The inspiration for this post is Željko Filipin’s post on
the same topic. Nobody worked remotely during the pandemic, but everybody worked from
home. During the pandemic, office workers had to adjust to working out of
their homes. But remote work is different: you’re not working from home,
necessarily; you’re working while seperated from a lively, in-person
office. You might be in the same city as your co-workers or on the other
side of the world. When you’re physically disconnected from your colleagues, you have to
build new skills and adapt your tactics. This is advice I wish I’d had
seven years ago when I started working remotely. Office workers have the luxury of hallway conversations. In an
in-person office, getting feedback takes mere minutes. But in a remote
work position where you may be on the other side of the planet,
communication may take overnight. To be effective, you need to master asynchronous communication. This
means: I wish this section was as simple as saying: use UTC for everything,
but it’s never that easy. You should definitely give meeting times to
people in UTC, but you should tie meetings to a local timezone. The
alternative is that your meetings shift by an hour twice a year due to
daylight savings. This all gets more complicated the more countries you have
involved. While the United States ends daylight savings time on the first
Sunday in November, many countries in Europe end daylight savings on the
last Sunday in October, creating a daylight confusion
time. During daylight confusion time, meetings made by Americans may shift
by an hour for Europeans and vice-versa. I think the only thing to learn from this section is: you’ll mess it
up. Function often follows form. Give yourself a context for capturing
thoughts, and thoughts will occur that you don’t yet know you have – David Allen, Getting Things Done Working from the kitchen table is unsustainable for your mental
health and your back. You need a space that’s primary function is your
work, and that space needs to have tools that are a joy to use. Splurge a bit on tools you’ll use every day: your chair, keyboard,
monitor, headphones, webcam, and microphone. These purchases quickly
fade into the background of your life. Still, if you ever have to work
outside your home office again, you’ll realize how these tools enable
your best work. Buy a nice notebook, and don’t be afraid to absolutely destroy it. I
prefer the Leuchtturm 1917
notebooks, but I’m currently trying out the JetPen’s
Tomoe River 52 gsm Kanso Noto Notebook. Writing is thinking, and
you’ll find your thinking is sharper if you start with pen-and-paper
first. “The beginning of wisdom,” according to a West African proverb, “is
to get you a roof.” – Annie Dillard, The Writing Life The most important property of your permanent workspace is that it
has ample and appropriate light for video calls. Apart from that, I prefer having a door, but then again, I have a dog
and a cat, so your mileage may vary. The implicit agreement [of social media] is that in return for
receiving (for the most part, undeserved) attention from your friends
and followers, you’ll return the favor by lavishing (similarly
undeserved) attention on them. You “like” my status update and
I’ll “like” yours. – Cal Newport, Deep Work Nobody cares about most of your photos on social media. Sure, likes
and social updoots are gratifying, and documenting your life may be
useful in some sense, but that’s not what I mean when I call a photo
useful. Useful photos abstract ideas and subjects. Researchers, journalists,
and encyclopedia authors push the boundaries of our understanding with
useful pictures. If this all sounds grandiose — it is, but it’s within
reach of the dedicated amateur. This is a short guide to getting started taking useful pictures. A great architect’s creative power […] lies in his capacity to
observe correctly and deeply. – Christopher Alexander, A Timeless Way of Building A useful photograph is technically sound; focuses on a
single, important subject; and makes its subject
obvious. Most people will never create a useful picture because they
don’t have the know-how. It’s easy to make a useful picture when you focus on your subject.
Focus means picking a single subject and highlighting it.
Social media pictures aren’t useful because the subject is always
both: you and your subject. You ate
dal makhani vs. this is dal makhani. This subtle shift changes
a thousand little technical choices. A useful picture is the result of good technical choices (this is a
summary of the Wikimedia
Commons image guidelines): First off, a useful camera is a camera, not a phone.
Buy a camera. When a picture matters and people have a choice, they
rarely choose to use a phone instead of a camera: presidential
portraits, for example, are never shot using an iPhone. Featured Pictures are the best photos on Wikimedia Commons. At the
time of this writing, only 0.019% of the almost eight million pictures
on the site were “Featured Pictures”—the best of the best. I looked at
more than 12,000 of these pictures (you can find my database
of EXIF data on GitLab) you know how many were iPhoneography? Three.
These three: What do those three pictures have in common? Their subject is
human-scaled; it fills the frame, is well illuminated, and is close to
them. If you’re dealing with subjects that don’t match those criteria,
your phone picture probably won’t be useful. For example, try to take a picture of any of the following on your
smartphone (without any extra equipment): The characteristics of a good camera: You don’t need a top-of-the-line camera to take a useful picture. The
data
I collected about Featured Pictures confirms this. You can find a
camera matching these criteria for about $100, used. The most popular
Nikon in the data (the d5200) is available on eBay for about $150, and
its predecessor, the d5100, is even more affordable. A Canon 500d (also
popular in the data) is less than $100, lens included. These cameras are
a good starting point for beginners. In the book Atomic Habits, author James Clear tells the
story of photography teacher Jerry Uelsmann’s experiment with his class
at the University of Florida: Everyone on the left side of the classroom, he explained, would be in
the “quantity” group. They would be graded solely on the amount of work
they produced. […] Meanwhile, everyone on the right side of the room
would be in the “quality” group. They would be graded only on the
excellence of their work. […] At the end of the term, he was surprised
to find that all the best photos were produced by the quantity
group. – James Clear, Atomic Habits The point of the story is deliberate practice produces results. You
might think this means if you take more photos, you’ll
take better photos. But the students in the class
weren’t only taking pictures; they submitted these pictures and got
feedback on them. When I first started photography, I spent a lot of time focusing on
quantity (and I still do, according to
I’ve received honest feedback whenever I nominate my pictures for
either Quality
Image or Featured
Picture on Wikimedia Commons. The process is very impartial (and
often demoralizing), but when persnickety strangers on one of the
largest photo websites in the world agree your image is useful: it
probably is.
Asynchronous communication
Timezones suck
Space and Nice tools
What is a useful picture?
How to buy a useful camera
Edit your photos
exiftool -ShutterCount, I took 3,100 pictures between Nov
2020 and Nov 2021). But you should practice creating final, edited
images to the best of your ability, too. Still, you’ll need honest
feedback to improve.More resources
Posted
Posted
