Today, I am leaving Hyderabad and going to Bhuj for undefined legth of time. My current job is permissive enough to let me take such a step. And this step brings many challenges.

I have never taken up remote work before. The reason behind thinking about remote work is interesting. A few weeks ago I, Bhaskar, Mohit and Harish were having beers (lot of it) at Harish’s place and discussing ideas. After some time, Harish brought up the subject of “Tell us what happened in past”. As interesting as the topic is, I talked for an hour or so. During this, I heard a sentence from Harish which rings in my ears - “Dude, you need to travel a lot”. Now, this isn’t just an opinion. I think this is a key point.

We all have read a lot of quotes about how traveling is important in one’s life, how it makes one grow etc. But for me, it represents something different. What I really want is knowledge. For me, knowledge is the only thing that is attractive enough. Yes, I understand (a few that I know of) counter-arguments to this. But this is how I think. When I know something, I feel satisfied. Until I discover one more question. Traveling helps this process a lot. We meet a lot of people, we meet nature, we meet questions, we meet answers, we meet opinions, feelings, beliefs, adventure, friends, masters. All of this transforms into knowledge.

My tentative planning is this - stay at home for a while (not sure how long - max 2 months) and go out. Two of my friends - Bhaskar and Jaysinh have (for now) agreed to join me for one month after my stay at home. So if they stay with their decision, three of us shall go to some place in South India and live there. This thought excites me, to be honest. There is one more friend with whom I want to spend some time, but that would only be possible in 2018 it seems.

In the upcoming 2 months I will be focusing on these things - setup Internet connection, figure out ways to handle remote work pace, communication, team and time management.

Being a person who would read all the articles ever written on the topic of remote work, I am reading how others do this. Other thing is, I have a team. And they all have their own ways of working. I talked with others and they all are happy to experiment - which is very nice of them.

Our team is organized in this way: 2 guys are working from their home; 4 are in Hyderabad office. This includes me. And if things go as planned, it will change to the other way round - 2 in Hyderabad and 4 remote workers. This gives us a lot of time to experiment and adjust our methods to function for us. Harish is very good at managing teams - that’s a plus.

This is a quick update. This post will be followed by others in the series - how the plan execution is, how we are implementing the team management etc.

Stay tuned.

Second part