Remote Insights - The HelpDocs Blog

Trying to Be Productive in a Altered World

It's tough to comprehend how different our world is now. Social distancing, lockdowns, face masks, and empty offices. Here's how it's affected my mindset.

Remote Insights

Is Your Stay for Business or Pleasure?

Hotel life sounds glamorous but the reality sets in when you live in them full-time running a business. Is it business or pleasure?

Remote Insights

Stepping Off the Startup Treadmill

Notifications can become overbearing especially for remote teams. Here's my experience learning to take a step back and focus my time more wisely.

Stories

Time, Tickets and Video Games

It’s 9:07pm on a Tuesday night. I’m sat on the sofa in my living room. My wife’s gone to bed to read. It’s now my

Stories

Hiring Through Exhaustion

I’m exhausted. Fatigued by a week-long deluge of “Dear Hiring Manager” and generic cover letters. In the latest entry to our epic hiring adventure, we decided to disregard our

Starting Up

Communicating through Emoji

If I’ve learned one thing during the 8 months I’ve spent following HelpDocs, it’s that this company is truly unique. The people here are even more so.

Remote Insights

Managing the Imposter Within

When you try to do everything, you risk achieving nothing. That's what I've learned from decades of struggling with imposter syndrome.

Remote Insights

HelpDocs Has Ruined Marketing for Me, and Here's Why I'm Grateful!

“If you ever need a marketing gig in the future you’re pretty fucked”, Jake remarked during a completely off-topic bout of lighthearted banter about work ethics. We often joke

Remote Insights

My Struggles with Time Management, Education and Support

It takes 23 minutes to recover from an interruption. As I struggled with a sidestep into education, this stat proved to be way more true than I ever thought possible!

Remote Insights

When Customer Happiness is Never a Priority, Does it Ever Become One?

For a while, I’ve been trying to reconcile the idea that many huge companies purposefully avoid placing any effort on their customer service. And worse still, that we, as consumers, kind of let them. We fail to hold them accountable or really call them out on it.

Product Insights

Why we Avoid Discounts and Deals

January is an inexplicably long month. 🕰 Perhaps it’s a kind of repercussion from taking a longer break over the “holiday period”, coupled with the long nights and cold, overcast

Remote Insights

A Rose by any Other Name

A few weeks ago, I got the opportunity to chat with our customers and friends at Referral Rock, about all things referral marketing, customer success, and putting people first. It

Starting Up

Hustling Hard for Happiness

49% of all working days lost in 2016-2017 were due to work-related stress, depression or anxiety. Let’s take a moment to think about that for a second. Work is

Remote Insights

Living Life as a Remote Worker's Better Half!

As the wife of a HelpDocs remote worker, I've read many blog posts that talk about what it’s like to work remotely. A quick Google search returns pages and

Starting Up

Breaking the Bad Habit of Breaking Habits

Around 18 months ago, I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror, and it made me feel sick. A couple of years before, I'd quit a 14-year smoking habit,

Remote Insights

Rediscovering Work-life Balance: What I Learned While Honeymooning in a Swedish Airbnb

Regular readers and followers on Twitter might have already picked up on my love of balance. The Swedes have a word for this, Lagom, which roughly translates to something like

Remote Insights

Delusions of Culture: Making Remote Work as a Small Team

Since working at HelpDocs the past few months, I’ve become a pro at explaining what remote work is and how it works. So much so, I’m thinking of adding it to my CV under “additional skills”.

Remote Insights

Actually, Distractions Aren't a Bigger Problem for Remote Work

As I write the bulk of this post, I'm sat at my desk, tucked in a nook in the dining room of the Grade II listed country cottage I rent

Remote Insights

Not All Remote Jobs Are Equal

When I began working remotely full-time in 2015, years of occasional freelancing had skewed my expectations. I'd become convinced life would be greener if I were only freed from the