Chris Ming, Author at Christopher Ming Blog

Remote work experiments for a productive & happy life

Today I want to share tips on how to integrate remote work into your life.

While there’s no “right way” to structure your work and life, seeing examples of how others “counter-program” against the 9-5 can inspire you to tweak your schedule to live a happier, more fulfilling life.

I hope this guide inspires you to experiment with 1 or 2 small changes that’ll save you time, money, and make you more productive at work.

Note: Every quarter I publish an update on goals set for the year. You can read my 2022 Q3 update here.

The Research: Segmentors vs. Integrators

My colleague Alison Kaprielian recently introduced me to the concepts of “Segmentors” vs. “Integrators” in the context of remote work:

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Update: 2022 Goals Q3

I wish somebody would have told me babe / Some day, these will be the good old days
– Ke$ha

At the start of 2022, I said these were my 3 focus areas:

Building my audience, career, and relationships.

From the Q2 recap, my objectives and priorities for Q3 were: :

(High) Publish 1 thread per week

(Med) Systematize blog posting processes to speed up my publishing

(Low) Publish 3 new blog posts about remote work and career navigation

Below, I’ll dig into how things went this quarter.

How did your quarter go? I’d love to hear about it, feel free to let me know.

What happened in Q3?

I achieved these 3 objectives.

The only “gray” area was publishing a weekly thread: I missed a week here or there, so give myself an 8 out of 10. Not perfect, but solid.

When looking at the outcomes these processes were supposed to drive, I fell short. Reality vs. expectation off by these percentages, respectively (list out). More on that below.

So how do I feel about this?

I feel good about the processes developed. I feel confident and undaunted about achieving my long-term goals.

It’s critical to get the process in the right place. To win the audience building game, I need to be (1) consistent and (2) I need to survive. Accomplishing both while managing the vagaries of raising happy small children and an ambitious career is hard.

But the long-term goals I wrote about in What is Rich? continue to motivate me.

Your financial independence boils down to just a couple of numbers. Here are mine:

– $75,000/month
– $6,000,000 net worth

They’re stretch goals for sure, but definitely within reach.

There’s also an element of motivational competitiveness: When I look at other creators in the field, so many further down the path than myself, I don’t see anyone who makes me say: “this person is so much smarter, more hard-working than me, that I couldn’t do what they do.”

I feel like I can be the very best at what I choose to do.

And whether that’s true or not is actually irrelevant.

What matters is that ambition will at the very least make me extremely proficient. So deeper down the rabbit hole we go.

How do I feel about missing quarterly quant metrics?

To be honest, it sucks. It hurts the ego. It’s not fun to post these images of flat lines quarter after quarter. I’m working on shaking that mentality because attaching a feeling, good or bad to these short-term metrics isn’t productive.

They don’t take me out of the game (as they would a CEO of a public company that misses targets quarter after quarter).

These quarterly metrics are not meant to serve my ego. They’re designed to keep me honest. They’re meant to give me signals on what’s working, what’s not, and what needs to change for the next quarter.

Here’s what I’m focused on for Q4

(High) Consistent, sustainable output

Post 3x per week on social. Reduce the frequency of posts (move away from daily and trim back to 3x per week, but improve the quality).

1 newsletter & blog post every 2 weeks. Build reusable content atoms that can be remixed and reshuffled and used in various templates that scale up in components: tweets, newsletters, blog content, products, courses

(Med) Flip from Twitter > LinkedIn to LinkedIn > Twitter

Posts perform better on LinkedIn, get better feedback, and it’s easier to rework that into new content, feel like I’m able to write longer stuff there anyway. So I’ll focus on LinkedIn first, and adapt it for Twitter.

(Low) Find the right balance with engaging on social

Engaging regularly definitely helped with goals. I learned a lot, met cool people, and I liked it

But it came at a cost. I had notifications turned on, it was hard to do focused deep work

So I went the other way and stopped doing it altogether.

Now I’m ready to bring it back towards the middle.

The numbers behind building an audience

As mentioned, quantitative goals were a miss in Q3. I didn’t give much thought to new goals for Q4, but do find tracking this good for my own visibility and posterity.

Twitter Followers

LinkedIn

Blog traffic

This drop in organic traffic was most interesting. One of my popular posts, 10 Remote Jobs With No Experience Required dropped 50% in organic traffic after the latest Google algorithm update. Good reminder about the importance of channel diversity. *

Newsletter subscribers

Changed strategy mid-way through Q3 and started sending the newsletter again. Really enjoying this.

Short updates in other areas:

Career. Started a new role this quarter with a new company, Persefoni. I launched our freemium product, Persefoni Essentials, in my first 90 days. Really enjoying this work and its mission. It’s got its dysfunctions (as all companies do). Fortunately, they’re the dysfunctions I can live with.

Went deep into Deep Work this quarter. Starting to think deeply about problems and challenges again for the first time in a long time.

Relationships / Family. On a trip to Croatia, it dawned on me that long-term travel with family is easier than ever. I used to think that a year abroad, traveling to a different country each quarter would be out of reach as the family grew. But I’m more confident and optimistic than ever.

Training. Training is going well, the goal for 2023 is to get my purple belt. Considering competing in a BJJ tournament in Q1 2023, but not sure yet.

Sleep. Vastly improved with a “shutdown” routine. I track my sleep with HealthMate (from Withings) and it’s been motivating to watch my “sleep score” tick up month after month.

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A 4-step productivity system to banish remote work anxiety

Today I’ll show you how to banish remote work anxiety. You’ll get more done at work. More importantly, you’ll feel like you’re able to actually switch off when you’re not working.

Working remotely for 9 years has been incredible for my career and life.

For most of that time, I’ve also dealt with low- to mid-level anxiety. Never to the point where it was debilitating, but more like this background noise I’m unable to switch off.

Because I can work anywhere, anytime, it felt like there was always something I could be doing.

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6 Simple Steps to Improve Remote Onboarding, Boost Productivity and Reduce Employee Churn

I’m going to show you how to build a fantastic remote onboarding experience. This works whether you’re onboarding your first remote freelancer, or you’re looking to refresh your company’s entire onboarding process.

Employees are at their peak motivation during the first few weeks in a new role. They want to make an excellent first impression. Investing in onboarding keeps that motivation and morale high for the long term. This means a happier, more productive team that sticks with you through the highs and lows.

Unfortunately, remote onboarding is still nascent.

There aren’t defined best practices.

At best, companies try to “port over” their IRL onboarding experience but don’t account for working remotely.

Over the last 10+ years, I’ve worked 7 remote work roles. That’s 7 different remote onboardings.

Here are the 6 things that separate good onboarding experiences from poor ones:

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8 Questions Tech Leaders Ask in Interviews (That You Should, Too)

Today you’ll learn the exact questions to ask in job interviews, and why to ask them. These are the same questions tech leaders from companies like Slack, Eventbrite, Pinterest, and Atlassian ask. Copy them, win more interviews.

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A Beginner’s Guide to Navigating The Messy Middle of Your Career: Earn more money, become recession-proof, and drive results in 90 days

Today I’m sharing 3 frameworks to accelerate through the “messy middle” of your career.

Push through the messy middle quickly and you’ll earn more money, faster, and be happier at your job.

What is the messy middle of your career? It’s the volatile period filled with uncertainty and struggle. As Brian Balfour put it:

Everything is always changing. New roles and functions are always emerging, the underlying knowledge for tech is accelerating, nothing is a linear path. As a result, navigating this part of the journey is chaotic and volatile (source).

This period is critical. The middle makes or breaks a career.

Unfortunately, because there’s no clear narrative arc (hence the “messy”) people rarely talk about it. Or they put too much stock in Steve Jobs’s idea that “you can only connect the dots going backward.” (Arnold was guilty of it, too.)

Instead, here are 3 frameworks to grab the reins of your career and navigate through the messy middle:

Develop a clear hypothesis for your next role
Set yourself up for success in the first 90 days (avoid these mistakes)
Capture upside and limit risk in your career

Let’s jump in.

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Update: 2022 Goals Q2

For most people, goal setting is a waste of time.

Why? Because they don’t track their progress against those goals. If you’re going to set goals, keep yourself accountable. Here is the recap of my Q2 2022, the good, bad, and ugly.

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7 Powerful Ways To Boost Career Growth While Working Remotely

Today, I’m going to share my favorite tips and tools for working remotely. This list has been refined after:

After 9 years of remote work
In 7 different roles
Across multiple industries

Only 16% of companies are fully-remote businesses[efn_note]https://www.apollotechnical.com/statistics-on-remote-workers/[/efn_note]. Companies will spend the next 20-30 years addressing working remotely challenges. This means it’s our responsibility to create a great remote work experience.

By optimizing how you work remotely, you’ll drive more impact, get promoted faster, and earn more money. Plus, life is just more enjoyable.

The problem is most people treat remote work as working at the office… but at home. It’s not. Instead, they need to rethink every aspect of their work processes, routines, and cadences from a remote-first mindset.

Note: if you’re looking to land your first remote job, check out my article here. And if you’re trying to break into tech, read this first.

7 Tips for Working Remotely (That No One Talks About)

Remote work is a skill. The better your skills, the more successful you’ll be in a remote-first career. Here are 7 tips to improve the skill of working remotely:

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Update: 2022 Goals Q1

This is a recap of the first quarter of 2022.

In my 2022 planning post I said:

I’m focused on building my audience, career, and relationships for Q1 of 2022. This is probably an indication they’re going to be the focus for the year.

This quarter I reached the blog traffic goal. I missed on the newsletter and Twitter goals.

For the second quarter, here’s what I’ll tackle and the order of priority:

(High) Build processes to write and engage on Twitter and LinkedIn daily
(Med) SEO optimization for 3-5 blog articles; write at least 1-2 SEO articles
(Low) Define the value proposition of the newsletter; reposition opt-ins

Let’s dig into how things went. Plus, plans for next quarter.

(How did you do this quarter? Would love to read or hear about your retro!)

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The 1000 Hours Outside Challenge: What, Why and Tips to Succeed

My first thought when hearing about the 1000 Hours Outside Challenge? Sounds great, but that’s impossible for us.

Both Amy and I worked — a lot. Our kids spent the entire day in creche (daycare). We lived in an apartment in a city. There was no backyard we could chuck the kids into to leave to their own devices.

But moving to Dublin, Ireland had an unintended consequence: more time outside. We had no choice. With no car, we either walked or took public transportation. Instead of driving everywhere like we did in Albany:

We walked 2km to get groceries at SuperValu
Rode bikes into the city center to catch a movie
Spent hours at playgrounds in Phoenix Park, Inchicore, and Malahide

At the end of 2021, Amy started talking about the 1000 Hours Outside Challenge. Despite my initial skepticism (1,000 hours?! 3 hours a day?) we started tracking our time outside. We realized with existing habits, we were already tracking close to that goal.

And we loved the lifestyle.