Tips for Working From Home

Given a lot of people I know are experiencing working from home for the first time, I thought I’d like to share some tips and tricks that have worked for me. Working from home can be hard at the best of times, and this is far from the best of times. Let me assure you: nobody is working at 100% productivity these days. Even seasoned remote workers are stuck dealing with the uncertainty of the world, fighting the urge to check the internet at five minute intervals to see things have gotten worse or better. With that in mind, give yourself some empathy. This is hard, but working remotely comes with some upsides are very nice: flexibility, and unbeatable commute, etc.

With that preface said, let’s get into it. How do you work from home effectively?

Habits

The first trick to working remotely is to maintain the habits you had at your normal job, and impose a few at home to help keep you sane. I often joke that the first rule of remote work is “Wear Pants”, but in that joke is a grain of truth: make sure you get dressed. Do your normal routine for getting out of the house.

I found when I started it was really valuable for me to go for a walk in the morning: 10-15 minutes to act as a ‘pseudo-commute’ to let my brain change gears was really valuable. Two and half years in I don’t tend to do this any more, but perhaps as Addie gets older and her sleep schedule normalizes we’ll try to bring it back.

If you go to the gym at certain times during the day, maybe you can’t do that right now, but figure out how to do some exercise at those times.

Take your lunch hour: And make it a full hour, and don’t read your email or do other ‘background work’ during it. Go watch some TV, hop on a video conference and eat with your colleagues.

Work Space

Figure out where you work. Find some space in your space that’s your workspace. Ideally away from other people, to the extent you can.

Time Blocks

A really important aspect of working from home is establishing what your work hours are. If you work for a flexible organization like Mozilla, there’s no reason those hours need to be 9-5, but, for your own sanity, choose the hours that work for you, your family and your team. Perhaps it makes the most sense for you to get up early, work from 6-9, then from 1-3, and again from 7-9; whatever you decide is fine, but choose a set of hours, and stop working outside them. The dirty secret of remote work is that it allows your work to bleed into the rest of your life if you let it, and that’s a recipe for burnout.

Distraction and Focus

You’re going to get distracted. You’ll have times when you can’t focus. You have a few different options for how to handle those.

Block Those Distractions

If you have internet distractions, one option is to use some tools to block your distractions. I get great use out of both LeeechBlock and Self-Control. These help stop me from the ‘I need to wait five seconds for an operation to complete, quick let me check the news and twitter and oh god an hour has gone bye’ loop.

If there’s noises in the house, I find that using a noise generator can be really valuable. I like ‘natural’ white noise, so for example this “white rain” is a pretty excellent tool, because it blocks out voices and things, without sounding like you’re in some sort of engine room. Speaking of engine-noises though, this sound of the Enterprise idling is fun too.

Accept Them

When you work remote, you forget just how much time you spent at the office wandering around, chatting to colleagues in the hallway. It’s difficult to recalibrate your notions of ‘productivity’ to remote work, but one important aspect is acknowledging you can’t always get shit done; sometimes you need to wander away. Go for a walk, make yourself a coffee, deliberately read some news. It’s ok!

Video

While chat systems like Matrix and Slack are useful, and we’re all doomed to email forever, be aggressive about choosing to hop onto a video call at the first sign of communication roughness. Finding you can’t type fast enough to express the thoughts you’re trying to? Losing track of what the other person is trying to communicate in their loopy email style? Hop onto a video call.

It doesn’t really matter how. We use Zoom at work, and it’s pretty nice. But Skype works, or even in your browser there are video conference systems like Whereby. The important thing is to get something setup with your colleagues such that you can be talking to each other in a a couple of minutes if you decide to go video, rather than spending a bunch of time fighting your AV setup.

Doing Video Calls right:

1. Wear headphones. Anti-echo software is really good these days, but if it goes wrong it’s crazy distracting. Please; wear headphones.
2. Chose the best microphone you have available. A lot of software will echo your voice back to you: try the microphones you have (often laptop, and headset ones), and choose the one that sounds best to you. It’s important.
3. Put the camera on a steady surface: Nothing like giving your colleagues sea sickness as your camera bobs and weaves while you balance your laptop on your knees.
4. Mute yourself if you’re typing (especially if you are using the microphone built into your laptop). The sound of typing can be really really annoying!

Conclusion:

Remote work can be hard, but it can also be fantastic. Give yourself space and time to figure it out, but you can do it.

If you have questions, let me know!

The Citizen's Guide to Climate Success

I spent a little over a week reading through Mark Jaccard's newest book, The Citizen's Guide to Climate Success: Overcoming Myths that Hinder Progress. Notably, the book is Open Access, and so it's downloadable from that link (and it's even possible to send all the chapters to Kindle, which I find slightly surprising!)

Summary

In the book Dr. Jaccard discusses eleven myths which he argues prevent us from succeeding at addressing climate change. By describing the myths, and how they are unhelpful, he is trying to guide concerned citizens to what he sees as the most likely route to success, which is:

1. Transforming and decarbonizing a few key sectors of the economy first: Transportation and Electricity production. While he doesn't advocate ignoring other sectors, these are key sectors to target initially because they are domestic services, where we don't need to worry about competition from other countries, and we know this can be done because near-zero emissions technologies already exist at reasonable costs.
2. Decarbonizing other emissions intensive industries that are exposed to global trade, using 'climate clubs', where groups of countries cooperate to implement carbon tariffs imposed upon imported goods that vary based on the carbon emissions of production.
3. Assisting poorer countries in adopting low-emissions energy.

One theme that runs through the book is the need for flexibility on the part of campaigners to address climate change.

Indeed, we cannot be rigid about solutions. We must pay attention to technical, economic, political, and social feasibility, and be willing to shift our preference for a particular action or policy if one of these factors presents an insurmountable barrier to its contribution

For example, while economists see carbon taxation as the most cost-effective mechanism for reducing carbon emissions, they have become a political nightmare almost everywhere. As a result of this, a fixation on carbon taxation is counter-productive if the goal is decarbonization. In the book he discusses other policies: Cap-and-Trade and flexible regulations which have had a great impact in some areas, and are more politically feasible in many areas than carbon taxes. I found this to be particularly interesting. I know I have historically been heavily in favour of carbon taxation as a road to climate success, but after finishing the book I have to wonder if we haven't wasted a decade in Canada by choosing to argue and fight about Carbon Taxes rather than trying to find the most politically acceptable solution.

Politics is another very interesting theme that runs throughout the book. Dr. Jaccard has been working in this field for a long time, advising many different governments of many different stripes over a long period. This experience has obviously made it very clear to him that the only way we are going to decarbonize is through the effective use of our political power as citizens:

This leaves one last task on the simple path to climate success. We must be able to detect and elect climate-sincere politicians, and then pressure them to implement a few simple policies, such that any citizen can detect procrastination and evasion.

He includes in the book a diagram he titles the "Guide to citizen behaviour for climate success"

As you can see, there's an important set of bars we can apply to our politicians to help drive climate success: Targets, Policies, and the stringency therein. I think perhaps that is the most important takeaway from the book: We as citizens must exercise our political muscles to make action on climate change happen. There are huge benefits to political careers in dilly-dallying and paying lip-service, but we as citizens are the only people who can really hold politicians to this course of action.

In any case, it’s time to stop feeling guilty about ourselves as consumers and start feeling guilty about ourselves as citizens. As consumers, there is little we can do with the guilt in those cases where we have no realistic options to reduce GHGs. As citizens, however, there is a lot we can do. There is a lot we must do. But it won’t always be comfortable

Other Notes

I think this book is likely an excellent resource to share with people who want to effect change on climate. I found Dr. Jaccard's style in the book to be very interesting: He wrote the entire book in extremely plain language. You can feel throughout his aversion to overly technical jargon. While the book is excellently notated with citations for various assertions he makes, the actual style is extremely plainspoken throughout. It made reading the book very low cognitive effort.

As someone who was a believer in some of the myths he deconstructs ("We Must Price Carbon Emissions", "Energy Efficiency is Profitable", "Renewables Have Won") I found this book to be an extremely helpful corrective.

Quotes

I'd like to leave with some of the quotes I highlighted on my read through, because I found them valuable:

Demanding that the global climate agreement only happen if it is seen as equitable by every country on the planet is to ensure that it won’t happen. Those who demand this need to look in the mirror when it comes to allocating blame for a continued global failure that is now especially harming the poorest people on the planet.

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If we allow the fossil fuel industry to paint our domestic efforts as globally futile, these efforts will be thwarted.

When they say, “Our oil, coal, or gas is ethical because when you buy from us your money doesn’t go to terrorists,” Steve now wonders, “How ethical is it to harm current and future generations with climate change simply to enrich yourself?”

These are just some of the justifications for continuing on our high-risk path. The false logic and biased evidence are easily refuted, but informing the public is not easy. This is why people who understand the need to act quickly on the climate threat must lobby for and support compulsory policies, domestically and globally, and actively help their neighbours, friends, and family achieve this same understanding.

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The fossil fuel industry and insincere politicians would like nothing better than to delay compulsory decarbonization policies by claiming that we need behavioral change. We must not play into their hands. Instead, we should prioritize the one behavioral change that can make a big difference: changing our behavior as citizens and voters to more forcefully pursue deep decarbonization policies.

Provincial Investment in Oil and Gas

I am extremely angry right now with my provincial premier. So angry, I’ve taken time out of my work day to write and send the following letter (and post this blog post) to him, CC’d to my MLA.

I am extremely angry to see today’s article where Premier Kenney proposes investing public dollars into Oil and Gas.

As an Albertan, I don’t want to see my provincial dollars supporting a private industry who could totally operate successfully on private capital markets if only our provincial leadership would listen to those markets about what is demanded before investment: It has become increasingly clear that first and foremost, capital markets are demanding control of climate emissions.

For example: Larry Fink of BlackRock investments:

The evidence on climate risk is compelling investors to reassess core assumptions about modern finance. Research from a wide range of organizations – including the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the BlackRock Investment Institute, and many others, including new studies from McKinsey on the socioeconomic implications of physical climate risk – is deepening our understanding of how climate risk will impact both our physical world and the global system that finances economic growth.

It’s time the Alberta Government stop being a laggard on Climate: Become a leader and the money will follow.

You want to support Alberta oil and gas? Don’t throw public money at it: Build policies and legislation that will demonstrate to the world and investments that put Alberta’s assertion that we can have climate action and resource development to the test.

Mr. Kenney: You believe in Alberta: then lead us to the future the rest of the world already sees coming. Quit lollygagging and throwing good dollars after bad.

— Mathew Gaudet

Of course, I was so freaking annoyed, that I both spelled my own name wrong, spliced a sentence and forgot a salutation.

You hear from so many right wing politicians that we can have resource development and action on Climate Change too. If they truly believe that, then they need to demonstrate that by backing up their words with legislation that will enforce success on climate change.

I don't believe a word my premier says on climate change, because their actions aren't nearly enough.

You want my support for the oil sands Mr. Premier?

1. Legislate the 100MT emissions cap.
2. Mandate that the emissions cap drop by an appreciable fraction every year. Let's say by 4MT per year: That brings the emissions cap to zero by 2045.

If you can't do that, then you don't believe in what you're saying, that we can succeed at climate and have resource extraction.

The Burnt Wasteland of E-Commerce?

I get the impression that people think that e-commerce is pretty bad for the environment. To an extent, I get that: We’ve all had big bundles of cardboard boxes smiling back at us in the hallway once or twice I expect.

I do wonder if our expectations around this are accurate. Think about something like Grocery delivery. Imagine on a given day, a small grocer has 50 electronic orders, and needs one truck to work a full day making those deliveries. It seems to me that when you think about routing, one truck doing a fairly minimal traveling-salesman-order is going to be way more efficient than 50 people driving to the grocer and home.

Now of course, there are problems with induced demand, increased consumerism, but I feel like there are efficiencies derived from the ability to just be patient and wait a few days, allowing the enormous logistics engines at work that power e-commerce to batch things together, ultimately minimizing the impact relative to having a big store everyone goes to (where there’s all kinds of questions about utilization).

Efficiency isn’t a universal good here of course. Some of the efficiency allows a small number of people to have jobs doing an enormous quantity of work, whereas employment levels are higher with local stores; this is the hollowing out of city economies by various giants.

Anyhow: I’d love read a deep dive into the impact of e-commerce, and whether or not it’s more or less efficient than the big box stores of yore.

The Green New Deal: The enormous opportunity in shooting for the moon →

Wow, this piece, a precursor to the one I posted earlier, is even better. (My god I hate Medium.com tho)

Some amazing quotes:

People will raise the specter of how we will pay for all of this. That is not the right way to think about it. Given the enormous cost savings from future efficiencies, the question should be “how do we finance this slam-dunk investment?” Reducing a major source of costs by 50% should be seen as the source of unassailable competitive advantage for our economy, an investment sure to repay itself many times over.

Summarizing how this isn’t a deprivation plan

In short, without changing the size of our homes, or our cars, or fundamentally changing the fabric of our lives, these discounts mean that a fully electrified energy economy using non-carbon fuel sources would require less than half of the total amount of energy we use today.

How to solve climate change and make life more awesome

I listened to this podcast the other day, based loosely on this article by Saul Griffith. I highly recommend giving it a listen (the article has sources, but is less of a good read than the interview is a good listen). One thing that is worth calling out from the article, is the discussion of Carbon Tax as a fairly weak measure. I tend to agree with it, despite supporting carbon taxation.

A second thing I want to call out, that I really believe is key, from this podcast is the same pull quote used on the Vox page:

I think our failure on fixing climate change is just a rhetorical failure of imagination. We haven’t been able to convince ourselves that it’s going to be great. It’s going to be great.

Let’s plan to get aggressive about this next year. Let’s get louder. Let’s all get more involved.

I plan to.

OK Doomer

A couple of weeks ago I started writing a blog post trying to articulate some of my feelings about a pair of pieces published in the Tyee that ruined my whole damn day. (Honestly, maybe don't even read them, they might ruin your day too).

A good chunk of my feelings were actually covered by a rebuttal piece called OK Doomer, from which I will quote liberally.

On being realistic:

We need to switch from being “realistic,” implying the need to accept defeat, to being ambitious, bringing a determination to do whatever it takes. We need to stop spreading the fear that the energy descent needed to tackle the climate emergency will wreck people’s comfortable lives, or that it is something “for which our civilization doesn’t have an ethos or a vocabulary.”

This bit echos some of my own thoughts

Item six calls for retraining the workforce for constructive employment in “the new survival economy.” Retraining, absolutely. We need to provide income security to every fossil-fuel worker during the transition. But “the new survival economy”? That suggests training in how to light a fire in a cave, not how to build a Passive House.

When we frame our thoughts around the negative language of “energy descent” and “deliberate contraction,” we confirm people’s fear that solutions to the climate and ecological emergencies will wreck their comfortable lives. This is so harmful. It’s like a sports coach telling her athlete that winning a medal will ruin her family life, and besides, it’s impossible. Is this really the message we want to deliver to the millions of young climate strikers who are packing the streets demanding urgent climate action?

In my first post in my Climate Change category I said this:

Climate Change scares the shit out of me. It should scare the shit out of you too. But, sometimes I spot some good news stories that help me keep the hope up.

I want to expand on this a bit.

I am scared by climate change. More than anything, I'm terrified that I did a disservice to my daughter by bringing her into this world. I am scared that I have resigned her to a life that will be so much worse than my own. Beyond my own family, I'm also scared that it will be climate induced pressures that will bring great violence back to the world.

I'm scared that we'll all have to watch the world fall to pieces, in the name of "our economy". I'm scared that capitalism cannot be harnessed for good in the final throes of an ecological challenge, and that all we will be able to do is watch as our political and economic systems drive us over the cliff, paralyzed by those who will profit in the short term by our fall.

I'm scared that no amount of work I could do on this issue can change the course of the juggernaught that rolls towards us daily.

I'm horrified that because my family has a reasonably high income, living in a first world nation, fairly far north, far from coastal shores, there is a good chance that we will be able to dodge the worst outcomes. We live a climate privileged life.

Despite all this fear though: I wonder about the value of our media's obsession with doom. I don't want a propagandistic media that puts yellow smiley faces on the front page every day and says "All is Well". Yet, surely we needn't live in a world where all we read is "We are totally fucked!".

In my darkest moments, where I feel least sure we can fix the world, I feel a powerful urge to go forth and ruin it more. To really dive into international travel; do some doom-tourism. See the places in the world that will be lost as the seas rise. I'll bet I'm not alone in this. We need people to see the world as continuing past their own lives, past their children's lives, and getting better.

I really wish we could figure out how to tell a hopeful story, without falling down to the level of mere propaganda.

I Recently Learned About: The Air Force Academy Chapel

Occasionally I find myself trapped in a hole of knowledge; this may become a recurring section as I dump that knowledge on you! Today’s edition: The Air Force Academy Chapel.

Mostly, I just want to share with the world that it is a place that exists, and looks like this:

Photo by Anthony Quintano (CC BY 2.0)

Built in 1962 to support three faiths, today the chapel has room for five major religions (Protestantism, Catholicism, Judaism, Islam, and Buddhism), as well as an All Faith worship area, and an Earth-centric worship circle.

The whole thing is beautiful science fiction insanity, but the Protestant Chapel takes the cake:

Photo by Brook Ward (CC BY-NC 2.0)

Dorks like me will note that this chapel inspired the chapel in Wreck-it-Ralph.

Seriously: Browse the Flickr photos.