A Worthy Life Goal

If you can do your job with just a computer and a phone, you have a rare and powerful chance to live a better life. You should fight hard to use this opportunity to design the life you want.

Your life will not automatically get better if you work from home, but it does provide the power for you to improve it. You will not have whiter teeth, experience shorter lines at the DMV, or get access to the world’s best jewels. But it does give you the flexibility to control a few hours of your day, and this can lead to massive changes. Managing your space and time means that you can wear one of those weird teeth-whitening strips all day and go to the DMV when people aren’t there. It won’t let you wear the best jewels in the world, but it will allow you to visit museums that might have some on display with your kids on a Tuesday afternoon. Or it just lets you focus on what is rare, precious, and beautiful in your own life, like spending time with your children.

In a word, remote work gives you margin. It gives you a bit more time, a bit more money, a bit more flexibility to your schedule, and a bit more flexibility in your location.

Freedom and Flexibility

Many great movies, books, and comic strips tell us that going to work is miserable. From wearing a tie to the rat-in-a-cage feeling of working in a sad cubicle, these works speak to the core feeling that many of us have had: that having to drive to work and follow specific arbitrary rules to do our work is depressing, demotivating, and pointless.

Working from where you wish separates traditions from work itself, allowing you to make more precise decisions around what you want to accomplish. Being in charge of your work environment is empowering. You are responsible for the work itself, and all other concerns are secondary: what you wear, how you set up your desk, what time you eat lunch, even what time you start. Just the ability to not work underneath artificial light in a smelly old office is a welcome change for many. The simple ability to add variety to your work environment can significantly improve how you enjoy your job.

The people that you will spend your work hours with can be your coworkers, or it can be friends at co-working spots, your family, or the people at your local coffee shop. The people you work with also feel this freedom; you have surrounded yourself with happy people, and this will rub off on you.

We never know when we will need the margin until we need it, and we never know how powerful the margin is until we have it. A few years into my remote-work life, an illness within my family made the experiment a required way of life. I needed to be around to take a family member to daily doctor’s appointments, cook them lunch, give them medicine, and keep an eye on them. I needed to be a part-time nurse while also working.

Within a traditional office setup, this illness would have been a multi-month Human Resource Situation, my entire team would have to know all about it, and I would have been afraid of losing my job and insurance. Instead, I could split my day into two work blocks and fit all the other needs around it. Most of my coworkers were not even aware of it, as I was able to keep getting my work done. Merely having the little bit of extra margin that location-independent work provides allowed me to escape all of that; you never know when you can use extra margin.

Time Margin

Your primary reason for working from home, your core benefit, is most likely different than other people’s because it is this: it gives you more time. There are very few things in life that do this.

Imagine an extra day call FreeDay that happened every week between Friday and Saturday. The rules of FreeDay are pretty simple:

Everything operates as a typical weekday: kids are in school, buses are running, The Price is Right is on, etc.
You don’t have any extra work to do.

How would you spend this extra time? Some ideas:

Sleep in or catch up on all that sleep you lost working or living.
Watch that Netflix show you stopped after episode three a few months ago.
Go for a jog.
Try out that new BBQ place.
Read more.
Eat all the cheese that you own.
Write more.
Play with your kid’s Legos.

Now I’ll make it less fantastical and say that FreeDay actually can’t be taken at one time. You have to chop it up and spend it throughout the standard weekdays. Do your answers change? Mine would:

Taking and picking up the kids from school.
Eat lunch with my kids at their school every few weeks; be a mystery reader at their school more often.
Read more books myself.
Watch more TV.
Exercise more.
Sleep an extra hour every few days (because of extra exercise).

FreeDay isn’t some crazy fantasy. If you have a traditional commute, you spend around 30 minutes twice a day in your car [1]. This adds up to five hours a week that you are already spending that you can save by killing your commute. Add in other secondary time like getting gas, going out to lunch from the office, going to the dry cleaners, and other driving you have to do because you have to leave from work, and you get almost an entire day of your life back every week.

Improve your Health

Despite the stereotype of an unwashed overweight worker in their pajamas screaming at the neighbor’s dog while holding a bowl of cereal at 3 o’clock, at-home workers are on average healthier than their in-office counterparts [2].

There are many reasons for this:

They spend less time on average in the car (lower stress, less sitting).
They have more flexible schedules and wardrobes and are more likely to maintain an exercise routine.
They get higher quality sleep [3].
They get positive mental benefits of reduced stress [4].
They can cook lunch at home more quickly.

Merely having more control over your schedule can provide you with a greater range of acceptable exercise times and more time to sleep well. The mental benefits of controlling your environment might feel more subtle; simple things such as controlling what your office looks like and being able to change it around whenever you want to add up a more peaceful attitude about work.

I spend about 80% of my life in shorts or exercise pants. You would be surprised how much this increases my overall happiness. When I go on vacation, I don’t pack comfortable clothes; all I own are casual, comfortable clothes. Dressing this way is a personal quirk and my particular expression of the flexibility I have with my work arrangement. Perhaps you will be able to dance during the day, go for walks, or wear comfortable shoes rather than dress shoes.

These small powers over what we wear, where we work, and what surrounds us may feel trivial, but they add to a feeling of control that is good for us.

Save Money

Since working from home means not having a commute, you pay less in car maintenance and gas. Other costs can decrease because you have more choices:

Since there is most likely no formal dress code for your remote job, you might be able to spend less money managing your wardrobe, like not having to go to the dry cleaners or own so many jackets.
If you tend to get coffee or lunch out while at work, staying at home means you can do these things at home.
In some countries, there are direct tax benefits to working at home, such as the home office deduction in the U.S. [5]
For some families, working from home allows much more flexible schedules, which allows for a reduction in the number of hours you need to use childcare.

A simple tabulation of the real financial cost of commuting [6] might shock you as it reveals that not only is your time more valuable than you think, but the cost per mile of travel can cost you more to drive to work than lunch does. Other sources use simpler metrics to calculate an average savings of $4,000 from working from home per year [7]. Multiply this over the years, and depending on which calculations you use, you could be missing out on a big raise or losing hundreds of thousands of dollars over your career by commuting.

Location Independence

If you can establish a successful remote-work career, you have more geographic freedom, which can matter on a small or large scale. You can work from a library or coffee shop, from a balcony, or take trips, such as spending a few months living in Spain. It can mean living near family on one side of the country while working for a company on the other. If you change jobs, you can do so without having to uproot your life.

For many young digital professionals, the trend of digital nomading has them traveling across the globe as they use local Internet connections to work from where they wish. No more saving up for a trip to Europe; work while in Europe as efficiently as you work from outside it. If taking your kids on a wild nomad adventure isn’t your speed, working from anywhere might mean you stay at the beach or DisneyWorld an extra week.

On the other hand, if you love where you live, working remotely means you get to stay there more. If you live more than ten miles away from where you work, then you could spend most of the actual day away in another community. You don’t know the patterns of your neighborhood or enjoy many of the reasons you might have moved there. We will go over this as a long-term benefit in Chapter 8: Lifestyle, but the core idea is that you get to choose where you live and dig in there, and get to know your community.

Employer Benefits of Working from Home

Even the company you work for can enjoy benefits when you work from home:

More loyal [8], happier, more balanced employees.
A more distributed workforce is more resilient. Next time you have a fire drill, a flu outbreak, or terrible weather at your headquarters, think about how everyone was interrupted at the same time. That won’t happen anymore.
A larger pool of people to hire since candidates aren’t just those within 40 miles of their office but everyone in their state or country.
The ability to retain key employees who move or need more flexibility during a difficult season of their life.
Cost savings for IT, HR, insurance, and, of course, office space.

Building effective distributed teams is a type of fitness that a company has to achieve: they need clear communication, a clear way to measure productivity, and they need to build and retain a reliable workforce. Because doing these things are table stakes for remote work, it means that only well-operating companies can pull it off. Think of it this way: if everyone works from home and working from home focuses your attention on what people get done, your workforce will consist of only super-productivity monsters.

The True Challenges of Working from Home

If working from home is so great, why isn’t everyone doing it? It is harder than expected for the worker and goes against the company’s standard business practices. Working remotely shifts some of the company’s power and risk to you, and you might find that this scares both of you.

Companies fear that allowing their employees to work from home will lead to an out-of-control workforce that wastes company time, exposes them to security risks, or acts unprofessionally to customers. Even if a company trusts its employees, they fear them losing touch or altering the existing culture. Managers also have trouble imagining themselves running a remote team because the skills needed to do so are different from how they do their job in an office.

Myths about remote work discourage those that might want to try it, as they think it only works in rare cases or specific industries. Remote work is not just for technology startups, the very highly paid, or only for well-established companies. Or they think that they will get lonely, won’t get as much done, and they fear that they will be considered less critical and lose their jobs.

With some knowledge and practice, all of these obstacles employees face are things that can be overcome entirely or managed well.

Real Challenges

The real challenges of remote work, the obstacles that remain after we free ourselves from false myths and unrealistic expectations, are four key differences that affect our work and our lives.

Boundaries

Working where you relax is arduous. Relaxing where you work is a challenge. If you treat your home like a workspace all the time, you have no easy way to unplug, and if you treat it too casually, you will never get anything done. Dealing with your family interrupting you causes stress at home. The lack of structure can create a boxed-in feeling causing constant low-level anxiety that drains your energy.

Increased Isolation

Many jobs that require concentrated effort are best done alone and without distraction, and these jobs are the easiest to do remotely. The people that are good at these jobs: developing software, performing financial analysis, etc., are also many times good at being alone. And leaning into this strength can lead to unhealthy social isolation. For those that are more extroverted, spending most of the day alone can be a nightmare.

Communication and Collaboration

Most companies use constant in-person adjustments to coordinate work plans and track progress. Staying in sync with your coworkers and boss requires extra effort and a new set of tools and attitudes; doing what you did before will not work.

Lowered or Inconsistent Productivity

Working in a busy open office is the default setup for most people, leading to consistent productivity or something that looks like productivity. When left alone, we suddenly discover that we can browse the Internet for an hour and get away with it, while at the same time realizing we can get much more done without the distractions of an office. Navigating this much broader range of possibilities and setting ourselves up for consistent higher productivity takes systems and practice.

An Achievable Goal

If you don’t currently work outside an office or have tried it and it hasn’t gone well, I’d like to ask you to be open to working from home being an achievable goal for you. Many people have preconceptions or negative experiences with remote work that cause them to dismiss the idea too early. They don’t push through to real solutions. Working from home covers issues between the triangle of your personality, your home life, and your employment. It can get touchy; if you find a critical flaw in one of these or a big challenge, you can cling tightly to your existing patterns and use them as an excuse not to change. Don’t quit before you truly start.

I believe that remote work will only increase in the future, and you want to be a part of that future. You can be a productive worker while also spending the extra flexibility on the things you desire. You can build a life that you want.

Continue to next chapter: Clock-in Clock-out