I've been working remotely for a few years. The first few months, if you've never done it before and don't know how to cope, definitely feel as the author described. It's your first time. You're just doing it wrong.
Best way I've over come the social needs is to work out of a local cafe once or twice a week. Get to know the people there. Learn their names. Make friends. Work on a crossword together.
Get a whiteboard. Plenty of notebooks. Take time to journal your day. Thoughts, frustrations, tasks. Explain things to yourself out loud.
Reward yourself. Take a walk to the park. Catch up on the New Yorker Poetry podcast.
I don't find motivation to be a problem so long as the team is good at planning and there's always something to do that I can take action on without bothering folks. Use a system and stick to it: pomodoro, GTD, whatever. Be systematic and work with intent. If you're stuck wondering what you should be doing you need to re-evaluate your process and plug the leaks: you should always know what needs to be done next.
Things that make working remote suck for your remote workers:
1. Hallway planning. Making decisions face-to-face in meat-space and not documenting them anywhere. Everything needs to go into an email list or task tracking system.
2. Poor communication. If you're never available online, refuse too many requests for chats, ignore emails... it can be really frustrating. The great thing about working remotely is that communication can be intermediated by scripts. Set auto-replies, status updates, reminders, alerts.
3. Never enough information. When you're working closely in a group face-to-face it can be easy to draw consensus on an issue and document it with a single, innocuous task in the task manager and not bother filling in the description, properly rating it, tagging it, etc. Always add enough information so that anyone can come along and take care of it without having to hunt you down.
I really connected with your first half there. Self Enrichment!
It's funny, that's a lot of what it takes to keep a dog happy and healthy too. They need a job and friends and play time and special snacks. We just need to take the same care and consideration for ourselves when it's not provided by an employer.
Best way I've over come the social needs is to work out of a local cafe once or twice a week. Get to know the people there. Learn their names. Make friends. Work on a crossword together.
Get a whiteboard. Plenty of notebooks. Take time to journal your day. Thoughts, frustrations, tasks. Explain things to yourself out loud.
Reward yourself. Take a walk to the park. Catch up on the New Yorker Poetry podcast.
I don't find motivation to be a problem so long as the team is good at planning and there's always something to do that I can take action on without bothering folks. Use a system and stick to it: pomodoro, GTD, whatever. Be systematic and work with intent. If you're stuck wondering what you should be doing you need to re-evaluate your process and plug the leaks: you should always know what needs to be done next.
Things that make working remote suck for your remote workers:
1. Hallway planning. Making decisions face-to-face in meat-space and not documenting them anywhere. Everything needs to go into an email list or task tracking system.
2. Poor communication. If you're never available online, refuse too many requests for chats, ignore emails... it can be really frustrating. The great thing about working remotely is that communication can be intermediated by scripts. Set auto-replies, status updates, reminders, alerts.
3. Never enough information. When you're working closely in a group face-to-face it can be easy to draw consensus on an issue and document it with a single, innocuous task in the task manager and not bother filling in the description, properly rating it, tagging it, etc. Always add enough information so that anyone can come along and take care of it without having to hunt you down.