Matt Ragland shows how he structures a remote work day solo with childcare, starting with 30 minutes of planning and email, then moving between coffee shops, Whole Foods, and home to reset focus. He uses Basecamp and Slack to manage projects and collaborate with teammates, fitting in family time between work blocks.
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Hey, good morning! Over the next couple of days I'm going to be doing kind of a special vlog and showing you exactly how I set up the vlog, how I edit it, and some other tips, tricks, just things that I've picked up over the last few weeks. So hope you enjoy it. It's a little bit different. I would love to see your comments down below. What I'm doing today is headed to a coffee shop. I really have two distinct days. There are days that Morgan doesn't work and I'm primarily responsible for Kanan, and then there are days that Morgan doesn't work and I just get to go do kind of whatever I need to do for the day. This is a Morgan does not work day, and so I'm headed to coffee shop. To do some work. We have a really small place right now, and so it's nice to get out. Going to a place today called Camp House. It's a big, beautiful venue, because it is a venue, and coffee shop in downtown Chattanooga. Hey, so just getting set up. Normally I'll spend like 30 minutes or so planning, just making sure I'm set for the day, looking over my calendar, seeing what kind of meetings and calls I have set up. And then I'll normally jump into email. And I know there's tons of stuff out there that says like, don't start your day with email. And I don't start the day with email, start the day with planning. The other thing is that like, I'll only spend like, say, 30-ish minutes on it. I don't get sucked in. Because if I can have a relatively clear inbox or make sure that at least anything that's come in in the past 24 hours that's urgent is already off my plate. I hate email, and so if I take care of it first, then it's some— then I can go into things that I really enjoy more with a clear head. So that's, that's really my, my rationale for starting the day fairly soon with email or tickets that need my attention. The other thing that I'll jump into relatively early is Basecamp. It's what we use to manage all of our projects, all of our like bigger work in ConvertKit. And so I'll talk about what I plan on doing I'm doing today, any blocks that I have. People can just see that. Most of the time, if I have a specific block that's related to something another person or department could help me with, then I reach out to them directly. I don't just expect that they're going to see. I can also tag them inside of Basecamp, but I'll also like ping them in Slack, for example. So jump into Basecamp, say what I'm doing, maybe look over what other people are doing, make sure my to-dos are in order. So that's the second thing. That I'll do. And that's also normally done in the planning stage. Just changed locations. I do this once or twice a day. Helps break the day up, and also I use it as a technique for refocusing on a different part of work or something that I want to do with my family. And so if I just stay in the same place, sometimes it's tough for me to task switch. But a lot of times just going to a different location, if I'm able to do that and make sense with time, is a really good thing to do. Just leaving Whole Foods. I actually really like working at Whole Foods. Connection's not great, but if you're at a time where you don't need like a super great connection, what's really good about Whole Foods that I like in terms of working is that you can get any kind of food or drink that you want there, and even more important, it's really easy to hide at a Whole Foods because you just kind of tuck yourself away in a corner and I never feel bad for spending a lot of time there, whereas if you spend you spend several hours at a coffee shop and it's kind of small and you've only bought one thing of coffee and it's just been sitting there empty for a while, maybe it's just me, but I start to feel kind of bad about taking up space, especially if it's busy. So Whole Foods, never have that problem. Heading home now for a couple hours, which will be nice because It's nice to work remote so I have some of these options. Now the, the balance of that is I've still got a couple hours I have to wrap up and I got to do that later on. Just because you have the flexibility of working in different places doesn't mean that you don't have to do the work. So it's nice that I can go spend a couple hours with my family now and play around while The weather's decent, but later on when most people are going to bed, I'm still going to crank for a couple hours. So that's the balance of it. Wouldn't it suck if I was doing this and I was in a fender bender? Be so embarrassing. All right, going off now. Just got done with our family hike. I said it's great to be able to do that when you work remotely and you have some flexibility with your schedule, but again, Now I still do have a couple hours to crank through. You know, people are settling in, they're getting ready for dinner, they're gonna go to bed, you're gonna watch some shows or some sports or something like that, but still got some work to do. I think that gets lost a lot when you think about flexible schedules and being able to work remotely or work from home is that you're still responsible for your stuff and It takes a lot to be able to, to be able to take care of that. Sup. It's 9:15. Just got done with the day and just gonna edit this vlog and go to bed because I'm tired and I have to wake up early, which will be fun. I like waking up early. Do you like waking up early? See you in the morning.
