Part of a sponsored news article post on remote workers

Before the pandemic hit, I worked for a couple of companies that required working from home two days a week due to a shortage of desks.  Unsurprisingly, Mondays and Fridays were particularly desirable (and there was a separate rota for those two days) and failing to secure them, Wednesday the next best.  Back then, working from home for a maximum of two days a week was widely accepted. But remote working was not. Fresh from a holiday spent reading, and being inspired by, Tim Ferriss’ The Four Hour Work Week, I quickly realised I would not only have to be self-employed but would also have to find a client who was happy for me to work remotely. Suffice to say I was unsuccessful. 

A few years later, this time in the lead up to the pandemic, I was able to create my own remote-working experience and found myself in Cape Town working from a co-working space that housed startups, accelerators and a group of people who had signed up to Remote Year, which until then I had never heard of. The company’s offer was simple—spend a year working in twelve locations globally with a group of people. I became friends with two of them who were, by and large, having a rewarding experience. And what became clear to me in our conversations, was the variety of people and the types of jobs they did. By now remote working was considered normal within the start-up industry, particularly among software developers, but until then I had never met someone from a Fortune 500 Company who had only been with the company for a couple of years after graduation. She found out about the programme, asked for permission and was simply told to go ahead, no resentment, no blowback.

This shows that even before the pandemic, how we worked was changing. What COVID-19 did was precipitate this change. We had already started moving away from a designated desk in an office to spending a couple of days a week working from home, albeit in certain industries. The pandemic simply made it more acceptable to work from anywhere and senior management finally acknowledged that we can be just as, or even more, efficient away from the office—as was the case on the days I worked from home, as I would simply block swathes of time to create content.

In recent weeks the discussion about home working has been reignited. From Jacob Rees-Mogg’s notes to a senior Apple executive resigning. Certain skills within the technology sector are very desirable and companies are securing the best candidates not necessarily because they are offering the highest salaries but because they have embraced hybrid and remote working.

My top 5 tools for working remotely
1. Meetings: Zoom for calls with individuals I have sub-contracted and teams etc for calls with corporates

2. Osome for accounts

3. Slack for working with developers

4. I manipulate a lot of data and Gyana (now defunct) was part of my visualisation toolkit

5. Mangools for all things SEO –keyword research, backlinks