The value of remote

A lot has changed for me recently. Within the last six months, my family had a significant health scare, my second child was born and I started working at HashiCorp. These events caused me to reflect a considerable amount, which in turn has caused me to make a number of adjustments to help get the best out of life. One of the factors that was having the biggest impact on my life was time. The locomotive that nobody is able to control. However, we spend our lives as somewhat of a servant to it, bending to its will. We are either out of time, struggling to keep up with everything we have to do, never able to be happy that we have achieved enough. Or, we have too much time, feeling like we have wasted our lives doing nothing.

Personally, I was more the former than the latter. My weekly commute time added up to around 10.5 hours. Most weeks, I would stay up later than is healthy trying to make sure I didn’t waste an hour of my day. If there were opportunities to rest, I would ignore it and find something to make myself feel productive. There were a number of times that I felt burnt-out, and my health over the last 18 months has been impacted. Never have I had to have as much time off for personal leave. It was time for a change.

The biggest change I could make was joining a company that valued remote work and flexibility. With a young family and a partner who has their own career aspirations, the fact that I can be home at a reasonable hour to help with the morning and night time routines is amazing. The time that I have got back due to not travelling allows me to spend more time with my children. On top of this, working for a company who is remote-first (not just remote friendly) means that everyone in my team is understanding of each others personal situation in a way that I have not experienced.

It is now my personal goal to never work in an office environment again. Hopefully more and more companies pick up on the value of remote work and it becomes the norm for our industry.