Mindset

Many of the struggles of remote work are all in your head. They aren’t any less valid, hard, or important than physical problems, but not seeing your coworkers in person and not getting up and driving into an office can cause a number of above-the-neck struggles.

One of the primary reasons people stop working outside an office, even those that wanted to make it work, is that they weren’t comfortable with the isolation. This is normally reported in safe language as people don’t want mental health concerns to make them appear weak to their employers. The reality is that many people get depressed, lonely, and feel very isolated from society when they work alone. This struggle comes on very slowly compared to the other topics we have discussed; we might not experience them until a few months or years into working from home. If you started working outside the office during the pandemic, you might just now be feeling the mental effects.

We have to be aware of specific things to look out for in our battle with these issues, figure out how to navigate the common advice we will always get from other people, and be aware of how others might perceive our new lifestyle.

Floors and Ceilings

When you work in a traditional office hanging around other people, you are operating in a group, and you are within a herd mentality[1]. We are animals that operate most easily in a group, and the accepted rules of the group influence our personal decisions. You operate within certain boundaries: there are things you will never do or will be discouraged from doing because it isn’t acceptable behavior. And within a workplace, there are rules of engagement that protect you from drifting off into space in terms of productivity or attitude. You won’t sit at your desk and clip your toenails, you won’t take a nap even if you are exhausted, and you won’t walk around without a shirt on after working out at lunch. The rules prevent you from doing certain actions. All those rules are now gone.

In an office, you drift along with what everyone else is doing. If people talk over their cubicles, take long lunches, or have constant meetings, you will also. If people in the office sit down, immediately put on headphones and work in a focused manner all day, you will also do this, or appear to be doing this, to fit in.

In an office, you have a large group of people that you can blame if you don’t get much done in a day. “Too many meetings today”, you can say while you drive home and feel that you still did a day’s work: you got up, got dressed, attended some meetings, had some small talk, and are now coming home. There was a minimum agreed-upon standard for what a work-day was, and you know that you met that bar, so you have no need to feel guilty.

You can think of your behavior as being within a certain range between your lowest and best productivity: a floor and a ceiling. When you work alone your floor gets lower, and your ceiling gets raised dramatically. You are no longer held back by the distractions, practices, and culture of the office. While at home, your minimum daily productivity can fall all the way to zero, and on those days, you have nobody to blame but yourself since you are in charge of the noise, distractions, and schedule. You feel the full weight of a bad day.

There is no bottom to how much you can slack off. Do you remember the feeling of your boss walking by and you suddenly feel that you weren’t productive enough? Or not looking productive? You squinted and stared at your computer, deep in thought, or typed a little faster, or stopped chatting with your cubicle neighbor for a bit. There is a real presence and pressure that in-person work brings, and working from home can bring the opposite effect. If you are behind on a deadline and stop answering the phone, it can feel like the deadline was not missed. Or that you don’t even have a job. You are anchor-less and can drift away from the fact that people are counting on you to deliver, and they expect you to be working diligently even when they aren’t watching you.

Your mindset will determine both how you deal with the new lows and if you can achieve the possible highs. Because we won’t see our boss in person, it can sometimes feel like our work doesn’t matter as much. After all, it is much easier to ignore an email or phone call for a few hours if we know our boss can’t see us watching an episode of The Wire and isn’t going to suddenly storm into our cubicle demanding an update. Let’s talk about some ways to reconnect to combat this issue.

On Feedback, Perception, and Presence

We might not realize it, but we receive a lot of feedback from working in an office. Because you saw your boss and they didn’t seem mad or annoyed, you felt that things were going well. As we will discuss in Chapter 6: Communication, when you work from home, a lot of communication shifts to the written form, and those small social graces and body language cues are gone. We can misinterpret small signals and start to think that things aren’t going as well. Lack of implicit feedback leads to doubt - you are doing the same work, and maybe more of it, but you have less feedback, so your perception of it changes, and normally not for the better. You are not getting as much praise as before is hard for some.

In addition, the lack of feedback can grow into anxiety. If I haven’t heard back from them yet, maybe it is because I’m about to get fired. If the remote employees find out information last, maybe they will be the first let go. People tend to fill in gaps in information with the worst-case scenario.

Remote guilt can also factor in; we feel guilty for getting to work this way, so we commit to something we wouldn’t normally or operate as if we always owe the company, team, or in-office coworkers a favor.

Find Your Why

We will go over how to build systems to consistently have productive days and hit those high ceilings in the next chapter, but if you struggle to get started or have days when you can’t seem to get anything done, or you feel that work doesn’t matter; you need to think about working on your work mindset.

It helps to be more clear with why you are working and why you are avoiding certain tasks. To be happy at work, you need to believe that what you do matters. You need to find your why and remember it.

Most of us are working to make money to feed and clothe ourselves and others. Why else are you working? Make a list of why working is important to you in the short, mid, and long-term. Write out a list of things that you like and are grateful for at your current job. Break down the positive consequences of your action, what how what you want is connected to your work.

Here are some simple questions with example answers to help you find your motivation:

Why are you working?

Because I need money for burritos, and they are important to my well-being at a physical and spiritual level.
I’m saving for a big trip.
I want to continue to live where I do and feed my kids.
I want my kids to go to college.
I want to have financial margin in case I need it later in life to handle an unexpected emergency.

Does the task in front of you matter?

If I don’t do this expense report, then I won’t receive the money I’m owed and I feel stupid for not doing it since it is such a simple task.
What I’m working on is a small piece of a project that I care about because the project’s success or failure will reflect directly on me, and I want to have a good reputation at work because I like to feel valued and respected.
What I’m working on is insignificant in the grand scheme of things, but if I’m not good at my job, then it is going to make me feel bad about myself.

Find Your Nerve

Procrastination is a nasty beast. To battle it, your mindset matters more than anything else. If you are procrastinating, it is usually because of some form of mental block that is preventing you from doing a task.

We procrastinate because of our emotions; maybe we are just afraid of something. Afraid? Of typing into a computer? Yes, afraid that you won’t be able to complete it on time, or that you will do it wrong and have to redo it, afraid that you might do a bad job and be called out on it, unsure of where to start, lacking in the belief that it matters, etc. The list is endless, personal, and powerful. We create these lists with our minds, so we can create counterpoints to them as well.

We also procrastinate because of how a task makes us feel. There is a concept called Ugh Fields[2], which explains why that we avoid certain tasks because they make us feel crappy. This is how we fall behind with certain things, and the mere thought of how far behind we are makes us not work on it, causing us to fall farther behind.

To break out of these mental traps, ask yourself these questions:

Am I afraid of failing at this task?
Is this task so boring that I just can’t be bothered?
Does this task annoy me - does it remind me of something negative?
Would I simply rather be doing something else?

Sometimes just asking a few of these questions of yourself will kickstart you because the answers are sometimes silly:

I am afraid of this spreadsheet, and I am so far behind I don’t want to work on it.

Another quick exercise that will cheer you up and give you a proper perspective is to do a quick gratitude survey. This is a listing of things that you are grateful for across different areas of your life. It flips you out of feeling like a victim and instead focuses you on the positive; it’s a tricky way to turn the corner towards optimism.

These are statements that you could say, ”I’m lucky to ___”.

For example:

I’m grateful to have my health.
I’m grateful to get to work from home.
I’m grateful to have a family.
I’m grateful to have a job.
I’m grateful to have a job where I don’t have to work outside in the heat all day.
I’m grateful to have a job that matches my skills.

Get Your Mind Right

You are a house plant with more complex emotions [3] // Reza Farazmand

We’ve all had days when we aren’t in the right place mentally; we don’t want to be at work, we have stress outside of the office, we don’t feel well, or we just don’t care. Let’s discuss some basic elements of feeling happy before we discuss other mindset solutions. The above quote might come off as a joke, but there is some truth to it. When you worked in an office, you got dressed, got some sunshine, and got around other people automatically. You need to keep doing those things.

If you want to stay happy, you need to make sure that your body is working. This means you need sunshine and water and somebody to look out for you.

So before we discuss some of the bad mental spaces you can get into, remember the following quick health checklist:

When did I last eat?
When did I last drink water?
How well did I sleep[4] last night?
When is the last time I exercised?
How much time have I spent outside today?

A word of caution: the above is not meant to be simplistic or dismissive of those of us with actual depression. The above can help, but if you think you are depressed, I recommend talking to your doctor. The following is a list of symptoms [5] that might be helpful as well. I know that there is a lot of stigma to mental health, and people that have never felt real depression can be driven to clinical depression by working alone. Every person is different, and extroverts will struggle considerably if they don’t replace the social interactions they had at work with others.

When to Actually Go Outside

If you haven’t left the house in a few days, leaving it might improve your mood for biological reasons. First, your body needs sunshine to keep its mood up. This is why people have Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) when exposed to less sunshine. Second, getting up and out increases how much you are standing, and improved posture from walking more can also improve your mood. Bad posture leads to bad moods. Also, if you aren’t leaving the house, your overall activity is likely lower, and bodies were built to move and receive positive chemical feedback when they do. In addition, the air outside is normally better air to breathe than the air around your computer. If you go outside of your home about as often as a prisoner, then you are living in an unhealthy way, and a simple walk around your neighborhood every few hours can certainly improve your mood.

When you work remotely, people will always tell you to just go outside. There are times when they are 100% right. When we work from home, we are really working from where we want to. There are many other options other than working alone in our residence. You can take the lessons learned in Chapter 3: Sacred Space and take them on the road.

The feeling of working in public can also help your productivity. Your behavior-changing because you know you are being watched, called the Hawthorne Effect [6], can help you get stuff done. This effect in my experience is heightened when you have been working away from people for a while and then work in public.

Here are some alternative locations where you can work:

Coffee shops

PRO:

The energy of a public place can be good.
Good coffee.

CON:

The chairs are engineered to be just uncomfortable enough to not do well if you sit for a few hours.
Hard to take a phone call.
Expensive, as unless you are an animal, you should buy something for every 2-3 hours you are there.
Distractions are everywhere, unless you do your best work while overhearing which Tarantino movie is best while your bag and clothes get covered in the smell of raw coffee beans, in which case working in a coffee shop is for you.

Coworking

PRO:

Coworking, in theory, should be the best of both worlds: you get the benefits of an office environment without the requirement to be there at a certain time.
You get some privacy and control over some aspects of your environment without the constant feeling of being watched. You have coworkers, but they don’t work where you do, so you don’t have to worry about what they think of you.

CON:

Unless it is very close by, you are signing yourself up for a commute and the stress and cost of doing that every day.
It is expensive, and some employers won’t help you offset the costs, as they don’t understand why you can’t just work from home.

Other Creative Locations

Non-traditional coffeeshops: Starbucks and high-end coffee shops are normally where people work, but Dunkin Donuts, Krispy Kreme, and other dessert or no-nonsense coffee shops also have Wifi, strong coffee, and don’t mind you being there for a few hours. There is more foot traffic in these places, but they also sometimes have more comfortable seating.
Libraries: Very quiet, typically have free Wifi (although it might be restricted to only some sites; Dropbox does not work from my local library)
Your backyard: Work a few hours from a chair in your backyard. It helps you get outside, you stay on your own Wifi, and you can go back inside easily if needed.
Restaurants: A variation of a coffee shop in terms of a public place, but the seating is built for people to stay a few hours. Coffeeshops are architected to encourage people to leave after 30 minutes: uncomfortable chairs and tables arranged closely together. Pro tip: the wifi password at most restaurants is their phone number because it is easy for all the employees to look up and remember. Tip your waitstaff.

Other People

Let’s begin by letting you know that if you are brave enough to be honest about struggles with remote work, you will hear: just get outside. Or maybe take a shower or put some pants on. Even those that fail at remote work can easily use this phrase without being questioned, normally by saying something like: I just had to get out of the house, the walls were creeping in on me. Behind this traditional advice lies some truth, but it is also terribly simplistic, dismissive, and un-empathetic advice as well.

Outside of the extreme case of rarely leaving your house, the advice is too simple because just getting out of the house doesn’t mean that you will address the root cause of any of the issues we are about to discuss here. It just means you will be doing more typical social behavior. So, sometimes when people tell you just get outside, they mean stop being so weird. We all have to find the right personal balance of outside/inside, introvert/extrovert, and how often we socialize.

Your Standing in Society

Speaking of other people, how others perceive you changes when you work from home. You can’t change this, but you need to be aware of it because we are social creatures and might feel the differences in how we are thought of and let it affect our self-confidence.

There are people in your life that don’t really know you well but have an image of you based primarily on your outside appearance and the behavior they have observed. Our neighbors and acquaintances fall into this category. They see someone dressed in a certain way and make a snap judgment about them across many dimensions: where are they from, do they look dangerous, where are they economically, etc. We all do this and feel others doing it, normally without thinking about it explicitly. It takes practice to kick back against all the bad that comes with this behavior.

And when you work from home for a while, you will be perceived by people older than you as a loser. This is because the cultural artifacts of the last few decades of America define success as:

Live in a nice suburb of a large city.
Drive a nice car into the city.
Wear formal business attire.
Have a set schedule, normally getting home a little late, with some business travel.
Perhaps have a secretary or assistant.

Working from home makes you look like you are unemployed or going through a hard time:

Don’t leave the house that often.
Have a car you don’t drive that much.
Wear weird clothes.
Have a weird schedule.
Don’t seem to talk to other people.

After working from home for a while, you can drift into behavior that works for you, such as wearing only Adidas tracksuits that affect how seriously you are taken by other people. Society thinks that you should spend the majority of your time working or taking care of children, and when you don’t look like you are doing either of these things, you will feel it.

About three years into my work-from-home life, I was the only dad that regularly attended events at my daughter’s preschool, and the moms would rarely talk to me when we were waiting for a performance or class party to start. They weren’t rude to me directly, but I felt a small awkwardness around them. I thought this was just some gender barrier, but one day I overheard one of them say, “he still hasn’t found a job”. Well, I did have a job, and a great one, but the way I dressed and the fact that I was always at these events had created an impression that I was out of work.

My advice on how to deal with this is pretty direct: be aware of it and make adjustments only when it matters. When you go apply for a bank loan, maybe don’t wear Teenage Ninja Turtle sweatpants, but the rest of the time, you can safely ignore it. Living your life based on how others perceive you puts power in the hands of the most judgemental people in your life. Don’t do that.

People, even true introverts, are social creatures. When we say the word social nowadays, we think of sharing the most marketable events of our lives - aka Facebook/Twitter/etc. By social, I mean something very different.

We exist and are most comfortable in a tribe, on a team, in a crew (hip-hop dance in the best case). When we become isolated, we become anxious and potentially even depressed. Even the most introverted among us will eventually miss being in a group. Working remotely, you will meet fewer people if you aren’t careful, and because of the distance, it’s harder to establish real relationships. Because you don’t have the normal small talk time while you wait for coffee, you don’t find out the basics about your coworkers unless you are intentional about it.

Here are some simple ways to build a relationship online:

Message people “good morning” when you start your day. A simple “How are you?” might feel a little awkward, but you will get responses.
Make the normal small talk you would in an in-person meeting in the few minutes before a remote meeting starts. Just because you might not be in the room, you can still talk to people.
If your company is remote-friendly, it might already have some forced social interactions such as online Happy Hours, or skip-level 1-on-1s, or just group meetings with different people from different departments. Attend all of these, and try to get them started if they aren’t already.

Establishing a little rapport with coworkers helps, but you shouldn’t assume that you will always build new friendships at a remote job like you might have done at previous places. You need to stop relying on work to provide most of your social interactions. Instead, you need to build a group of people outside of work and be intentional about seeing them often. For me, I like to have lunch with people 1-on-1, and so I have a group of friends that I make a point to each lunch with every few weeks or months. In this way, my lunch crew replaces my old involuntary work crew with a voluntary one.

It seems obvious to keep in touch with people on social media when you start working from home because of how easy it is. The problem is that it isn’t the same. You need actual dialogue, actual social interaction. And viewing other people’s social media profiles is like viewing other people’s highlight reels while you are struggling during practice. Be very careful with social media, which does not actually reduce loneliness but is a crutch that can increase it. Talk to real people! Build a network of actual people, not avatars, in your life.

But there are times when you can’t get out to lunch to see a friend and feel lonely. During these times, you want to stop the loneliness until you can talk or hang out with someone in the real world. Until then, rather than turning to social media, instead, find a TV show you are very familiar with and have it on in the background (with or without volume). In addition, you can always turn on QVC, Matlock, or Wheel of Fortune. Anything that senior citizens do, you can do to not feel like you are spending all day inside and alone.

The Benefits of Solitude

Hell is other people. // Dorothy Parker

All this talk of our need for social interaction might make you think that there aren’t any advantages to working alone. There are strong benefits to solitude for your mind and your productivity. As we mentioned earlier, when you are in a group, you tend to match their speed and energy. They might be holding you back.

If you are an introvert or a people-pleaser, then you spend a great amount of energy dealing with people and your interactions with them. Physical (literally copying body language, which we do almost without thinking) and neurological mirroring (roughly - being agreeable) make us expend energy as we try to remain accepted and in good standing in a group. Other people literally are exhausting you.

They might also have been limiting your creativity. The rules of the herd limit your thinking and create blind spots where good ideas might live. Being weird is discouraged in a group, but thinking weirdly is great for coming up with novel ideas.

Working remotely is hard because if you don’t take any action, you lose some of the free social interaction and energy you received from coworkers and the office environment. But, with a little effort and by centering yourself on why you are working, not rely on the attention to others, and building true social networks outside your company, you can thrive working remotely alone from anywhere.