I'm Going Crazy In My House

Reflecting on the definition and implications of remote work

The Teardown

Wednesday :: January 17th, 2024

👋 Hi, this is Chris with another issue of The Teardown. In every issue, I cover how daily life evolves in concert with the technology we use every day. If you’d like to get emails like this in your inbox, you can subscribe here.

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Intro: Get Me Out of Here

In November, I dropped my daughter at school and ran into a running club buddy. We exchanged random pleasantries and he then said “I’m going crazy in my house” in the middle of a longer point about work.

He was two months into a fully-remote job and adjusting more slowly than planned. He suggested that we group up one day a week to work together. But, to be clear, we have different jobs at different companies and absolutely no reason to work with each other.

He needed company. And, I decided to function as that company. I also learned, well before COVID, to force myself out of isolating environments. You need sunlight, fresh air, and interactions with people

In December, I met another parent from my daughter’s school who is an in-house litigator working from home. In talking about work-life balance, she abruptly exclaimed: I’m really lonely working at home.

Defining Remote Work

The exchange with my friend and subsequent school-parent motivated me to dive into the concept of “remote” work. My simple definition is this: you work separate (geographically) from most or all of the people that you speak with day-to-day. It means that you don’t see your coworkers daily because there are unreasonable costs tied to meeting in person. In practical terms, you’re too far apart or must deal with an unavoidably horrible commute. It might also mean that your office is close enough but desolate. You go to see empty chairs and desks and then ask why you bother at all.

These scenarios might be obvious now, especially post-COVID, but I think lots of people associate remote work with working from home. It is, in fact, remote work too, but just one type. There is another definition that helps set the broad terms of my thinking about remote work: my direct manager and collaborative teams are remote from me.

I’ve worked this way for most of the last ten years, mostly by accident. In 2014, I started working for a company based in Bermuda, but I was physically in Nashville, TN. In 2017, I started working for a company based in New Jersey, and that’s where my manager lived and worked, but I was based in New York City. My direct teammates and collaborators were entirely in New Jersey. While I was in an office with people, I might go days without interacting with those people. In fact, I didn’t really need to interact with them at all - except to occasionally ask about the location of office supplies, or to be let into the office when I forgot my smart card.

Two months ago, I met with former coworkers who mentioned ongoing microscopic scrutiny on physical card swipes in buildings. Compensation would be tied not only to actual work, but also to whether they went to the office. My quick retort was this:

They should be prepared to let half the company walk away

Whether the number is a third or a half is irrelevant. Workers are now familiar with the flexibility offered by remote work. So, in revolt, they’ll find other jobs. There are plenty out there that explicitly offer remote work or allow for a structured negotiation to achieve it.

That said, remote work is something lots of people want without realizing what it means.

Communication Is Hard(er)

My first anecdote about remote work might be obvious. Some things just take more time to achieve. Why? Huddling together in an office allows for very quick inquiry resolution interactions. You walk to someone’s desk (or corner office), deliver your ask, and a receive the information morsels you need to power forward. Or, you argue it out. Or maybe hug it out.

This sequence is a context switch for both of you, and that’s disruptive. But it allows for an unscheduled free-from information exchange that delivers lots of value in a short amount of time. Suppose instead that you’re remote from this person and rely entirely on phone, email, or something asynchronous like Slack. You might assume that a simple Slack exchange is more efficient.

In a post about remote work, Victor Petersson describes why Slack might not be the answer (emphasis mine):

Either you’re remote-only or you don’t do remote at all. Lots of companies brag about giving their staff the freedom to work remotely. However, the reality is that unless it is in your company’s DNA to be a remote company, it will inevitably favor the team members that are working in the office (in particular if this is where the leadership is). The reason for this is largely related to the flow of information. People chat over the water cooler, over coffee or over drinks after work. This leads to unevenly distributed information, which easily can make people feel left out or that other team members simply assume everyone else knows about something despite it never made it to the official channels. In a remote-only culture however, the information flow tends to happen in a more organized fashion either over email or in the company chat rooms (or even in GitHub Issues).

This concept of a remote-only culture stuck out in the quote. There are thousands of posts about remote-work, remote-first companies, the best and worst strategies, etc. So, a company built remote from the ground does two things well:

1. It kills unnecessary meetings and requires very strict preparation for meetings it needs to hold

2. It promotes over-communicating everything - primarily but not only asynchronously.

However, there is a third aspect to a remote company that helps the most: it pushes people to be very clear and concise when they communicate. You can argue that every company should require that prerequisite training course. I’m a member of that camp too.

The reality is much more complicated. Some people communicate in passive terms. They tell you to do things or ask you questions but in the squishiest possible manner. You may stumble across a leader defaults to asshole-mode. You might have coworker that prefers email exchanges, another that prefers phone calls, and yet another that prefers asynchronous Slack and Teams sharing. Different time zones befuddle even the best calendar warriors. And don’t get me started on collaboration tools. It’s not a stretch for a company to use more than one collaboration tool and subsequently lose a true enterprise-wide sense of where anything is.

All of these traits remind of a normal company. And, as you might conclude, that means I think most companies aren’t configured for remote-native work. Defaulting instead to in-office work allows these companies to trim away much of the coordination I just mentioned. You need email, Slack, and Teams less when you’re huddled in the same geographic location.

Spend Time Your Way

By contrast, most of us now know that the work “day” may be more of an amorphous blob than it ever was. You work for two hours, run an errand, pound the keys for two more hours, exercise, work, eat dinner, work, and clock what would be eight hours of office work in a normal setting. You need lots of discipline to be productive. Much of that has to do with habits, something I wrote about not long ago, and Victor highlights in his post:

Habits will make or break you as a remote worker. As mentioned earlier, remote work is not for everyone. It requires a lot more self-discipline than a regular office job where you’re constantly “supervised.” Over the years, I’ve experimented with a large number of habits, and at this point I’ve devised a set of habits that work pretty well for me (but they are likely to change as I keep experimenting). The most important habit when working remotely from home is to mentally trigger a beginning and an end of the work day. It’s easy to sit in your PJs or sweats all day just because you can, but it will likely backfire in the long-run.

Indeed, habits do make or break me. Victor describes how he constructs a typical day in his post. Here’s my take:

• 5:00 am | COFFEE, COFFEE, COFFEE

• 5:05 am | Write The Teardown or work if I have pre-set plan to get something specific done. Also, allocate time to personal errands (at home) as needed.

• 5:30(ish) am | Work-out, and these days, I go to a gym rather than work-out in my house.

• 6:30 - 7:30 am | Clean up, hang with my miniature people

• 7:30 am - 3 pm | Work. I start earlier. I am a morning person and find that I’m sharper and more efficient during the earlier part of the day.

  • 8:30 am | Break. Walk oldest daughter to school

• 3 pm - 5 pm | Work/Personal. This is the point in the day where I might go back to a few personal to-dos and finish or handle them, or continue work if I have the momentum. But, exhaustion is also setting in. I don’t pretend to be productive when I know I’m not.

• 5 pm - 7:30 pm | Hang with my miniature people, make/eat dinner, clean up, etc. I’m mostly disconnected from work at this point in the day.

• 7:30 pm - 9/10 pm | Husband/wife hang, primarily. Work, if something has to be done. Errands, if they have to be done.

Victor describes two qualifications around his own process:

Clarification: This does not necessarily mean I work 10 hours per day every day (sometimes I do). I do take a lunch as well. Also, I am perfectly happy to wrap my day at 17:30 after a productive and successful day. The 19:30 hard stop, not as hard requirement for me to work to it every day.

And

As my good friend Milos (@milosgajdos) pointed out while reading a draft of this post, an early start isn’t for everyone. Shifting your day is perfectly fine too. The point is not when you start your day and when you wrap it, but building and sticking to habits that make you productive.

Similar to Victor, I sometimes work more, sometimes less. I don’t penalize or reward those differences and instead just stay focused on maintaining my schedule. The other area I want to highlight is the end of my day. I stop working and cook dinner for my kids, my wife and me, clean up, and wind down. There is an explicit calculation that some things - personal, work - can just get done tomorrow or on some other schedule. Not everything needs to be urgent, to be done today, to tie to some sort of late-night email frenzy.

Victor closes his piece with some additional thoughts on the matter:

What is however related to remote work is the the importance of wrapping up your day. As you may have noticed above, I end my day at 19:30. After that I’m not allowed into my office (unless there’s an emergency). I also try to keep my screen time to minimal in the evenings. In my younger years, I frequently worked late into the night. Yet, even if I clocked more hours, I got less done.

Switching off very is important, and it is a lot more challenging when you’re working remotely. If you’re struggling with switching off your devices at night, one “brute force” approach that I’ve used myself at times is to use one of the many parental control devices. They come in all shapes and forms (ranging from apps to hardware appliances), but what they all tend to have in common is that you can turn off your internet at a certain hour (say after 21:30).

When I spoke with my friend who asked to group together for work, he mentioned a surprising behavior. He and his wife often sit together in bed, working, later at night. Working doesn’t mean drawing or fixing a car for most of us. It means sitting in front of screen to power through an email, Excel analysis, or other similar task.

What struck me wasn’t the work, but instead the lack of boundary between work and non-work. Someone’s bedroom was the same as the workplace. On the other hand, sitting with your spouse does mean something. It’s easy to be incredulous at the concept, but there’s another more common parallel: the couch.

My wife and I like to watch TV at night. We start awake on the couch, and often end up asleep in the same spot. Defer your comments on sleep hygiene for now! The point of the parallel is that it’s time together irrespective of what we’re actually doing. We’re engaged by colocating and worrying less about what we’re actually doing.

So, if switching off is hard because of extreme demands or other reasons to stay on, it seems important to allocate time to switch off on a temporary basis. My simple solution for making time is to conquer free slots in my calendar with single-attendee appointments.

In that time, I’ll pick up the guitar sitting next to me and play it - poorly. Or, I’ll head to my basement and jam on my drums, realizing I was once much better at them than I am today. I also use the time for non-work things - drafting or sending an email I meant to send to a friend. Reading an article in another publication that I previously bookmarked.

The other break that I’ll use starting soon: lunch. With people. Call it a 2024 resolution if you want.

It’s easy to forget that you haven’t seen many people in person when you’re at home. Some of my friends will be more proactive than others. But I see a simple lunch as a useful mental break and something that pays dividends. I’m usually more motivated and energetic after seeing people. And, with some trials and initial anxiety over stepping away from work, hopefully some of my local friends will be too.