Day in the Life of a Remote Worker: Stuart Sequeira
Day in the Life of a Remote Worker
This spotlight illustrates how each remote worker finds freedom and productivity in their everyday life, in their unique way. Get inspired and see how you can improve your workspace, workflow, and work/life balance.
Name: Stuart Sequeira
Pronouns: he/him/his
Current Job: Engineer at Ninja Forms
Current Location: Albuquerque, NM, USA
Current Computer: 15” and 17” Dell Inspiron laptops
Current mobile devices: Moto x4 with Google Fi connection
What does your typical workday look like?
5:00 am Begin coding with short, frequent stops for coffee and fruit snacks
6:00 am Outdoor exercise, such as going for a run. This is very seasonally dependent as the summer temperatures mandate doing all outside exercise before the sun gets too high in the sky. In the winter, outside exercise won’t happen until the sun has been out to warm up the ground for several hours. I alternate outdoor exercise with indoor floor exercises for strength.
7:30 am Ensure children are awake for (virtual online) class; make breakfast for them and me
8:00 am Ensure children are at their work stations for their first classes. Their stations are around a shared picnic table alongside me so we share a workspace, making visual controls easy.
I continue work with short, frequent stops to do house chores like tidying the kitchen, water plants/garden, and hanging laundry. These stops are usually timed with a coding challenge that I need to think through and they give me a chance to think through the problems more abstractly such that I come back to the computer with better clarity.
11:00 am Lunch time for kids. I tend to make a collection of food on Sunday, which the kids can prepare for themselves. Since their online schedules vary, they each go to prepare their lunches on their own offline time.
4:00 pm Prepare dinner. The start time varies based on how long the meal preparation is.
8:00 pm Occasionally as I get ready for bed, I may opt to watch some online training videos on different coding techniques. It depends on how busy the day was and how alert my mind is.
Throughout all this, there is variation dependent on my wife’s work schedule. What I list here is a typical day for about half the time, when she is out of town. The other half, when she is working from her home office, I adjust my work times to match when she has time off so that we can enjoy family time together.
"Here's my outside office, built in an old horse stall, where I could work while enjoying some sunshine. That ended when the kids’ online virtual schooling started."
Describe your workspace setup:
I sit at a corner of the picnic table set up in our family room with a 24” monitor in front of me, with an ergonomic keyboard. One of the two laptops is on my side as an additional monitor. I have a homemade standing desk along the wall with the other laptop so that I can work while standing/stretching. I tend to have a different project open on the second laptop so that I can switch mental gears when I get stuck on a particular area. The three kids each have their own corner of the table.
What do you listen to while you work?
I don’t listen to anything while working, in part because I must manage the kids’ school work, in part because I’m constantly surrounded by chatter all day, every day, so I enjoy the quiet moments whenever I can get them.
Aside from your phone and computer, name a gadget you can’t live without in your workspace:
I have no gadget I couldn’t live without, but I do love having the kitchen right next door, along with a garden outside, and good running trails nearby. It’s a perfect office setup for me.
Website: https://ninjaforms.com/
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