The inner game of working remote
How to handle procrastination while trying to work within a delightfully full life
My first job telecommuting was in 1996; I worked from a spiffy DSL line from home, doing customer support via Lotus Notes. It was an oddity then, and I eventually went back into the office for a decade before I started working from home — or the road — again. But I’ve been doing this now for many, many years.
There are no magic bullets to making it work. You can use any keyboard, monitor, or desk lamp that you want. You can work from a deluxe home office or from your bed. You can have a set routine or you can have endless variety in your day. However, there is one constant: You must get the work done.
I sometimes need to remind myself that I’m just a human, like any other human, and find the balance between what I aspire to be and the behaviors I’m prone to feeling bad about. If you’re lucky enough to be a telecommuter with a lot of flexibility in your day, maybe some of what I’ve learned can help you, too.
Experiment to learn what works for you
You can read a thousand articles about working from home, but there’s no substitute for knowing yourself. That requires some experimentation and observation.
Some people do better with routines, other people do well with novelty. I’ve had success with both, but overall I tend to get restless and can fall into a funk if I’m looking ahead to a string of days that all look the same. In the depths of that kind of funk, I don’t get much good work done.
So, despite having a nice peaceful place to work from home, sometimes I need to go work from somewhere else. Lately, I’ve been going into the Medium office in San Francisco; this involves a commute of driving to the train station, taking the train, walking to the ferry, taking the ferry, then walking to the office — and repeat on return. The time spent in the office is fairly short and usually involves a rowdy lunch with coworkers. A productivity hit, right?
Wrong. Those are the days I tend to move bigger strategy projects along. Working on the train or ferry has a strange way of focusing me. Chatting with coworkers in person makes new and better ideas come alive.
I have good, productive days at home, too, but the long haul into the city a couple of times a month is strangely energizing in my work. And more energetic work means better results.
I also cope with my restlessness by trying to keep a vacation or trip on the calendar, even if it’s tentative. Something about that makes it easier to stay on-task at my desk during the week. Working from home is a supreme privilege and I love the freedom it gives me. But I’ve also learned that the only way it works for me is to occasionally take the show on the road—so I’ll also look for opportunities to combine work with a change of scenery.
Take every opportunity to get social time with your coworkers
There’s a subtle thing that can happen if my interactions with coworkers happen only through screens and only for business. I lose a sense of mindfulness about it; they can seem almost like fictional characters in a movie. I feel like there’s a tendency to subconsciously fill in a lot of things in the low-resolution space of Zoom meetings.
When I have a chance to get to know people in real life, though, I have a better appreciation for working with them. There’s a subtle shift in my interior experience of working with others, and it’s for the better.
I’m lucky that Medium brings staff together twice a year to meet in person, and provides opportunities for us to do smaller in-person meetings regionally or around specific efforts.
We also have “donut chats” at Medium, too — short 10-minute one-on-one conversations between coworkers that have nothing to do with work. It’s a chance to laugh and connect over mundane things, like the hilarity of huge cats and smol dogs.
If you have a similar opportunity with your own remote team — or if you can make one — do it. I know, it doesn’t seem like there’s time and Zoom fatigue is real, but this is always worth it.
Learn to discern performance from the performative
I once had a remote boss who radicalized the way I think about work and productivity.
“What if we,” he said, “got all our work done in 2 or 3 hours in the morning, and then just took the rest of the day off.”
I’m not saying you can get away with only working two hours a day, but here’s the thing: Look back at what you got done yesterday, or the day before. If you’d buckled down and really worked hard, could you have gotten all of that done in just two or three hours, instead of eight or more?
It’s almost painful for me to realize that, many times, I could have. And here’s the thing: I’m not doing anyone any favors by staying in front of my desk for X number of hours per day. I’m not paid to be in front of my desk, I’m paid to get things done.
Sometimes it’s better to get up and take 40 minutes to go on a walk than to try to do 40 more minutes of work. Your brain loves a good walk as much as your body does.
If you’re telling yourself you can’t get up and take a walk because you have to stay at your desk and work, you might be “performing” work instead of doing it. If you’ve been trusted to work from home, you’ve been trusted to get work done — not to do work as performance.
Procrastination is short-term mood repair — and it’s been the most difficult part of working from home for me.
Experimenting with routines or novelty, changes of scenery, and the promise of future travel is a form of mood repair that helps me overcome the boredom of routine. Social time with my coworkers is a way of repairing the sense of isolation that can creep up on me unconsciously. Looking at my work day as an opportunity to accomplish something — rather than just work — is an appeal to the pragmatic side of me.
I’m still prone to procrastination, but I’ve learned to look at it for what it is.
Sometimes, getting up to take a walk or planning a day with 5 hours of commute time to go into the office can be a weirdly effective path toward getting some real work done.
