Remote Work, the Plus and Minus
i graduated in September 2021 and went straight into a hybrid setup — coming to the office maybe two to four times a month. even my internship was hybrid. then in January 2024, i joined Jitera, a fully remote Singapore-based company. no office at all. just me, my desk, and a dangerous amount of freedom.
four years of this now. i have thoughts.
the good
flexible time is genuinely great. i do my best work in the morning so that's when i tackle the hard problems. meetings and reviews get pushed to the afternoon. you can't do that in an office where someone taps your shoulder every 20 minutes.
and you learn so much just by being remote. you get better at writing, documenting, working independently. these aren't soft skills, they're survival skills. and they compound.
the ugly
here's the stuff nobody puts in their "remote work is amazing" posts.
there were months where i stayed up till 3-4 AM doing nothing, then slept through morning standups. entire days of "working" while actually just rotting at home. didn't leave the house for days. completely blurred the line between work and life until they were the same thing.
it's boring sometimes. you miss the office vibe. you miss the random jokes in the hallway, the energy of people around you. a slack emoji will never replace someone laughing at your terrible joke in person.
what actually helped me
i messed up a lot before figuring this out. my first year was a whole mess — working at midnight, sleeping at 3 PM, feeling guilty during every hour that wasn't "productive."
the thing that fixed it was just... having a routine. getting morning sun before opening my laptop. having a startup ritual — coffee, open blinds, check today's tasks. setting actual break times instead of "i'll take a break when i feel like it" which either means no breaks or all breaks.
separating work space from chill space helped too. different desk, different corner. your brain needs that spatial cue to know when you're on and when you're off.
and just going outside. i know it sounds obvious but when you work from home you can genuinely go an entire week without fresh air if you're not careful. that's not living.
the communication thing
a coworker at Jitera shared GitLab's async communication handbook with me and it actually changed how i think about remote work. the idea is: async by default, sync by exception.
in practice that means be concise, lead with the point. be respectful because tone is invisible in text. say thank you and sorry when needed — remote strips away all the nonverbal stuff so words have to carry that weight. and document everything, because if it's not written down it didn't happen.
it sounds simple but consistently doing this makes everything smoother.
the early career thing
here's something specific — if you started your career remote like i did, the boundaries problem is way harder because you've never had an office to compare it to. i didn't know what "normal" work-life separation felt like because i'd never experienced it.
so i had to build from scratch the kind of structure that an office would've given me for free. took real effort and a lot of trial and error.
four years in, i wouldn't trade remote work for a full-time office. but i also won't pretend it's easy or glamorous. it's a skill you develop. and the freedom is real, but so are the consequences when you misuse it.