There was a time when my life was pretty structured. Up at a certain time every morning, into my suit, into the car and then into my office to manage clients' money. So it went for nearly a decade until the market crash of 08/09 left me without a job in an industry that didn't seem to be hiring until financial outlooks stabilized. Funny thing about that…
Now I help make mobile games from home as one of the co-founders of Itzy Interactive. You'd think the transition from a regular, office job to one working out of your home would be an easy one. No boss micromanaging you, no set hours, no dress-code, no phones ringing, etc. However, the transition from office peon to home office productivity machine wasn't a smooth transition for me.
I thought I'd take a moment to share a few of the things that help my productivity as an indie developer working from home, and help retain my sanity while doing it. It's also an exercise for me to reaffirm some of these things I may be slipping on as I fall into unproductive habits while work continues on our newest title, Vex Blocks. :)
For the love of god, put on some clothes
You wouldn't walk into your office dressed in sweats and a t-shirt and even if this was acceptable, you probably still shouldn't do it. There's been a few days when I've rolled out of bed and stumbled into my office, but I'm never as productive as I am when awake, showered, had a good breakfast and dressed for work.
I'm not talking about dressing up, I'm mainly talking about things like…putting on pants. It may sound a bit clichéd, but feeling good about yourself makes you more productive, and until I've cleaned myself up and dressed first thing in the morning I just don't feel like I'm ready somehow.
If you're content to work in your tighty whities all day with the windows open and your retired neighbors aghast, maybe just try cleaning up one day, spraying on some Axe body spray and getting dressed to see how you feel in comparison.
Regular hours
Set yourself regular work hours. The nice thing about working from home is you can usually be flexible with your working hours, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't still have set hours. I found that having a schedule was valuable for maintaining my sanity and improving my productivity.
For me, it's like a switch flips on in my head. "Time for business!" If for some reason I find myself off my schedule, it's hard for me to get into my work groove when I do sit down at my desk. I'm sure there's some behavioral scientist somewhere that can back me up on this one, but I've really found keeping a regular, scheduled work day improves the amount I can accomplish compared to days when I just "wing it."
It's also nice to have that end time to look forward to as well, and having a family. It's good to have that moment when "Daddy is available for play now!" You're not a machine and you can't work all the time. There needs to be a point where you can stop and focus on yourself, your friends and your family.
Also, take breaks and take a scheduled lunch. I'm terrible when it comes to this, and by the time my day is done my brain feels fuzzy. Taking a break keeps me from burning out, stressing out and helps me gain my bearings.
Office Rules
If you're working from home, it's also a good idea that you lay down some ground rules for the other occupants of your home. It's hard to get anything done when you're being interrupted by pets, parents, spouse, children, etc. My wife is currently at home on maternity leave, and it's nice to be available if she needs assistance with the new baby or our 2-year-old son, but I need time to do my work.
You wouldn't be able to work a regular office job with a toddler on your lap, yelling for Elmo videos, so it's understandable that there needs to be generally uninterrupted work time. So far, having my family at home has worked out pretty well, with even our headstrong 2 year old grasping the concept that when Daddy's office door is closed, he's working and he'll be able to play later. My son even says "Bye!" to me now and waves when I'm going into the office to start my work day.
Separate work environment and minimize distractions
It's also useful to have a designated work space. A "zone of work" that you can enter and exit. For myself, I'm lucky enough to have an office in my home but even if you don't it's not a bad idea to create a separate space that's specifically setup for work. Even though it should go without saying, make an effort to decrease distractions.
If you're a PC gamer and you don't have the willpower to not fire WoW up every couple of hours, then perhaps you need a work machine that doesn't have any games installed, or create a unique login that doesn't have access to programs you may find distracting. I find it useful for my PC to be work only while receiving my gaming fix on the consoles setup in our den. It's helpful for me to have that separation.
Don't limit human interactions
After working in a busy office, this is something that I didn't think would be an issue but it was. I found the transition from always being in communication with others to working primarily by myself to be a bit jarring. By the end of the work week I found I craved human interaction; that I'd even go a little squirrely without it.
As I mentioned in previous blogs, regularly scheduled meetings with my team helps to break up the monotony of this lone programmer's existence while keeping the team on task. It can never hurt to keep up communications with your team, even going so far as to have a voice chat session running in the background while working occasionally.
This may hinder productivity in the short-term, but in the long run I find it helps keep me from experiencing cabin fever. A change of venue from time to time couldn't hurt either. If you can, take a laptop down to your local cafe and get some work done. Again, in the long run this will be beneficial to your working well being. At least it was for me.
These methods have all helped me over the past year and a half I've been working from home. Hopefully you find some of these useful as well. Cheers!
[This piece was reprinted from #AltDevBlogADay, a shared blog initiative started by @mike_acton devoted to giving game developers of all disciplines a place to motivate each other to write regularly about their personal game development passions.]
yep... that pretty much sums it up. Pants are not optional (well, unless you like shorts in the summer). I've been working from home for over a year now. I like it but it does limit social interaction, especially when working in a different state from the office. I find myself having to leave the house just to go be around people and talk to other humans face to face. Without it, I get a little jittery and start to feel my ability to speak the human language slowly fade =). That, and I feel obligated to stir the gas in my car every now and then.
The best part of working from a home office which I have done most of my adult life, is when inspiration hits, you can capitalize on it. Face it, you can push through sending emails, doing the yoemans work of the day during some set hours, but being creative, you cant fake nor push that. It happens when it happens. For me, creatively I am worthless most of the day. Early afternoon after walking the dog I get touches of it, Late afternoon I get a little more, but its at night, and often sometimes very late at night that I get my true creative work done, and the home office is perfect for being able to capitalize on it.
As a work-from-home freelance Flash game programmer for the last 3 years, I agree with all your points (although I don't have a fancy laptop or anything like that (: ).
If I may comment on "Regular hours":
What I'll do is schedule the time that I will be available for my clients each week I'll do this Monday morning, or sometimes Sunday night, and I'll send it to all my clients so they know the days and times I'm available to them. I still try to work 8-hour days - although not every day is 8 hours; some might be 7 or even 6 - but as long as I finish the week with at least 30 hours, I'm good. My schedule has been a straight 11a - 3p EST, then 1-hour break/lunch/errands/go for a run, then 4p - 8p EST, and I'm done for the day. One client gets one of those 4-hour time slots. It's also flexible, and if a client absolutely needs me for a day or time for which I am not available to them, we can swap it with another time slot - they just need to let me know in advance.
If I have two clients, then the time slots usually go: client 1 (am), client 2 (pm) , Mon - Fri. If I have three clients, it gets a little tricky, because it takes me three weeks to serve all three clients an equal amount of time. Four clients is a bit much - I've only done it once, but I'm more comfortable with three.
Thanks, and best to you and your work-from-home endeavors.
I've actually found that when I put on shoes at home while working it puts me in a different mindset. And having a newborn baby at the house has made working from home impossible since we are in a 1 bedroom and I can't close a door like an office.
Also, I can't have a conversation with someone about working from home without talking about this "That Mitchell and Webb Look" sketch (potential NSFW dialogue, but it's a British TV show) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=co_DNpTMKXk
Great article! But after 5 years working at home, I really think that it's needed, when possible, to have a place to work out of your home.
But even if you follow these rules (separate work environment, regular hours, etc.) after some time your mind begins to get tired. Your first 1-2 years working at home can be great, but ...
I really should try to implement the regular hours thing ...
For game developers working from home with kids, there's an Indie Game Developer Parent facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/425451814143723/
Working from home presents interesting challenges, but then again so does commuting to an office and dealing with office politics and receptionists that enough free time to make pie charts of how much work each person in the office is doing to show that they are working harder than anybody else.
My top tips:
Break up time spent in your own head by playing a game of Outwitters with your team.
Regular exercise helps too.
Working form home, the dream of dreams.
No boss, no "rules", etc. Its like when you were a kid and you had that fort, you were your own king.
But this is adulthood.
I strived to work from home for most of my adult life, going day to day to day going to the office to perform soul crushing work and coming home to a couple meagre hours before needing to get to bed to wake up early enough to get to work on time the next day, only to bring home a very modest, unimpressive pay-check and live on that till the groceries and living expenses ate through 99% of it. But hey some people love that structure.
I'm a programmer of the web by trade, and its what I do at home, self-employed. I am a newbie to this, only being three weeks into my self employment free of any other full-time job obligations, but what I cannot stress enough is just how intensely "freeing" it is to someone who has felt my work woes.
As a creative person, I get ideas. When you work for a company that specializes in what you do (for me, a web firm for example) those ideas if acted upon in even the smallest way or even mentioned; become the companies, not yours. As a creative individual I value "Flextime" because lets face it, some days I may be really in the zone at 9AM, some days I may be more in the zone at 10am, some days I may even just decide to work at night instead. Trying to force my hand at "being amazing" at 8AM every single day at my full-time job mostly created more bugs and problems than solved, causing a ton of unnecessary stress that really strained on me, my friends, and my relationship.
Also, as a creative individual, I need an outlet if I'm stressed or feeling deeply unmotivated at any given moment. For myself, that could mean heading over to YouTube or GameTrailers and watching a video or two to get my mind off the problem, and come back with a fresher pair of eyes. This works 99.9% of the time for me. However, when doing this at a job, I would get deeply scathed for doing this, as I am now considered "slacking" and worse "Stealing Time and Money from the Company" when in reality its actually helping me concentrate. It doesn't work for everybody, but its my flow and it works extremely well for me. Has since I was just starting out with this whole tech thing some a decade ago. Some people just need to get up and stretch, I just need to directly remove myself for a couple minutes, gets the brain churning again and come back with a different mindset.
What I'm getting at, is that's the beauty part about working from home, everyone's got their special flow that makes them work to the best of their abilities, everyone's got their own special clocks, everyone's got their own outlets and desires.
A full-time job (understandable so, don't get me wrong) make it a point to regulate these to a often-times stone cold set metholodology everyone must adhere to or be unto a threat of being fired. (there was a time at my job where the boss figured all the bugs were coming from us being distracted by listening to music while we programmed (because, see, HE cant concentrate when listening to music while working), we were immediately threatened to be fired if we were caught listening to music on the job, I'm not kidding. This lasted a solid month before we had our internal "peoples court" session that unbanned music (sort of sounds like footloose))
But the best part about working at an office though, is less distraction and surrounded by helpful like-minded individuals. I miss talking and collaborating with my co-workers everyday, in fact I make it a point to remain in contact with them and stay on the up and up with the company I just left.
Its six of one and half a dozen of another, both scenarios have their equal pros and cons, but that pro and con needs to be weighed in before becoming a lifeless clock punching zombie, because you never know the amazing things an individual could create/cook up when given that little bit of extra freedom! ( or they could just spend their day playing LoL :\ )
As a work-from-home freelance Flash game programmer for the last 3 years, I agree with all your points (although I don't have a fancy laptop or anything like that (: ).
If I may comment on "Regular hours":
What I'll do is schedule the time that I will be available for my clients each week I'll do this Monday morning, or sometimes Sunday night, and I'll send it to all my clients so they know the days and times I'm available to them. I still try to work 8-hour days - although not every day is 8 hours; some might be 7 or even 6 - but as long as I finish the week with at least 30 hours, I'm good. My schedule has been a straight 11a - 3p EST, then 1-hour break/lunch/errands/go for a run, then 4p - 8p EST, and I'm done for the day. One client gets one of those 4-hour time slots. It's also flexible, and if a client absolutely needs me for a day or time for which I am not available to them, we can swap it with another time slot - they just need to let me know in advance.
If I have two clients, then the time slots usually go: client 1 (am), client 2 (pm) , Mon - Fri. If I have three clients, it gets a little tricky, because it takes me three weeks to serve all three clients an equal amount of time. Four clients is a bit much - I've only done it once, but I'm more comfortable with three.
Thanks, and best to you and your work-from-home endeavors.
- Ziro out.
Also, I can't have a conversation with someone about working from home without talking about this "That Mitchell and Webb Look" sketch (potential NSFW dialogue, but it's a British TV show) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=co_DNpTMKXk
But even if you follow these rules (separate work environment, regular hours, etc.) after some time your mind begins to get tired. Your first 1-2 years working at home can be great, but ...
For game developers working from home with kids, there's an Indie Game Developer Parent facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/425451814143723/
Come on down!
Second year: stable and efficient
Third year: KILL ME NOW
My top tips:
Break up time spent in your own head by playing a game of Outwitters with your team.
Regular exercise helps too.
No boss, no "rules", etc. Its like when you were a kid and you had that fort, you were your own king.
But this is adulthood.
I strived to work from home for most of my adult life, going day to day to day going to the office to perform soul crushing work and coming home to a couple meagre hours before needing to get to bed to wake up early enough to get to work on time the next day, only to bring home a very modest, unimpressive pay-check and live on that till the groceries and living expenses ate through 99% of it. But hey some people love that structure.
I'm a programmer of the web by trade, and its what I do at home, self-employed. I am a newbie to this, only being three weeks into my self employment free of any other full-time job obligations, but what I cannot stress enough is just how intensely "freeing" it is to someone who has felt my work woes.
As a creative person, I get ideas. When you work for a company that specializes in what you do (for me, a web firm for example) those ideas if acted upon in even the smallest way or even mentioned; become the companies, not yours. As a creative individual I value "Flextime" because lets face it, some days I may be really in the zone at 9AM, some days I may be more in the zone at 10am, some days I may even just decide to work at night instead. Trying to force my hand at "being amazing" at 8AM every single day at my full-time job mostly created more bugs and problems than solved, causing a ton of unnecessary stress that really strained on me, my friends, and my relationship.
Also, as a creative individual, I need an outlet if I'm stressed or feeling deeply unmotivated at any given moment. For myself, that could mean heading over to YouTube or GameTrailers and watching a video or two to get my mind off the problem, and come back with a fresher pair of eyes. This works 99.9% of the time for me. However, when doing this at a job, I would get deeply scathed for doing this, as I am now considered "slacking" and worse "Stealing Time and Money from the Company" when in reality its actually helping me concentrate. It doesn't work for everybody, but its my flow and it works extremely well for me. Has since I was just starting out with this whole tech thing some a decade ago. Some people just need to get up and stretch, I just need to directly remove myself for a couple minutes, gets the brain churning again and come back with a different mindset.
What I'm getting at, is that's the beauty part about working from home, everyone's got their special flow that makes them work to the best of their abilities, everyone's got their own special clocks, everyone's got their own outlets and desires.
A full-time job (understandable so, don't get me wrong) make it a point to regulate these to a often-times stone cold set metholodology everyone must adhere to or be unto a threat of being fired. (there was a time at my job where the boss figured all the bugs were coming from us being distracted by listening to music while we programmed (because, see, HE cant concentrate when listening to music while working), we were immediately threatened to be fired if we were caught listening to music on the job, I'm not kidding. This lasted a solid month before we had our internal "peoples court" session that unbanned music (sort of sounds like footloose))
But the best part about working at an office though, is less distraction and surrounded by helpful like-minded individuals. I miss talking and collaborating with my co-workers everyday, in fact I make it a point to remain in contact with them and stay on the up and up with the company I just left.
Its six of one and half a dozen of another, both scenarios have their equal pros and cons, but that pro and con needs to be weighed in before becoming a lifeless clock punching zombie, because you never know the amazing things an individual could create/cook up when given that little bit of extra freedom! ( or they could just spend their day playing LoL :\ )
Now I must get back to work :)