Almost 4 years ago, I started working remotely. I had just moved over to a sales and account management vertical from an operations, which had been my home for 5 years. This change meant that I didn’t need to work onsite anymore: it didn’t matter what office I worked in, since all of the members on my team worked in a different office anyway.

At the time, I was excited about the obvious benefits: the extremely short commute, the freedom to work without major interruptions from coworkers streaming in and out of my office, and best of all, I could work in my pajamas. I had a spare bedroom as a home office and a(n uncomfortable) desk, which I had tried to setup to mirror what I had been used to while I was working onsite.

I didn’t really know what I was doing.

Instead of using my “office”, I worked off of my laptop, on the sofa, distracted by a myriad of things: my cell phone, neighbors talking, household chores I wanted to complete, the TV — the list went on and on. I had gone from having a dedicated working space and multiple monitors to working off of a single laptop screen on my sofa, scrunching what I could onto the limited real estate and getting done less than what I could have.

About seven months later, my now-husband got a new job. So we moved to a new city, and my bad working habits followed me there. I was keeping up with my workload a bit better, but definitely not working to my full potential. I told myself and others that I had gotten into the swing of working remotely. I really believed, it, too. But it would take me another nine months to realize I had a working efficiency problem and then begin to address it. It would take another two months before I had created a dedicated home office that I actually liked. I’ll be honest when I say that I’m still tweaking my space to make it as efficient as I can.

But my issue wasn’t the space, or my desk, or the work I was doing. The issue was that I was working remotely and didn’t know how.

The first time that I thought there might be a deeper problem than just my desk was when I had stopped traveling for work. I was talking nonstop with one of my coworkers at 8:03am – he could barely get a word in and had to tell me a few times to slow down.

In all the excitement of the freedom of remote work, and the chaos of moving to a new city, and my husband traveling for work all the time, and being a new homeowner (and a bunch of other factors!), I had completely missed that my working relationships with my peers was critical to my success. And now that I had been starved for friendship, it had become painfully clear that my interpersonal skills hadn’t sharpened enough to be successful in virtual position.

The full picture was that I needed to work harder (how much harder I didn’t yet know) to build relationships with my coworkers so I could influence change. I needed to work more efficiently, because building those relationships meant devoting more and more time to meetings — both when I was at home and when I traveled to the office. I needed to overcommunicate in ways that my peers working in the office didn’t need to, because my coworkers often couldn’t see my face or read my body language to know that I was on their side, too.

I needed to do these things not just for me, but also because I needed my coworkers to remember me as part of the team even though I wasn’t in the office.

This was almost 2 years ago, and was just the first of a series of lessons I would learn as I navigated successes and failures as a remote project manager. When I wonder about how far I’ve come, I think back to that critical, manic moment when I was yammering in my mentor’s ear.

I don’t want to create the impression that I learned all of these things in a vacuum. I was and still am supported by the best mentors and managers that I could ever ask for, who give me guidance when I need it and freedom when I need that, too. There were I’m sure many moments before my epiphany when I’m sure they were trying to push me in this direction, but I wasn’t ready for the message.

I’m not sure if this blog will help anyone, but right now I think I need to write it. If I can help just one person, it will be worth it, even if that person is me.

If you are here reading, thanks so much! I hope you stick with me.