Whether you’re reading this from your home office, your cubicle, or your yacht in the BVIs, you probably won’t be surprised to learn that 96% of remote workers recommend working from home.

No commute, personal space, pajama jeans and the possibility that you can get more stuff done - #winning.

Beyond the well marketed benefits on company career sites and remote work job boards, working from home gives knowledge workers a path to closeness to self.

Eventually.

Like anything, working remotely takes practice. You put in enough reps to reduce time spent thinking about work so that you can actually do work, to move from self flagellation towards self actualization.

Practice is essential. When you practice, you get the indirect, unadvertised benefits and essential ingredients of an engaged remote worker. You:

build confidence
become self-led
embrace your inner introvert & extrovert, too
remember how to be a human first
own your time

All of these things work in tandem, occurring in small ways simultaneously. Working remotely forces you to work on these things, making you open enough to take on new challenges and grow faster.

Build confidence in the value you add

You are not seen, only heard. This can lead you to make a lot of noise without much of a difference.

You have to be confident enough to shut up and get stuff done with little fanfare.

Without the positive reinforcement of a smile from your CEO every morning or the ability to see the immediate impact of your work, confidence can take a lot longer to build.

Lack of confidence leads to anxiety inducing existential questions. Who am I? Why am I here? What value am I even delivering?

All of this stuff gets in the way of actually delivering value, validating the need to ask these questions in a dizzying catch 22 and putting you at risk of quitting before you ever really get started.

There are fewer sticks or carrots when you’re working from home, so each interaction point takes on a greater weight, with extra attention paid to perceived failures.

Modeled off of leading above the line, Jim Dethmer

The only indications of good performance are, at first, signaled extrinsically.

You forget that with every new job, you’re bad for awhile. This becomes magnified working from home; without seeing the progress or lack of progress of peers in your cohort, it’s easy to forget that you have to be “bad” for long enough to be better.

The stress of feeling like you’re bad at your job creates anxiety, pulling you out of the present moment and out of a place where you’re able to fully engage to do a better job. You are getting in your own way and you can feel it, but still strive for external validation that you’re on track.

If you stick around for long enough, you let down your defenses and let your failures wash over you, allowing you to learn from them instead of deflecting them. You build confidence by taking feedback head on, by taking responsibility. Your failures are not as bad as you think as long as you learn and keep it moving.

You have to care enough to want to be better though.

The faster you can find intrinsic value you in your work, the faster you will have the confidence to get more, high quality work done.

The alternative is low job security, working defensively, living in a perpetual state of fear. Without the confidence that you’re there for a reason (you are) and that you’re learning and growing (you are), you can’t become a self actualized remote employee.

No one can solve this for you, but having an out loud conversation about the fear of failing, sucking and the feeling that you aren’t doing enough opens the door for reassurance but more importantly, support and daily growth.

To be a great remote worker, find your inner self-starter

Startups are less paint by numbers, more choose your own adventure story/race. No one gives you the answers, and when you work remotely, people probably don’t even know that you have unasked questions.

Everyone wants to hire self-starters. “Adults.” What does that mean, really? At a startup, it’s a person who can understand their job description and filter that through the broader company vision to see their purpose and the above and beyond areas that they can impact.

You work with people who understand that they could have cookies for breakfast everyday but don’t, because they’ve already tried it and gotten violently ill or inherently understand the potential problems with cookies as the core of your most important meal of the day.

You will fail as a remote worker if you wait for others to tell you what to do. Failure isn’t necessarily termination, but it’s definitely stagnation, and isn’t that actually worse?

Everyone will assume that you have enough to do. They “see” your workload, your inbox, the notifications you have to field, the aura of stress, real or feigned, that you carry with you in meetings. And maybe you do already have enough on your plate; if so, skip to the next section.

No one knows how much time you’re spending to arrive at the deliverables, and how well you’re really doing. Are you being challenged? Are you giving it your all? Are you worked to the edge of your existence* or quietly bored and disengaged?

At startups especially, there is always more to do; at remote companies, you experience that “more” differently, seeing how breakdowns in communication, silos and systems issues affect everyone else. You’re always a fly on the wall. The problems that are often simultaneously so obvious to you and not yours to deal with are waiting for someone with an idea and a little time to make them matter enough to fix them.

Working from home, you have time that you wouldn’t in an office. Snacks, coffee, the bathroom, your coworkers, your desk are all in constantly close proximity, saving you time. All of these things exist in the background instead of the foreground that they somehow just do in an office, saving you more time still.

The distractions you succumb to are mostly your own.

A self-starter sees this as a challenge, an opportunity to provide more value for themselves, their team and their company. The alternative is to wait. Wait for someone else to tell you about these problems or the ones more pressing to them, or to give you more of the same task oriented work you are already doing.

As busy as you are, you have fewer excuses than you might IRL, and at some point, the confidence to just go for it, because no one else will, and what’s the worst that could happen?

Taking on work helps you level up without playing games - you grow your skillset, you work with different team members in new ways, you deepen your investment in your company. This feels good when it’s something someone else has explicitly tasked you with but great when it’s yours - a business need paired with your unique perspective, passion and/or desire to learn.

Embrace your inner introvert and extrovert, too

You get energy from other people, to a point. You enjoy your alone time, to a point.

Working remotely, there is a clearer separation of time spent around and away from other people. This allows you to enjoy both more.

With fewer accidental interactions and a work culture that allows you to choose how and when you participate, you’re able to have higher quality interactions. You are neither extroverted nor introverted, you just are.

This new sense of being comes from the headspace you get away from a busy open office. You are no longer a victim of all of the people that are trying to eat your brain. You can, when needed, disconnect. Not just jump into a coffin sized phone booth, but excuse yourself from Slack to focus intensely, stretch your legs, get some icecream.

You need different things at different times depending on the type of work you’re doing, the team you’re working with, the way you’re expected to communicate and the external forces that impact your energy throughout the day and week. And that’s ok.

If you spend too much time alone, you will begin to go crazy, and repeat the confidence killing cycle from the last section. If you give too much of your time away, you will begin to go crazy, because as much as you like being with other people, you don’t feel like you’re getting anything done.

Checkin with yourself on that balance regularly. The energy saved from unnecessary external stimuli and distraction can be poured back into deep work and more intentional social experiences in and outside of work.

Working remotely lets you be a human first

You were taught in office jobs the importance of self sacrifice. Be the first one to work and the last to leave. Make sure your personal life - family, doctors appointments, vacations etc - doesn’t interfere with work. Many of these things may not be the fault of your previous organization but show their failure to explicitly rewrite unwritten law, and your failure to unlearn habits you’ve held for so long for good and bad reasons.

Sitting behind a screen all day can easily become an escape from genuine connection, but hopefully its a portal to more of it.

When you work from home, your life and your work become less clearly defined. You work earlier and later than you might at an office. Funnily, many office workers feel the same grey area, and perhaps resent it more because they don’t get to occupy it from the comfort of their favorite cushy chair.

Yes, boundaries are important, but so is flexibility. Done intentionally, you are a benefactor of loose boundaries, not a victim of it.

As a working parent, being able to get up early and get started then take your child to school at a reasonable hour without rushing lets you be a better, more grounded version of yourself.

When you don’t worry as much about arbitrarily arriving to the office by a certain time, you can slow down to enjoy a wholesome seated breakfast and laugh instead of cry when your kid falls in mud as you walk out of the house, prompting a hug, a retelling of that spilled milk metaphor and an all too necessary costume change.

You can rush less and take time without fear because you return to work whole, able to contribute at a higher level. You can create more value in this state when you are engaged enough in your personal world to be present in your work world. You choose to make time for the things that are important to you without losing sight of the job to be done.

The balance and imbalance of your personal and work life working from home

It’s an almost impossible balance to strike, but much easier as a whole human, which remote work not only allows but encourages. You have the ability to compartmentalize your life, sure, but do you totally want to? All parts of you are invited to peacefully coexist.

It ebbs and flows - there are magical days in seemingly perfect balance, and days that are so out of whack it’s painful. The difference from an in person office experience is that this isn’t an anxiety inducing burden you have to carry quietly on your own - you acknowledge the time everyone needs and takes to live outside of work, to be human.

Own your time

At some point while working from home, you begin to understand that you are largely in control of your own time. Everyone tells you this, but it takes time to sink in.

Up until this point, you will feel like everything is happening to you unless you create boundaries. Not just for the sake of creating them, but to protect your precious productivity.

When you understand time as a limited commodity that you own, everything comes into hyperfocus. What are the critical few things that you have to do each day/week? Beyond that, what is the single highest impact thing you can move forward this week?

You start to design your time rather than manage it.

You create structure through scheduling so that you don’t have to think about making time for the essential things, and you don’t give time away to the non-essential too easily.

You don’t set out to create a 4 hour work week, but you do set out to be more intelligent about how you deliver and prioritize value. You assess this through the lens of yourself and your team: your family, your friends, your company.

Nap time is important to me. I am queen of micronaps. At my 1st IRL startup job, I would nap before work on days that I taught early mornings, curling up in my car trying to refill my tank before diving into the hustle. It was a quasi-acceptable upgrade from falling asleep at my desk after lunch during my first college internship, although inemuri is encouraged in Japan.

You need time to rest and recharge to be at your mental, physical and emotional best. The decline of any of these three has an immediate although often unacknowledged impact on your work life and your life life. You know and share this with yourself, your friends and even your team members but perhaps leave this part of you out of checkins with your boss.

Instead of finding balance, you burn the stress candle, letting anxiety overtake your mind and move you from an embodied existence to one that spends all day and night thinking about thinking and feeling and doing without living at a high level in your high level head heart or hands. At some point though, you or someone close to you sees the wax dripping and the light fading. Do you really want to work/live this way?

You reclaim time by looking closely at what exactly the hell you've been doing for the last few months at work, reminding yourself of your values (your company’s and your own) and getting brutally, uncomfortably and refreshingly honest with yourself through a start, stop, continue exercise.

Stop Start Continue Working Remotely.png

This doesn’t give you a blank slate, but takes enough off of your must do list to rebuild your schedule. How you spend your time dictates how you feel, who you are, and who you become. It isn’t a one and done solution, but it's a start, a structured way to support intentional habit. You’ll tweak quarterly as your role develops and new challenges arise.

Creating your own schedule and sticking to it teaches you to prioritize your work for yourself. Great work doesn’t happen accidentally. You translate priorities into a calendar without anyone else hovering over you so that you can free up mental energy - you think about doing work less and just get stuff done.

Through this, you free yourself from the energy and stress you otherwise spend making hundreds of minuscule decisions every week and every day. You have a limited amount of discpline; what do you choose to spend it on?

The things that matter to you are different than the things that matter to me. Until you know not only what these things are but why these things are, optimizing your schedule is a moot exercise. Hopefully, the potential of freedom from self created anxiety is enough of a glimmer for you to do the work to get started. If not, if you choose to tell yourself that you’re too busy, maybe this plants a seed in your mind that eventually helps you take your own hand and lead yourself back to the place you need to be.

I love the working from home greatest hits - spending all day in athleisure, saving time commuting, getting to work alongside the best people in the world. What I am endlessly amazed by is the hobbies and pursuits of the team that I worked alongside, albeit remotely. With a little practice and belief in balance, remote work is a mode of fulfilling more of your potential, personally and professionally.

What do you think? What am I missing? Let me know in the comments.