of doing those kinds of work that really benefit from a close, communal, same-timezone environment.
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Last month my pest of a dog destroyed my slippers, and it was more-disruptive to my life than I would have anticipated.
Sure, they were just a pair of slippers1, but they’d become part of my routine, and their absence had an impact.
Routines are important, and that’s especially true when you work from home. After I first moved to Oxford and started doing entirely remote work for the first time, I found the transition challenging2. To feel more “normal”, I introduced an artificial “commute” into my day: going out of my front door and walking around the block in the morning, and then doing the same thing in reverse in the evening.
It turns out that in the 2020s my slippers had come to serve a similar purpose – “bookending” my day – as my artificial commute had over a decade earlier. I’d slip them on when I was at my desk and working, and slide them off when my workday was done. With my “work” desk being literally the same space as my “not work” desk, the slippers were a psychological reminder of which “mode” I was in. People talk about putting on “hats” as a metaphor for different roles and personas they hold, but for me… the distinction was literal footwear.
And so after a furry little monster (who for various reasons hadn’t had her customary walk yet that day and was probably feeling a little frustrated) destroyed my slippers… it actually tripped me up3. I’d be doing something work-related and my feet would go wandering, of their own accord, to try to find their comfortable slip-ons, and when they failed, my brain would be briefly tricked into glancing down to look for them, momentarily breaking my flow. Or I’d be distracted by something non-work-related and fail to get back into the zone without the warm, toe-hugging reminder of what I should be doing.
It wasn’t a huge impact. But it wasn’t nothing either.
So I got myself a new pair of slippers. They’re a different design, and I’m not so keen on the lack of an enclosed heel, but they solved the productivity and focus problem I was facing. It’s strange how such a little thing can have such a big impact.
Oh! And d’ya know what? This is my hundredth blog post of the year so far! Coming on only the 73rd day of the year, this is my fastest run at #100DaysToOffload yet (my previous best was last year, when I managed the same on 22 April). 73 is exactly a fifth of 365, so… I guess I’m on track for a mammoth 500 posts this year? Which would be my second-busiest blogging year ever, after 2018. Let’s see how I get on…4
1 They were actually quite a nice pair of slippers. JTA got them for me as a gift a few years back, and they lived either on my feet or under my desk ever since.
2 I was working remotely for a company where everybody else was working in-person. That kind of hybrid setup is a lot harder to do “right”, as many companies in this post-Covid-lockdowns age have discovered, and it’s understandable that I found it somewhat isolating. I’m glad to say that the experience of working for my current employer – who are entirely distributed – is much more-supportive.
3 Figuratively, not literally. Although I would probably have literally tripped over had I tried to wear the tattered remains of my shredded slippers!
4 Back when I did the Blog Questions Challenge I looked at my trajectory and estimated I wouldn’t hit a hundred this year until a week later than now, so maybe I’m… accelerating?
I decided to take my meeting with my coach today in our house’s new library, which my metamour JTA has recently been working hard on decorating, constructing, and filling with books. The room’s not quite finished, but it made for a brilliant space for a bit of quiet reflection and self-growth work.
(Incidentally: I might be treating “lives in a house with a library” as a measure of personal success. Like: this is what winning at life looks like, right? Because whatever else goes wrong, at least you can go hide in the library!)
This checkin to GC4MHJ0 Octo (MK Artwalks) reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.
Today’s the last of three consecutive days that I’ve spent working in Milton Keynes. On each day I’ve taken a short walk while I’ve eaten my lunch to find a nearby geocache. This was today’s.
After admiring the sculpture I snapped a selfie while I waited for my GPS signal to settle. The coordinates and the hint made the location seem obvious, yet somehow I did three laps of the hiding place before I reached down to what by all accounts was, indeed, an obvious hiding place!
Muggles weren’t too multitudinous, so I soon had the cache hidden again back in its snug little spot. TFTC!
This checkin to GC2GR3Z The Brass Bands of MK - Secklow Brass reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.
I’ve been working in Milton Keynes the tail end of this week while my kids attend a ski camp at the X-scape centre. While eating my lunch today I came out for a walk to find this geocache.
Approaching from the direction of the car park was definitely the right route and I was soon standing at GZ alongside a likely host. I had to search for some time, though, before I found this surprisingly we’ll-concealed cache.
(I was hindered perhaps by my own eagerness to check the hint, which left me searching several feet lower down than the container eventually turned out to be!)
Right, back to work for me! TFTC.
This checkin to GC4NX9Y Light Pyramid (MK Artwalks) reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.
Found the host easily, but had to wait for a gap in thir lunchtime dog walkers to be able to mount a good search. After checking in a few obvious places I picked something up and there was the cache!
Took a walk up to the Light Pyramid where I snapped the attached photo of me pointing towards the X-Scape centre, where I’ve been working today (my kids have ski lessons, so I’ve been sitting in the cafe with my laptop with the exception of this, my lunch break!).
On which note, I’d better go find myself a sandwich! Thanks for bringing me up here, and TFTC.
Step/ski into my office! Today I’m working from a cafe overlooking an indoor ski slope where my kids are having lessons!
Power’s out yet again at my house (though not for the last reason nor because of our weird wiring: this time it’s for tree trimming), so here I am in my favourite coworking-friendly local cafe with The Signal And The Noise (which I’ve talked about before) in my ears and a whole lot of sprint planning at my fingertips.
This checkin to GC20GBC Neptune - The Mystic reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.
Super quick find on lunch break during a day coworking in Cheltenham. Love the hiding spot which seems pretty much made for a cache of this shape and size! TFTC!
This checkin to GC9Q4JG Timms Estate reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.
I’ve been working in Banbury this morning while my car was being serviced at the nearby garage. Once I got the call to say it had been done and I could come and collect it I walked back past this cache. Instant find. TFTC!
(This is yet another post about Automattic. Seee more posts about my experience of working at Automattic.)
Off the back of my recent post about privileges I enjoy as a result of my location and first language, even at my highly-multinational employer, and inspired by my colleague Atanas‘ data-mining into where Automatticians are located, I decided to do another treemap, this time about which countries Automatticians call home:
To get a better picture of that, let’s plot a couple of cartograms. This animation cycles between showing countries at (a) their actual (landmass) size and (b) approximately proportional to the number of Automatticians based in each country:
Another way to consider the data would be be comparing (a) the population of each country to (b) the number of Automatticians there. Let’s try that:
There’s definitely something to learn from these maps about the cultural impact of our employee diversity, but I can’t say more about that right now… primarily because I’m not smart enough, but also at least in part because I’ve watched the map animations for too long and made myself seasick.
A few quick notes on methodology, for the nerds out there who’ll want to argue with me:
I’ve been thinking recently about three kinds of geographic privilege I enjoy in my work at Automattic. (See more posts about my experience of working at Automattic.)
Take a look at the map below. I’m the pink pin here in Oxfordshire. The green pins are my immediate team – the people I work with on a day-to-day basis – and the blue pins are people outside of my immediate team but in its parent team (Automattic’s org chart is a bit like a fractal).
Thinking about timezones, there are two big benefits to being where I am:
(Of course, this privilege is in itself a side-effect of living close to the meridian, whose arbitrary location owes a lot to British naval and political clout in the 19th century: had France and Latin American countries gotten their way the prime median would have probably cut through the Atlantic or Pacific oceans.)
English is Automattic’s first language (followed perhaps by PHP and Javascript!), not one of the 120 other languages spoken by Automatticians. That’s somewhat a consequence of the first language of its founders and the language in which the keywords of most programming languages occur.
It’s also a side-effect of how widely English is spoken, which in comes from (a) British colonialism and (b) the USA using Hollywood etc. to try to score a cultural victory.
I’ve long been a fan of the concept of an international axillary language but I appreciate that’s an idealistic dream whose war has probably already been lost.
For now, then, I benefit from being able to think, speak, and write in my first language all day, every day, and not have the experience of e.g. my two Indonesian colleagues who routinely speak English to one another rather than their shared tongue, just for the benefit of the rest of us in the room!
Despite the efforts of my government these last few years to isolate us from the world stage, a British passport holds an incredible amount of power, ranking fifth or sixth in the world depending on whose passport index you follow. Compared to many of my colleagues, I can enjoy visa-free and/or low-effort travel to a wider diversity of destinations.
Normally I might show you a map here, but everything’s a bit screwed by COVID-19, which still bars me from travelling to many places around the globe, but as restrictions start to lift my team have begun talking about our next in-person meetup, something we haven’t done since I first started when I met up with my colleagues in Cape Town and got assaulted by a penguin.
But even looking back to that trip, I recall the difficulties faced by colleagues who e.g. had to travel to a different country in order tom find an embassy just to apply for the visa they’d eventually need to travel to the meetup destination. If you’re not a holder of a privileged passport, international travel can be a lot harder, and I’ve definitely taken that for granted in the past.
I’m going to try to be more conscious of these privileges in my industry.
A love a good Jackbox Game. There’s nothing quite like sitting around the living room playing Drawful, Champ’d Up, Job Job, Trivia Murder Party, or Patently Stupid. But nowadays getting together in the same place isn’t as easy as it used to be, and as often as not I find my Jackbox gaming with friends or coworkers takes place over Zoom, Around, Google Meet or Discord.
There’s lots of guides to doing this – even an official one! – but they all miss a few pro tips that I think can turn a good party into a great party. Get all of this set up before your guests are due to arrive to make yourself look like a super-prepared digital party master.
Using one computer for your video call and a second one to host the game (in addition to the device you’re using to play the games, which could be your phone) is really helpful for several reasons:
Connect some headphones to the computer that’s running the game (or set up a virtual audio output device if you’re feeling more technical). This means you can still have the game play sounds and transmit them over Zoom, but you’ll only hear the sounds that come through the screen share, not the sounds that come through the second computer too.
That’s helpful, because (a) it means you don’t get feedback or have to put up with an echo at your end, and (b) it means you’ll be hearing the game exactly the same as your guests hear it, allowing you to easily tweak the volume to a level that allows for conversation over it.
Jackbox games were designed first and foremost for sofa gaming, and playing with friends over the Internet benefits from a couple of changes to the default settings.
Sometimes the settings can be found in the main menu of a party pack, and sometimes they’re buried in the game itself, so do your research and know your way around before your party starts.
Turn the volume down, especially the volume of the music, so you can have a conversation over the game. I’d also recommend disabling Full-screen Mode: this reduces the resolution of the game, meaning there’s less data for your video-conferencing software to stream, and makes it easier to set up screen sharing without switching back and forth between your applications (see below).
Turning on the Motion Sensitivity or Reduce Background Animations option if your game has it means there’ll be less movement in the background of the game. This can really help with the
video compression used in videoconferencing software, meaning players on lower-speed connections are less-likely to experience lag or “blockiness” in busy scenes.
It’s worth considering turning Subtitles on so that guests can work out what word they missed (which for the trivia games can be a big deal). Depending on your group, Extended Timers is worth considering too: the lag introduced by videoconferencing can frustrate players who submit answers at the last second only to discover that – after transmission delays – they missed the window! Extended Timers don’t solve that, but they do mean that such players are less-likely to end up waiting to the last second in the first place.
Finally: unless the vast majority or all of your guests are in the USA, you might like to flip the Filter US-Centric Content
switch so that you don’t get a bunch of people scratching their heads over a cultural reference that they just don’t get.
By the way, you can use your cursor keys and enter to operate Jackbox games menus, which is usually easier than fiddling with a mouse.
Whatever videoconferencing platform you’re using, the settings for screen sharing are usually broadly similar. I suggest:
Don’t forget to shut down any software that might “pop up” notifications: chat applications, your email client, etc.: the last thing you want is somebody to send you a naughty picture over WhatsApp and the desktop client to show it to everybody else in your party!
How did it take me years of working-from-home before I thought to install one of these in my desk? Brilliant.
My employer, Automattic, has a creed. Right now it reads:
I will never stop learning. I won’t just work on things that are assigned to me. I know there’s no such thing as a status quo. I will build our business sustainably through passionate and loyal customers. I will never pass up an opportunity to help out a colleague, and I’ll remember the days before I knew everything. I am more motivated by impact than money, and I know that Open Source is one of the most powerful ideas of our generation. I will communicate as much as possible, because it’s the oxygen of a distributed company. I am in a marathon, not a sprint, and no matter how far away the goal is, the only way to get there is by putting one foot in front of another every day. Given time, there is no problem that’s insurmountable.
Lots of companies have something like this, even if it falls short of a “creed”. It could be a “vision”, or a set of “values”, or something in that line.
Of course, sometimes that just means they’ve strung three clichéd words together because they think it looks good under their company logo, and they might as well have picked any equally-meaningless words.
But while most companies (and their staff) might pay lip service to their beliefs, Automattic’s one of few that seems to actually live it. And not in an awkward, shoehorned-in way: people here actually believe this stuff.
By way of example:
We’ve got a bot that, among other things, pairs up people from across the company for virtual “watercooler chat”/”coffee dates”/etc. It’s cool: I pair-up with random colleagues in my division, or the whole company, or fellow queermatticians… and collectively these provide me a half-hour hangout about once a week. It’s a great way to experience the diversity of culture, background and interests of your colleagues, as well as being a useful way to foster idea-sharing and “watercooler effect” serendipity.
For the last six months or so, I’ve been bringing a particular question to almost every random-chat I’ve been paired into:
I volunteer my own answer first. It’s varied over time. Often I’m most-attached to “I will never stop learning.” Other times I connect best to “I will communicate as much as possible…” or “I am in a marathon, not a sprint…”. Lately I’ve felt a particular engagement with “I will never pass up the opportunity to help a colleague…”.
It varies for other people too. But every single person I’ve asked this question has been able to answer it. And they’ve been able to answer it confidently and with justifications for or examples of their choice.
Have you ever worked anywhere before where seemingly all your coworkers profess a genuine belief in the corporate creed? Like, enough that some of them get it tattooed onto their bodies. Unless you’ve been brainwashed by a cult, the answer is probably no.
For some folks, of course, the creed is descriptive rather than prescriptive. Regarding its initial creation, Matt says that “as a hack to introduce new folks to our culture, we put a beta Automattic Creed, basically a statement of things important to us, written in the first person.”
But this alone isn’t an explanation, because back then there were only around a hundred people in the company: nowadays there are over 1,500. So how can the creed continue to be such a pervasive influence? Or to put it another way: why are Automatticians… like that?
I’ve been here 1⅔ years and don’t know the answer yet. But I’ll tell you this: it’s inspiring to be part of a team that really seem to believe in what they do.
Incidentally: if the creed speaks to you too, you might like to look at some of the many open positions! I promise we’re not actually a cult.
Plus we’ve been doing “work anywhere” for longer than almost anybody else and we’re really, really good at it.
If you enjoyed this, you might also like other blog posts about my time with Automattic: the recruitment process, accepting an offer, my induction, and the experience of lockdown in a distributed company, among others.
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