S01E06 - Is Remote Work Burning You Out? Guest: Marissa Goldberg

Hello, everyone. Welcome to season one, episode six of Engineering advice you didn't ask for. Today is a special episode. We have Marissa Goldberg with us, who's our guest host. And the topic for today is remote work burning you out. So especially since the start of the pandemic, we've had a lot of people work remotely. More and more companies are going to do hybrid work now, so we wanted to use this opportunity to discuss that. But before that, let's just introduce Marissa. So Marissa is an innovator with a passion for efficiency, design, and ingenuity. This comes straight from her side. She's founded Remote work prep in 2018. This was way before the pandemic started, so she was ahead of the curve and she helps companies create an awesome remote work experience. So we'll be picking on her brains for a lot of advice today and, and getting her to share all of her experiences. Marissa, do you want to share a little bit about yourself and then we can get started?

Sure. Yes. Hi, everyone. Yeah, so I'm Marissa Goldberg. I'm the founder of Remote Work Prep. I've actually been in tech since I was 12. I grew up and spent five years competing in international robotics competitions. So I've always been in tech. From there, I went into software engineering for startups and. And I fell into remote work because I was in a really toxic in person tech job. The kind that just made me sick every morning. I was just dreading going in. I considered quitting tech entirely and that's when I was like, I'll take one more job and if it's still the same, then I'll quit. That job happened to be remote. It wasn't intentional at all, but I immediately fell in love with it because I had, I could spend time with the people that I wanted to spend time with. Instead of spending all day with toxic people around me. I could optimize my environment to make it perfect for how I work best. There was just so many different elements that I fell in love with. But I went remote in 2015 and at the time, there wasn't a lot of resources out there. So even though I knew there's so much potential here, I had to immediately start experimenting and figuring out this works, this doesn't. And since there weren't resources out there, I was just doing it all myself. Then some people started coming to me. They're like, hey, I see you, like run your engineering teams differently than most and that it's working and that your team is super productive. Like, how are you doing this? So in 2018, I started Remot Work prep. It was supposed to be just like a side business, something I did for fun because I was like, okay, these people are asking me to consult with them. I might as well protect the personal assets and start this little side business. And then it just exploded in 2020. It came out of nowhere. Yeah. So I started sharing online, which was very uncomfortable for me in the beginning because I am a huge introvert. I didn't even use any social media prior to starting to share in 2020. So I started sharing on Twitter because I didn't know anyone on Twitter and I thought if I fail miserably, no one. Now I've got close to 10,000 followers there, so not so much anymore. But yeah, since then I've built a course on avoiding burnout. I've built a course for effective remote leadership. We offer fractional head of remote services. So this means we go into multiple companies and we set them up with an async first people first environment. And yeah, I just, I left my job, my full time job as head of product and operations for a tech company last summer. And yeah, I love what I do. It's great.

That's incredible. That's incredible. Thanks for sharing. Wow, 10,000 followers and doing this full time. So clearly you found your, your calling, your passion. Love it. So let's just set the stage for burnout, especially with all the emphasis on mental health right now. So burnout is textually defined as an emotional, physical or mental exhaustion caused by excessive or prolonged stress. Right. You can feel overwhelmed, you can feel emotionally drained out, you might not be able to get into your flow state, you might have your relationships suffer as a result. And there's a lot of downside to it. Right. So first part is, is realizing when you are getting burned out. And part two is figuring out what your stressors are and what is causing you to burn out. I personally think it's especially harder now that people are working remotely because it's harder to set boundaries, it's harder to know when to stop. And there is no, especially for me personally. My demarcation was the drive to work, that is start of work. My drive back home is my end of work. So it helped me define my work day and my home day. Now those boundaries are quite blurred. So I would definitely like to get some opinions on what your experiences are fake. Go ahead.

Oh, I'm glad you talked about demarcations because this is perfect. So I've worked remotely for a very long time and I was fine for a Very long time for me when my burnout happened. And this is the sort of thing that you can look back in retrospect and be like, oh, that's what that was. It's a lot harder in the moment to know exactly where in the troughs and peaks you are. For me, what it eventually meant was that I stopped caring about my work. But I didn't want to disappoint my work friends who I had been working with for so long. And there was no demarcation for me to leave work and, and just be done. So I was never an underperformer. Instead, what I did was I worked all the time. And instead, when you work remotely, there's no separation, there's. And it's especially difficult to get away. So instead of underperforming, I just found despair. And I had poor health and poor relationships with my wife and my kids and my dog. And I would just recall the time.

Yeah, that's not uncommon at all. So a lot of companies when they first go remote, they're so worried about people not working, they think, oh, they're gonna like slack now. And what I've seen, and I've gone into dozens of companies at this point going remote, is that 99% of the time they're going to overwork and then 1% of the time they're going to underwork. But what happens is companies in place policies that address the under work and that makes the overwork even worse. Yeah, there's a couple of parts here. So one, when it comes to burnout from remote work, it's typically because we're applying the same way of work that we did in the office to remote work. When that doesn't work, it's just a totally different way of doing things. So the first thing is to recognize the differences between remote work and in office work, and then to target the way you work to those differences. And then on a personal level, it's all about creating boundaries. So in the office, one of the things is that there's built in constraints. So you started your workday probably at 9am you ended your workday probably at 5pm There was this commute in place. You had peer pressure there because everybody in the office, so that would keep you from coming in at noon because you wouldn't want to be seen as a slacker. Then there's things like, oh, you took a break to go grab a coffee and you chatted with a coworker then. And then when you're at home, you're like, oh, I Have to be available all the time. I have to like show that I'm present, show that I'm doing work. So my company doesn't think that I'm under working. So the very first thing in place is like resetting all expectations, making sure the company is setting reasonable, healthy expectations that target the overwork instead of the under work. And then on a personal level, building your own constraints because while in the office, it's great that they had them built for you, but a one size fits all approach just doesn't work for a majority of people. So this is your opportunity of creating them for yourself.

So do you think it's about trust? Is it building that trust from your peers and your boss to say, okay, if you don't see me online on Slack and teams all the time, it doesn't mean that I'm, I'm not working. I could be in doing deep work. I just don't want to be bothered with communication or I'm, it's gorgeous outside and I want to stretch. And that's completely fair. It is there. There is a lot of guilt around being able to get up and go and look after yourself or say, okay, I need this for me. I know work is important, but it can wait for 15 minutes. This email can wait. And I think part of the challenge is because they can see you always want to be available. You, you don't want to be the bottleneck, you don't want to be the one holding up the train. Do you think we tend to over rotate towards the working more in remote environment?

Yeah. So what I always say is that starts at the company level and at the manager level. So at the company level, trust should start from day one. This is not something you build over time. You hired that person. So during your hiring process, that should be built in that you are hiring a person that you deem trustworthy. So from day one, there should be trust there. And then two, a basic foundation to effective remote work is setting expectations. And I go into a company and I talk to the managers and they're like, oh, we have those. And then I'll ask them like, what are the priorities? And then I'll individually ask like their team members and I'll get like wildly different responses on what the priorities are and what the policy is around responsiveness. Because a lot of companies that went remote still don't have a responsiveness policy, which is crazy. You need to have that in place in order to say, hey, you don't need to respond to this message right away. So that people aren't constantly just getting interrupted all day, especially developers. They need that time to like deep work and get their job done. So when I was a engineering manager, one of the things that I put in place is I don't care what time you work. You can work what, whatever hours you want. We typically only had one to two meetings that were 30 minutes each per week so they wouldn't have to spend all their time in meetings. And then on top of that, they had a list of clearly defined expectations that I gave to them. And once they're done with that, whether that took them 10 hours or 30 hours, they were done with their work. They didn't have to just keep working and doing busy work just because they wanted to hit some hours expectation. It's no like when it comes to knowledge work, it's very different from manual work and I think we rely too much on time.

Awesome. I was just going to ask the others on what that might look like if this was implemented for your teams, what challenges would you face? So, Thiago, Louis, Vic, if you were to take this advice back and try to implement this, okay, starting tomorrow morning, this is how we are going to do work, top down. And this is our responsiveness policy, whatever that is. A few hours, 24 hours, half an hour, you set that and then you define the scope of work. But sometimes these are fuzzy lines. Right. It's very hard to figure out what the next firefighting task might be, what the next production incident might be. How do you set clear expectations for the team knowing that there is randomness involved there where you can predict all work? Go ahead, Vic.

It's a very good point. And so the thing is, at my team, we're spread across all the way from Seattle to it could be Spain. And we work with other teams and within my own team is spread between me on the east coast and then we have people in Tennessee and then we have people in California and Seattle. So we already don't really have an expectation of immediacy from our team. We are also a newer team that we're all hired in the middle of the pandemic. And so we're all remote. None of us have ever met each other. And so I think our expectations were just different from the people that have transitioned from working in person to otherwise. So, you know, I have the three hours in the morning where my west coast coworkers are not awake yet. And I just know that if I send them something that they're just not going to respond yet. And my expectation of that from them is also considerably lower. We used to use scheduled messages on Slack all the time. Scheduled messages schedule emails. The thing is, scheduled messages are not really a good thing because you're trying to get other people to work at a time that you think is right for them. And if someone wants to work until 2 in the morning but wake up at noon, who am I to say that's not the right way for them to work? And when they want to work, how they want to work is entirely up to them, right? So we just don't bother with scheduled messages anymore. You set your own working hours in your Slack and you respond to your messages whenever you want to. The only exception to this rule is the person that's on call. And we only have one person on call. And that's because when you're on call, your expectations are just different. You're going to be responding to production incidents immediately and not take 3 hours to respond to them. But other than that it truly is a. Whenever you're working. Louie, what's up?

Yeah, just to tack onto that, I just wanted to add that basically I think that was the real genius behind some of the Silicon Valley engineering driven companies. People with hoodies showed up late when I worked at the banks they had market hours are open at a certain time and you got to get there before they do. And, and so there's all these different constraints that are not conducive to good engineering work. You're working on someone else's schedule. And so basically I think Google and Facebook mopped up the market with the best engineers precisely because you could work from 5pm to 10pm if you want to. They don't. As long as you're doing your work. I'm being extreme on purpose. I'm sure people aren't working till 10pm at Google, but my point is you could work weird hours. You could leave at 3pm if you want to, like as long as. And there's a lot of stories of people, you know, leaving to be traffic and people used to make fun of them but. But that's the real genius, right, is that they're, they're stealing all this top talent that's very smart. And I think the people that are struggling the most right now during this are not necessarily. I mean, I mean, I guess the big tech is too, but there's a lot of mid tier companies and a lot of companies that are just used to this physical. And so I'd be curious to know from Marissa or Thiago or whoever, basically you think certain companies are struggling more than others in this environment?

Absolutely. I think that all companies actually do struggle in the beginning, because, like I said, they just try to replicate the office environment. And the other portion of it is what you were saying with the FAANG companies. They have this issue where a lot of their workers end up wrapping their entire world around their work because those FAANG companies offered things like lunches and massages, and everything was on site. So they would never leave the company on site. They wouldn't build a world outside of it. And that's what I. I've coached many of these people who come to me, and they're like, I don't even know what to do now, because my identity was so wrapped up in this job, and I have nothing outside of it, and now I'm working from home. And when you are working remotely, a big part of it is that instead of life revolving around work revolves around life in a healthy, remote environment. So you have to, like, realize that, oh, I'm more than just my work now. I'm more than just my company now. How do I make friends? How do I, you know, build hobbies? Again, there's so much to it. So, yes, there's a struggle on a company level because they're trying to replicate the office environment, and then there's a struggle on the personal level on relearning how to live.

That's amazing, Marisa. That's really advanced. I felt that I. I was running things well, remotely. And you're taking that to another level. I like, okay, I never done something as advanced as what you're describing here. But I want to go back to one point that's about burnout, and then I will ask you a question about being effective as a leader on a remote environment. But so regarding burnout, one thing that you said that really stuck with me was that you considered leaving tech forever because you had a traumatic experience. And that actually was what happened to me last year, almost maybe six months ago, I was at that place, was like, okay, tax. Not for me. I cannot stand working as an engineer manager. I cannot see projects, deadlines after deadlines. And then I. I found a Twitter from Peter Vukovic. I think most of us know him on Twitter. And he. He put this really nice 3, 3, 3 axis diagram where he. He said, like, the causes of burnout in engineering chains. What I agree with. And they want to add another dimension. He said, okay, first dimensions, inefficient processes. Second dimension is high workload. Third is unclear goals. And when you have an environment, you have those three of those and you are in the middle, right? Not good process, high workload and really unclear goals, you're going to burn out. And I think that is the fourth dimension is what you said. When you're working with people that are really toxic to you, I think toxic people is. It might not be for others, but if that being for you, that is another kind of twist into that diagram that really makes things like grow exponentially at risk of you burning out. But I just want to pig back and say that because I felt that's really something that folks need to pay attention to. Those four things. If you are with signs of burnout, look at those four things. If you have that better leave before you get to that place where you consider abandoning your career. But my question is to something that you said before, that was about when you transition to be a remote engineering manager, when that was not as common, right? 2018 or even before that, you said that your peers would look at you and say, oh, how are you doing, Maurice? How are you making your team so productive? What were you doing there? What are the things that you're doing that the other engineer managers were not?

So many things. I don't think I could talk about all of them on here, but. So let's see. So to start with, I put a heavy emphasis on giving them their deep work time back. So I know a lot of engineering managers who thought that they needed to have meetings in place in order to keep track of progress, in order to put some of that peer pressure onto their team. I just, from the very beginning, always trusted my team and gave them the expectations. It was very clear I would know immediately, like whether those expectations weren't being met. So I didn't need to have meetings in place just to see they're working or just to hear about progress. So one of the very first things I put in place was if the target we were going after in a meeting wasn't towards speed and wasn't towards relationship building, it was going to be done async. And that meant that I went from spending 80% of my week in meetings to 5% of my week in meetings by the end. So it drastically cut meetings down just because the primary target wasn't spent speed. So this would be like, oh, there's a bug that's taking everything down. Like, we obviously need to get on a call immediately to work things out. Instead of waiting for someone to type back and forth or oh, hey, I need to do this one on one to get an idea of like where this person's at to talk them through any struggles they're having. Like that's relationship building. So those two things I would keep synchronous. But everything else went Async first and that was a huge thing for me because I'm an introvert. I burn out from having tons of meetings. I didn't want to have tons of meetings. Most of my team members were obviously also introverts. As engineers they just tend to be and they just wanted their deep work hours back. So that was one of the very first things. I also implemented a 24 hour responsiveness policy. If it was through any regular channels, they could do 24 hours of their time. It ended up working out that, oh, if I message something at 4pm Friday for me, by the end of Monday for them, that's when they would respond by. There was a specific channel where you would have to respond right away. But by the end of it, I think it had been like two years since I'd even used that channel. Because once you get into this Async first mindset, instead of fighting fires all the time like I would in person, instead it was just, oh, catching a spark before it turns into a fire, shutting that down and then moving on from there. So that would, I would say that was probably the number one thing.

That's awesome. That's advice that we can definitely take and implement back within our teams. So with one of our teams we have done no meetings Tuesdays and no meetings Thursdays to allow for that deep work. In your experience, do you know if it's better to have chunks of deep work allocated through the week or say, okay, let's cram all of our meetings on Wednesday so that we can have more time for deep work on that's a Tuesday and Thursday.

So what I do is I schedule the deep work first before the meetings. And so even right now, as I run my own company, I only take meetings on Wednesdays and Fridays and then I have a meeting framework in terms of what kind of meetings I will accept. And I advise everyone to have their own meeting framework. This can be different person to person coming to company. So there's nothing that I can say that is, this is the one way to do things. It should definitely be like Monday, Wednesday through Friday, all your deep work. No, you need to create a meeting framework that's going to work for you and your team. So meeting frameworks would include like which days of the week you will accept meetings. It will include like the time frame, it would be in. So which part of the day? Also how many meetings? Because if you only have one day for meetings and you have 12 hours of them, it's not totally going to work out. So I typically limit it to three, three meetings per day. And then on top of that, there's like a time limit for that. So if three like two hour meetings, that's not going to work. But three, like 30 minute meetings are going to be totally fine. So I also limit it there as well. And then I also limit the type of meeting it will be. So I don't always accept video call meetings. By default I'm off video because I don't think it brings a lot to the experience and I think that it causes you to burn out faster because you're staring at yourself, you're staring at other people, you're trying to fix your environment. And it goes back to one of the things I talk about too in that there shouldn't be just one place to work which we can get into later. But yeah, like this Vic washing his hair, that didn't necessarily need to happen and maybe he could have used that time better for something else if he didn't have to be on video. So I don't do video by default. There's a lot of things into it, including working with international team members where video actually takes away from their experience because they don't have the Internet bandwidth to be able to support it. So instead of being able to hear everything, they have their video on and everybody has their video on, which is taking more bandwidth and then the video is stunted instead of everybody turning off their video and being able to hear everything that's being said. So there's a lot to it.

But yeah, so that's a topic of hot debate in a number of companies. Right. I think senior management usually prefers that all employees have their videos on at all times so they can see and gauge and sense engagement. Most individual contributors don't want it so that they have a chance to get into work. Even if they're multitasking, then they're not being judged. And it's very hard to find a balance or a happy place to keep all parties happy. And there's research showing both ways. I just want to get a feel for what you guys have experienced. Thiago.

Yes. So I was actually gonna make a comment on what you said, Marissa. Amazing. The meetings framework. Beautiful. And I had never thought about, I'd say video from that perspective of restricting you from working from different places because you're going to be judged by people that see you. Okay, what's Marissa doing outside? Is a super valid point. I usually the one pushing for folks to be on video, especially if it is a conference where they're multiple folks and is maybe the only meeting that we will have to see each other. But I definitely understand. So personally as an engineering manager director, I see a lot more engagement in meetings when folks are on video, especially if it is like a team wide meeting. But I fully agree that should not be every single meeting. So he's like, where do you find the balance?

So I'm going to push back on that a little bit. So I think. So you just said that you see more engagement. Is it actually more engagement though? So I want you to think about it next time you're in there. So some things, and I put a related tweet in the third, I have a whole thread on this. But you have people who have kids at home who when they turn on the video they might appear more engaged because they're like acting out for the camera, but they're actually like trying to just keep their kids off the camera and they're like more distracted because the camera's on and they have to pay attention to the visual rather than the actual information that's coming across. So the way that I did it, and this isn't the only way to do it, so experiment with your own way. But the way that I did it is I do videos off by default. And then if it's a relationship building call, I will most likely turn on my video. But I do not put any expectations on anyone else to put on their video too because I believe they will turn it on if they believe it's good for them and they'll increase their engagement or they'll get more out of the call. They know it. They're adults that they can, you know, choose for themselves. But they might know, hey, I don't have the bandwidth right now to turn on my video or hey, I've got a lot going on in the background and I'll be able to pay more attention if my video's off. And I'm not worried about what people are seeing. So that's my take on it.

I totally agree with that. At my previous company we were a video on culture. We even though we worked remotely, videos are always on. And you almost get a little judgy when people turn their video off. Like, why is this person on an all team call with the video off? And the funny thing is I'm in a slack room with a bunch of my coworkers and they still talk about that. Oh, we were an Altium call and this person clearly was distracted because they had their video off. And it's weird because I've changed companies and here I will get on calls where half the call, I kid you not, half the call will join with video off. And the first week or so I was totally in the same mentality of what is going on here. Like half the call is video off. Are these people even paying attention? We know what's going on and people talk. People talk just fine. People are just as engaged as me who has video on but is looking at one of my four monitors and like writing code during a meeting where I should be paying attention. And the funnier thing is I can tell the people who have their camera on but are not actually part of the call and I'm distracted looking at their faces because I know that they're writing code or talking on Slack or why are they smiling? We didn't say anything funny on this call. I someone who is not them is completely distracted by the fact that their camera is on. And the other thing is not everyone has had the luxury of being able to be in an office by themselves in their house. They have either kids around or they have their parents around or they have someone washing dishes behind them. Something is going on. We, I mean, right now I have no idea what Kir's room looks like, by the way, because I've never seen Kir on a call when he doesn't have that particular background behind him. And the thing is, I shouldn't care now I'm on so many calls where people just have a blurred background. And we talk about bandwidth here, right? And I don't know if we're talking about Internet bandwidth or mental bandwidth because it's both of those things. It's definitely both of those things. You don't have to worry about whether you're, you know, it's like, it's like that BBC video of that kid running into that the person was on the interview half naked and I don't have to worry about that if I have my camera off. I don't care if my, my kid is, my 4 year old is home 2 days out of the week and I don't have to worry about if she's going to run in with with something for me to play with her or whatnot if I have my video off.

Yeah, it's exactly that. And on top of that, I realized that as a woman, like I Cannot roll out of bed and take a call. Despite, like me going to be, I'm going to be in the same mental place whether I have my hair done, whether I have my makeup on, all that stuff. However, I'm going to be judged much more harshly, Harshly. And people are going to think, oh, you're tired or oh, you're not, you're not focused because as a woman, I'm going to be judged on my appearance more. So I realized that's a part of it as well, is that you're putting an extra burden on those people who are judged more harshly when they're not all done up.

And this is a video, this is a video on podcast. So I had to take off my running clothes and I washed my hair and put on a different shirt. And we joked about that, but not everyone knows why. And that's a burden that you don't necessarily have if you are just going to join a call and put your only your audio on.

Right. And does it actively matter? So Vic, would you have been in a different mental place if you hadn't put on the clothes? Like if you had just come in your running clothes and maybe you hadn't washed your hair, would it really have been that different? Would you have not been able to engage in the conversation?

I would have been the same person. I just needed to now reserve five minutes of my lunchtime to going and cleaning up. And for me personally, I find it better to be able to just to take my lunch on a call if I need to and be able to do that. And that's not a thing that I can do with video on. I'm like, I have to rush and eat this peanut butter and Joe sandwich.

Just to play devil's advocate though, I don't know if you guys are familiar with the 73855 rule. So that rule, basically there's been research done on communication and it says only 7% of communication is done through verbal communication, whereas the big chunk of the rest is through non verbal components. So this includes the tonality of your voice, your body language. Like I can tell the person that I'm talking to if they're slouched, if they are covering, then I can sense where they are at. If they're standing broadly, if they're smiling, then at least I get a sense of okay, what I'm saying is being perceived in a positive manner or negative manner. And that helps me with my delivery of content or speech or whatever. If do they not get it based on their expressions if it looks quizzical or completely lost, then I'll maybe take a couple of steps back and start over or add additional details. But I find with videos off that non verbal cues are lost. It's same as you being in a room with someone. Right. Like, you would pick up on their body language, you would pick up on nonverbal cues. And you can change your stance, you can change your delivery based on that, all of that is lost. If video is off, I'm going to.

Push back on that too.

Okay.

So there's actually been studies that have come out saying while we do receive this information about body language, it's most often misinterpreted, especially when you're working with people across different cultures. It becomes even worse in this misinterpretation. So what you're receiving from them is probably not what they actually meant. On top of that, how often do you see someone who's like junior dev on the team, who will not act confused and will not ask questions because they're afraid of being perceived as lesser than or stupid or not getting it, even though there's probably someone else on that call who didn't get it as well. So there's also this mask that we put on at work where if your boss says something that you don't agree with or is stupid, you're not going to be like, on a video call you will with the video off, but on a video call, you're not actually expressing this emotion. So it puts the burden on you to communicate better when you have that video off and you'll receive more information that's more intentional. So what a person says is intentional, their body language might be intentional, it might be masked. Like it's very different. And there's been some studies, I know Adam Grant had brought it up on his Work Life podcast that actually videos off is actually better for communication because you're able to not have that same sort of misinterpretation, to have the bad data, like all of that skewing your results. Especially when it's something about information sharing or when it's something about something not related to relationship building. Yes. Like seeing each other being in person. Synchronous is great for relationship building. That's probably not a majority of your calls.

Great point.

Yes. By the way, I changed my opinion of that already, but I. So Marissa, I would say I love this twist. If it is relationship building, that makes a lot of sense.

Right.

If possible, it is like a one on one. And it's not that you need to be on camera all the time. But it is your first one on one as your new manager. It would help a lot to like to see your special and see how you're reacting. But if the focus is like a project or like a problem that you're solving, the screen sharing plus audio would be more than enough and it would eliminate even a lot of emotions or things that we, we feel, we understand, but we really don't. We actually had a training about this book called the Culture Map and how different signs mean completely different things in different countries. And I think that is the famous, okay, scientists. Right. In Brazil it means something completely different than it means in the us. There is like whole bunch of things that you would guess wrong if you didn't have the background. It would be better to get the verbal confirmation then okay, whatever is a person doing. And I love that. I love that.

Yeah, I, I've been torn about this one. I find that on audio only calls it's harder for me to know whether someone is about to talk. So I find myself interrupting people often on audio only calls. And I feel terrible about it unless there's some sort of hand raised culture on the team because sometimes I just want to, I just want to jump in and add a point or a joke and instead either the moment is lost because everyone's waiting on the hand raise or I talk over someone and then we do this whole I don't know, you go. Mine's not that important because I was just gonna say something dumb anyway. So I find that's a problem. But other than that it's forcing someone to turn on video for the sake of being able to watch their body language just feels like a solution and searchable problem.

Yeah. When it comes to talking over people, there's a couple things. So one, there shouldn't be too many people on the call. I see that all the time is like you invite the whole company for every single. Oh, it's just way too much. No one's participating. So keep the people limited. Two is to have a moderator. So some person who's going to drive the conversation. Make sure it's hitting all the topics in your meeting agenda, which you should absolutely have. And then also to make sure that everybody's called upon. So there's a lot of people who are, you know, more quiet and they are afraid of exactly what you just said, Vic, that they all might interrupt someone and maybe offend them and so they just won't talk at all. So instead I might go around and I say, tiago what do you think about this? Or Vic, what do you think about this? And I'll bring it up and target that specific person especially as like the manager and the leader on the call. I want to make sure everybody's voice is heard. So that's really important. And then lastly is again setting expectations. So if you set the expectation that hey, this is the medium right now, it's not the most perfect medium because we had to everybody went remote overnight. We're still using very old tools. Honestly, Zoom hasn't changed since pre pandemic. It's crazy, but it's important to remind yourself that you're adapting to tools that aren't necessarily meant for remote work. So in the case of like Zoom and Slack, they were made for content companies that were in person in this office over here and this office over here. And now we're using them for remote work. So they were actually made for remote work. And there's going to be that little bit of friction when it comes to them. So you have to set that expectation. Yes, we will most likely interrupt each other. It is not rude. We don't see it as rude. It's going to happen and that's okay. So setting that expectation is important.

That's being said here. So a couple of things. When the pandemic first started and we went fully remote, we started okay, we're all going to keep our videos on so we can keep that. That basically that connection that we had in the office and we very quickly were having way too many meetings and it just became such a massive burden. And so I'd say within a month or two none of us were using video anymore. That that tells you right, what our natural inclination is to do. What our natural tendency is to do is to move away from video. And actually video adds a ton of friction. But then there's a couple of things. So once it became the norm that we most of these calls we were just on voice and I would take most of my meetings on walks, which was beautiful. And especially like when I could stack them up back to back. That was one of my favorite things because then I could go on three hour walk and talk to all these people and then it felt great. Basically felt energizing rather than the opposite. And but then there was a couple of situations where almost every time I had to talk to somebody important and I don't mean what I mean by that is like somebody in upper management, some C level person is expected for some reason the video to be on. And so I would always I couldn't take that on the walk because it's not like I can hold my phone like this while I'm walking and talking to them. And I would have to do what Vic did, which is I'd have to take a shower and I couldn't wear my sweatshirt and whatever it was. And that was always a brutal thing that would be mixed in somewhere in the middle of the day and would throw things off. So now looking back at that, I came pretty close to getting burnt out from all the Zoom meetings, by the way. But looking back at all of that, I wonder if there's a way to say there's certain meetings that, okay, like once a week or whatever, we're gonna have the video on, we're gonna try to bond. And it might not even be like a meeting about any important topic. It might just be just to hang out. I wonder if there's a way to say that. And then that kind of lowers the expectations for all the other meetings. And it says, hey, this is not the video meeting. Like, you don't have to have it on.

I don't know.

That's absolutely true. So you would just set that expectation. So in the way I did, it was always videos off by default. Everybody understood that. Everybody knew that if they didn't want to be on video, they didn't have to be on video. However, like, we do things like coffee break calls where it'd just be like a quick morning call where we each talk for it's like a 15 minute call and we have our coffees and we're chatting about things like TV shows and stuff, like not work related. And on that call, since it's like a relationship building call, people would more often than not turn on their video. It was, again, I didn't set the expectation that you absolutely have to turn on that video because there's more to it than just just a simple thing as relationship building. But it was more likely for people to turn on their video during that call because it was a different type of call. So setting those expectations and just being clear about all of that absolutely helps with that.

And guilty of the same. I'll leave my video off or have these virtual backgrounds that we pointed out because I have two young kids running around, especially when they're, they're schooling from home. They have no concept of time or how important your meeting is. They will come and sit right in front of the camera and pick their nose. So that. That is more embarrassing. More things to be conscious about if the video is on right I'm always sweating. I'm like, oh crap, what is he going to come with his pants on or what is he going to pull next? So that's an added level of stress that you don't need if you don't have to. Go ahead, Thiago.

Yes. I want to actually switch gears a little bit and I know we are approaching the end and to ask Marisa about something that she said about the expectations and about, well, I don't care if you take 10 hours or 30 hours to do something. My expectation is this, once you're done with this, you're good for the week. Right. What did you do? Like, how did you, like, how would you break down those tasks or how would you work in that way? I'm really curious because I was never able to set expectations that way. Not that I care about how long someone takes or ask for estimates, but that seems really interesting to me.

Yeah. So I've been lucky to work with some incredible developers. I've worked with a lot of different types of groups, but I'd say developers are like the main people that I was managing. And with development, it's honestly decently easy. Like you have tickets and you have these estimates already and you have these high level goals and if your planning is done right, which I was lucky enough to be in charge of planning, so I can push for that kind of thing, then you can work with your team members and say, hey, this is what I think we need to get done in order to complete this quarterly goal. So this week, this is what keeps us on track. Does this sound reasonable to you? All of this stuff? And before I even ask them about that stuff, I would think about, okay, so 20% of their time needs to be held off for. Oh, if some emergency comes through for their meetings, like, whatever. So making sure it was like 80% of what they could actually get done. And once you work with specific people for a while, you get into this rhythm where you, you can figure out exactly what they can get done in a healthy way in a week. And that's another part of remote work that I really love. Because when you're working on a remote team, it's not uncommon to see people stay with a company for five, 10 years. Like, that's a long time. You get really used to how someone works and so you start working like clockwork. Like, it's just super easy to say, these are the expectations for the week. They're like, yes. Or they're like, oh, hey, I think I need to shift this a Little bit because of this. Might have a blocker or whatever, but just being really open with that and like saying, hey, this here's the checklist. Do you agree with said checklist? Yes. Then that's the checklist for the lead.

So just a quick thing for me. So thinking back, I know burnout's been. Burnout is a very real thing in the remote world. Obviously, it's much more common than it ever was. And there's a lot of other factors going on that are stressing people out and inducing anxiety. But I remember people getting burnt out even before we were fully remote, when. Even when we were just in an office. I remember one. One particular story. This amazing developer was churning out stuff like crazy. And then I went into work one day, I saw him walking to the elevator. I said, what's going on? He said, I just quit. I said, why would you quit? You're, like, one of the best developers in this place. And, no, I'm just burnt out. And it's like, what. How did that happen? And he was pushing himself to the brink, and eventually he just decided, this is unhealthy, and I got to quit. And I guess all the people around him were saying, just keep going. You're doing all this amazing work.

Keep going.

And no one really put the brakes or any of that. People have been getting burned out for a long time. And I think the solution has always been take a break, go on vacation. But a lot of times you take a break, you go on vacation, and you forget about your anxiety and your burnout and all these things for a little while, but then you come back to that same environment, and things are still messed up because you haven't really addressed the root cause. And so I guess the broader question is right now, there's probably more of that happening than ever. And so how can companies help people without vacation? Because it's not. I guess vacation is going to help a little bit. But how can companies help people on the brink that are burning out? How can they bring them back from that? Or even if they've burnt out, how do they bring. Because basically, there's only two ways this gets solved, right? Like, either the root cause gets solved or the person quits. There's no in between. And so I'd love to. I don't know if you've thought about this at all, Marissa. I'd love to know if there are ways to bring people back from that.

Anyway, that's a huge thing for me. So, like I said, like, my company goes from the perspective of being async first and people first. Like, those are two critical components to how we help other companies work effectively remotely. And so the people first part is really important when it comes to your question. There's either people first or business first. And a lot of companies use business first because in the short term that's going to make them money. However, in the long term, people first is actually going to make them money, even though it targets something completely opposite of money. Because what happens is you increase retention, you have happy workers. I had the most loyal team that would drop everything if need be and like just jump on call at midnight if they need to. But because I never expected that of them, it wasn't because it was always expected of them. So you create this kind of totally different team dynamic when you take a people first approach. And what that means is that when I talk to my team, I'm saying like, your health, health is number one. And that's mental health, that's physical health, that's everything. Because you cannot do your job without that. Like, that's base level foundation. So anything that you need on that side of things needs to be fulfilled. And that's my number one priority before your tasks, before everything else. This is so many different things. And one of the things that I think remote work provides an extra boost of is that in the office, they would have to adapt to a schedule and a way of working work that was everyone was on one schedule. They were typically 9 to 5. Everybody had to do their work from their specific desk in the office. Like, everybody had to work around people. It was probably an open office plan. And as an introvert, that was so hard for me. Like, I would just get home and even if I had like barely worked that day, I would be so burnt out because I was just surrounded by people constantly. So now what remote work does, if you adapt to it instead of of replicating office work, is you get to adapt your entire environment and optimize it specifically for you. So then instead of working against yourself, you have everything working for you and it becomes easy and effortless. And that's what we're aiming for. So a lot of times for companies it means expectations. I know I keep going back to this, but I want to be really clear. Like, expectations need to be clear. If they get a message from their manager, do they know that they don't need to respond instantly? Do they know that they can go into deep work mode and actually complete their development tasks without it becoming an issue of, oh, they're not available they're not online. That means they're not doing work. So expectations is first. Next would be things like coaching so that their team members understand, hey, I can take advantage of this. Hey, I can work a different schedule. Hey, I can work in different environments and I can adapt it to me. And hey, I can experiment. Because honestly, they don't know what they don't know. So when you first start working remotely, you only know how to work one way and that's how you did in the office. So it takes some experimentation to figure out like, hey, this works and this doesn't for me. And breaking from that one size fits all approach. So I recommend expectations, I recommend education, and I recommend taking a people first approach to work.

Burnout and setting expectations. Do you think there are morning rituals that work or are there virtual boundaries that you need to set even within your workspace? This is my study area and not everybody has the luxury of a separate study. It could be your kitchen table, it could be in the middle of your kid's bedroom, it could be in the garage like Louis sitting today. But you don't necessarily have. And I've seen research on both sides. So I just wondered what your recommendations are because I've seen have a dedicated place and then as soon as you go there, your body automatically switches into flow state and you can start working. But I've also heard and seen research around having multiple work zones too, depending on your energy state for the day, depending on your flow state and you go work in a different part to feel like you're walking around and doing things differently.

Yeah, so I have a very firm opinion on that one and I've shared a big article on it. But basically we are used to replicating the office like I've talked about multiple times. And one of those pieces is having only one place to work and that comes directly from the office. The office could only afford X amount of space and they have these many employees, so they're going to give one desk to each person. That doesn't necessarily mean it's the right way to work. And so when you're at home, people put a lot of emphasis and say, oh, you need physical boundaries. You need to separate your space between like your office and then your home life and keep them completely separate. I disagree. I think that you should actually use multiple workspaces and that might mean some overlap between your work and your personal life. I think that physical boundaries work when you were doing physical work, when there was like physical reminders of what you're doing. However when it comes to knowledge work, which is what a majority of remote workers are doing, it's very different. You might even use the same computer for your knowledge work and your personal life. And if you work from one workspace, one, it doesn't optimize for different types of work. So let's say you want to do deep work. Deep work is going to be very different and need a much different environment than let's say like where you take meeting things. Like, it's just very different. It also doesn't optimize for like your personal mode. So if you're feeling lonely and you have an office environment at home, like going there to work is probably not the best for you. Like going to a coffee shop to work or going to going, being around your family to work, that's probably actually better for your personal mode in that moment. So I actually have multiple workspaces designed throughout my house for different modes of work. Whether I'm creating or I'm editing or I'm taking a call or like I'm doing different things. And that doesn't mean I have six offices in my house. That means I have a kitchen table. That means I have a adjustable bed that like sits up when I want to be like really comfy. Because when I'm really comfy, I'm in a really creative space and I'm able to write better versus this space that I'm in right now. I take it for meetings because it's got the lighting and the camera and like all this, you know, junk around me. But that would be so distracting if I was like trying to write or trying to get some task task done. So I'm not going to do the same work in the same space. So I have multiple workspaces. And you probably link to the article. It goes into much better detail and is much more well thought out. But I believe in having separate spaces whether inside the home or outside the home. So that could mean like going to the park, going to coffee shop, going to a co working space. There's plenty of outside the homes. I'm just a huge introvert and homebody so all my spaces are in my house.

We will include that in the show notes after. Marisa, Go ahead. Vic.

I was going to say the same thing that I don't really have the concept of separate spaces in my house because depending on where I'm working or who I'm meeting with, I will just carry this laptop. I'm in some meetings that require me to high focus and I don't want the distraction, my four monitors. So I will just take the laptop and I'll go sit either outside with headphones on or I'll sit in the kitchen or sometimes it really is one of those calls where that does not require any input from me. But I need to make lunch. It's going to be. I'm going to be listening on this call call every now and then. If I hear something, if I need to add something to the conversation, I'll say something insightful in the chat. But I'm going to be making Last week I made crepes from scratch. I made doses from scratch during a call because that's what I needed to get done. It's that the whole time zone overlap with all of your co workers means that there's never Everyone doesn't take lunch at the same time. And it's fine. It's perfectly fine. All this just to say that this room is not my night. It's only the office. This used to be the room where our toddler used to sleep and also my office. And when she napped I would just leave. I would go work elsewhere. And currently this is the I practice violin and take my calls and I shut my door when I don't want to be interrupted. And also I lift weights room. It's just, it's a space that I don't enter into a different mental space or anything else. It's just the space where I need four monitors. Earth is this space.

Yeah. And going back to what you were talking about before with getting into that mental mode, what I find is that having transition routines or trigger routines, that's what I use to get into that mental state rather than an actual physical environment that's going to work against specific types of work. So I use trigger routines for that. And then the second part of having multiple workspaces is, is to make sure that you have virtual boundaries. Like, I know people push physical boundaries when it comes to remote work. Virtual boundaries are a million times more important. And what that means is that you are not receiving your personal notifications and your work notifications on the same device at the same time. Like, I don't recommend having slack on your phone. I don't recommend. I recommend using desktops for so that you have a work mode and then a personal mode or like browser profile. I again have another article about virtual boundaries and how to specifically set them up. But having different virtual spaces for your work versus your personal life is going to make sure during work time you can pay attention to work because you're not receiving like your Twitter notifications right there in the same browser or like during your personal time, you are not receiving work emails, work soc messages when you're supposed to be offline. And that's going to cause you to burn out if you're working all the time. So you need to have those set hours when it to comes comes to trigger routines. So I have like specific morning routines and night routines and like in between. So like even for lunches I have trigger routines to switch me from my work mode to my lunch mode and then out of my lunch mode into my deep work mode. And I go by, I do energy management instead of time management. So there's so much to this and I think that people just default to I work in one place and that puts me into the mindset just because that's what they've done forever. And it's just a matter of questioning that default and getting them to see, hey, there's other options that might work better for you.

We could go on for hours about this. I love all the tips that you're sharing. Thank you Marissa. But maybe before we wrap things up and so we are all knowledge workers and you brought up your transition routines and trigger routines. That's something I struggle with personally as well. Like how do I define my clear end of day? It's 5:30pm Is it my kids are here, let me go spend time with them. Is it that oh crap, I just have these three more things to do. Can I just get it done so I don't have to context which and bring back where I had left off just so I can finish it? I am so close. How do you help with your end of day and say end of work day while working remotely? Do you have any tips you can share?

Absolutely. And I go into this more in depth in my avoiding burnout mini course. So if you're interested in this topic, check that out. But the way that I define it is that there's three ways to define your end of work day. Either one, it's time. So it's just like in the office you say 5pm and that's it. Like 5pm you're done. Or two, it's task based. So you say I'm going to finish these three tasks for the day. Whether it happens at 2pm or 7pm it doesn't matter. I'm going to finish these three tasks. So task based. Or you could do a hybrid approach, which is what I do. So instead of choosing one of these, I choose both of these so I'm either going to finish these three tasks or I'm going to finish by four. So whichever one comes first, that's my end of work day. And I have to be very clear on that. So that I'm saying, like, hey, if these three tasks end up taking way longer than I initially expected, I'm not working till midnight. I'm going to cap it at 4pm that's when I'm done. Because what I'm doing is I'm not just planning for today, I'm planning for tomorrow. So if I overwork today, I am stealing energy from tomorrow. And that's honestly going to take me more time to build back up again and get to the the point where I'm not constantly burning myself out and constantly on a burnout cycle. So I prioritize that over what needs to get done in that specific moment.

Love it. Absolutely love it. Thank you for sharing. So before we wrap things up, I'll, I'll just let you share, Marissa on where our audience can find more about you, more about your mini course, your Twitter, your social, whatever you want to share. Floor is yours.

Yeah, my personal website is Marissa Goldberg.com and then you can check out my company at remoteworkprac.com I also have a newsletter called Remotely Interesting where we explore untraditional work days and try to question the default to help you define new ways to work. And yeah, you can also check out my mini course, Avoiding Burnout, and that will be located on my website, marissgoldberg.com oh, also Twitter. That's where I'm most active on social media. Ar15sa.

And for those of you who didn't memorize all of that, we will include that in the show notes. Thank you so much, Marissa, for joining us. It was an absolute blast. Thank you again for all our panelists. And if there's one thing you take away, it's focus on being productive instead of being busy. Thank you.

Thank you so much for having me.

Thank you all.