This is Part 14 of a weekly series on my growth and development at a software startup in Austin Texas. Click here to view the full series or start at Level 1.

Twice the workload

Level Fourteen Stats

Weapons gained:

  • Connections + 2: Compared to last week, it felt like nothing happened this week. I met so many people last week, and this week was just a lot of following up and catching up. The follow-ups made it so I was still maiing connections, but not like last week.
  • Ability + 8: This week was fully remote. There were definitely some harder days to do this since I had days pretty full with meetings, but I made it work, even while taking on a lot more responsibility.
  • Knowledge + 4: Once again, I think working remotely helped me gain some knowledge around what I need to do to be productive while away from the office. The times I was most productive was when I could kind of lock myself away from the outside world and just focus on what I was doing for work. However, with too much of this I start to hate my life, so it was a good balance of getting up and doing something and taking time to focus in.
  • Discipline + 4: I kept almost all of my normal routines while gone. I failed a little on my exercise, but besides that, everything really held together pretty well. I had to get really disciplined to research before meetingst his week because there were multiple days where I had several meetings back-to-back. I had to be prepared for not only the first meeting, but all.
  • Organization – 2: This was definitely harder this week being gone. Organizing my time and meetings was harder to do while not being able to communicate with my office as well. Once agin, I made it work, but it wasn’t as smooth as when I am in the office.
  • Strength + 6: Well, I hiked 16 miles this weekend in some Wyoming mountains. I failed a bit in the day-to-day strength training, but made up for it this weekend I think.

Kills: I worked a full week remotely and didn’t completely shut down. My workload almost doubled, and it was the most stressful week of work I have had yet, but I managed and things aren’t on fire yet.

Deaths: I did fall behind this week for the first time since I started working. There were so  many things on my plate that every day I had things that didn’t get done. I hate that feeling, hence why it’s never happend before because I’ll just work until that’s not the case. But this week I had things planned and couldn’t do that. Stressful, got behind, but next week is the respawn.

Outside the Game

Crazy week outside the game. Was staying at a friend’s house in Colorado while working remotely this week and we did a bunch of different things every night and culminated with a backpacking trip this weekend with a couple of my friends from Kansas. It was a fantastic and full week, and it’s going to be a bummer going back to the Texas heat.

Final Takeaways

I found that working in the office is definitely easier for me and the rest of my company. I enjoy the ability to work remotely in the role that I’m in, but I now know that I couldn’t be full-time remote. The communication for my team to me and me to my team just suffers when I am not in the office.

I’ll probably take some week-long stints away to work remotely, but the office definitely needs to be my home base.