Lifestyle

After being offered the first job that allowed me to work from home, I considered it in the usual ways: would this be an excellent job for my career, do I like the people I’d be working with, are the salary and benefits acceptable? I didn’t think of the work-from-home aspect as anything other than a small detail in the overall picture. But shifting to a remote work arrangement affected my lifestyle dramatically, and my experience is not rare. Many people never go back to working in a traditional office after working at a remote job. They are surprised by this because many don’t think of the long-term lifestyle changes that remote work brings.

Most advice about remote work focuses too narrowly on the short-term. If you search the web for ideas, they cover how to find a remote job, adjust to working where you live, and interact with your teammates. These are all initial concerns, and because remote work is a relatively recent trend for many people, this makes some sense. We seek to teach the many workers transitioning to working from home how to transition successfully. Even the success stories for remote work are by those that have only been working from home or leading a distributed team for a few years.

In this way, most guidance about remote work seems more like the initial quality tests that car manufacturers love, which measure how well the cars run for the first year. While this could be an adequate indicator of success, for something as significant as changing your work environment, we should look at the longer-term effects instead; we want to know how much trouble the car gives us ten years later.

Freedom to work where you want and when you want gives you all the perks we mentioned in Chapter 1: A Worthy Life Goal. It means spending more of your life around those you live with, are more directly a part of your community, and have extra free time to spend however you like. As we covered in Chapter 7: Family Life, working from home directly affects those closest to you. These are all large-scale changes to your lifestyle.

Downsides of Long-Term Remote Work

There are longer-term downsides to working where you wish. Working remotely has a gravity to it that pulls you out of typical society and might take you away from the spotlight, but these are tensions we can manage if we work at it.

Working from home creates a gravitational pull towards staying at home, even when not working. It affects people differently, but many remote workers get used to not having to drive and find themselves shifting more towards being homebodies. Not going out becomes the norm, and they discover that they aren’t expanding their network of friends and acquaintances at the same rate.

How others think of you can make this worse, as covered in Chapter 4: Mindset : Your Standing in Society

This effect doesn’t always mean that you interact with fewer people. After all, someone working for ten years at the same company might only communicate with people from that company, but it does create a less dynamic lifestyle. And since the jobs most suited to remote workers are those that select introverted people, they can become more introverted over time and tip into an unhealthy balance. Suddenly they are not leaving their house and only want to be in front of the computer, and nothing is forcing them outside. One way to think of this is to state that those that don’t get out as much can weaken their overall social network or social skills. A remote worker stereotype is a crazy person talking to their cat while wearing pajamas, never leaving their house.

One reason that we might feel that we interact with fewer people is that our coworkers have different relationships with us than if we were in person. Casual small talk, exchanged smiles, awkward high-fives, or other typical social graces don’t apply to coworkers that you see only over Internet chat or perhaps video. In a regular in-person role, you might feel like your coworkers are something above a loose acquaintance, but in a remote role, they are just people you work with unless you take the time to establish rapport.

Even those that use remote work as a tool to travel the world as digital nomads can find themselves disconnected from real human connections because they are traveling and not establishing any real relationships. So, on the one hand, remote work can tether us deeply to our homes and on the other aggressively untether us from society.

Handle this to take action and make an effort to establish connections outside of your workplace. It is perfectly natural for your coworkers not to become friends. You can undoubtedly attend social meetups, go to more parties, introduce yourself to everyone at the coffee shop, etc. You had a default network of people at every job before, some of whom you carried with you as light friendships. You need to establish a new source of this now.

Slower Career Advancement

One of the primary fears of someone starting out with remote work is that they are turning off the Interstate onto a nice quiet road, full of a few miles of pleasant views and daring adventures, that eventually just dead-ends suddenly. Fear of missing out on a promotion because you are “out of sight, out of mind” is a legitimate long-term concern. Much of the risk here has to do with local vs. global currency.

Local currency is how valuable you are to your current company, and global currency is how valuable you are in the open market. Building a stable career relies on building up value in both forms of currency, and the flexibility of remote work can provide margin for both efforts.

Let’s say you are working at a large company where most workers are in-person and want to rise through the ranks. You might want to focus on local currency and spend some of your extra time pro-actively communicating with those above you in the food chain or doing extra credit style work for your team. How valuable and visible are you to those that matter in your company? Use the time your coworkers spend in the car to get ahead.

If a fully remote-first company employs you, everyone is competing for the same promotions, and you can focus more on global currency and ride the rising tide of more and more remote jobs. In either case, you can also spend some of your time writing, presenting at conferences, building expertise, and other actions that increase your global currency.

Because your physical presence can’t speak to your obvious intelligence, experience, and dedication, your digital presence should instead communicate these messages. Replace a nice haircut and being the first one in the office with a well-designed portfolio site or blog where you often write to market yourself well to current and future employers.

Upsides of Long-Term Remote Work

Expressed Priorities Over Time

Because working from home gifts you extra time in your schedule, replacing the commute and prep time, and also provides you with a more flexible schedule, it allows you to compound investments in your priorities over time. This can lead to large-scale positive or negative effects over the years.

As an example, many remote workers have shifts in their health in the first few months they start working remotely. Being close to their pantry and not having to get dressed or walk anywhere, they find that they gain weight suddenly, much like the “Freshman 15” effect that some new college students experience. Others find that extra control over their schedule allows them to exercise more, and they become more fit very quickly. Merely being able to adjust your sleep schedule a small amount by sleeping when you used to be commuting can dramatically improve mood, health, and vitality. These small changes over ten years can have direct effects on your longevity and energy.

Of course, you can spend this extra time eating burritos, playing video games, and watching meaningless TV. Some of it probably should be used for these things, but be aware that the small investments you make in these new spaces, the small actions you take with your new powers, can have significant effects. These hours, if you spend them well, can add up to something genuinely great.

Being at home during the day so that your kids see you when they get off the bus is a potent motivator. Being able to eat lunch with them, pick them up when they get sick, and take them every morning to school has given me much more time and closeness with them. I can go to school events easily and often enough to tell my daughters which boys to avoid. I can also call all neighborhood kids by name when they aren’t behaving, and I know the names of the librarian, PE coach, and principal, and they recognize me. But in either case, I’m there.

I’ve used the extra time for the obvious and silly:

More work.
Extra, precious, sleep.
Keeping up to speed with my industry.
More downtime (TV, movies, video games, browsing the internet).
Eating tacos, so many tacos.

Or more powerful investments:

More proactive forward-thinking work.
Starting a side career as a writer.
Reading an average of a book a week for four years.
Training for and completing a 150-mile bike ride and too many 100+ mile bike rides to count.
Taking care of my wife and four kids when they are sick or need support of any kind.
Taking my kids to school each morning.

Be a Part of Your Community

One example of an investment that you can make more easily when you work from home is participating more fully in your local community. If you are used to working 40+ hours somewhere else and spending 8+ hours in the car, and you now work here, you suddenly start caring more about here, your community, than you did before. The same effect can happen even within families; mothers and fathers find that they are suddenly more invested in their children only by having more of the best energy hours around them versus the tired late afternoon and post-commute evenings.

For example, I know the following details about my community that would have been lost to me otherwise:

What lunchtime at my kid’s school looks like on an average not-a-special-occasion day.
Where the geese like to camp down every year, the best place to find a deer even in my over-crowded suburb, the best times to ride a bike, and the best trails to run.
The stillness of my neighborhood a few hours after the morning commute is over.

Because of all this information, I feel settled and that I live in a community versus some holding tank to recharge me for my next day of work somewhere else.

Manage Your Schedule More Broadly

As you are more in control of your environment now, you have more say in your schedule as well. Make sure that you make use of this in ways that make sense for your energy, family schedule, and body clock. You should also be creative with your schedule and be aware that not all days are the same.

For example, I use Friday afternoon as a learning time rather than at little spots during the week. For an hour or so on Friday, I catch up on newsletters, blog posts, or other items that I have flagged during the week as interesting and study them. I can go through many in that time frame, and have the weekend to think them over. This works better for me than checking Twitter every few hours or refreshing an RSS reader every day.

Likewise, stepping back from my schedule has allowed me to see trends. If I need to work on the weekend for an emergency, I need to account for this or near the end of the natural workweek, or I’m going to lose steam. So if I’ve had a busy week or weekend of work, I make sure to take a few hours on an afternoon and get away from work to have a mini refresh session. In doing this, I’m allowing myself to finish the week strong.

The seasons aren’t the same either, especially if you are around your neighbors and family more when working from home. The summers are the hardest time to get things done for me personally:

The weather is fantastic.
My kids are in the house: creating noise, doing fun things, and wanting me to join them.
Neighbors and coworkers take vacations, and much of the world seems to not be working.

So I reset my expectations and realize that taking on a massive project in my personal or professional life over the eight weeks of summer vacation is going to be much harder. It isn’t that I work less over the summer, but that I work to a pace that makes sense. If I’m going to accomplish some large goal at work, it will be easier to do so in fall, spring, or winter.

Mental Freedom

Not having to be in the same place every day wearing the same clothes can help your mental health. If helplessness is a depressive feeling, then having control of your work environment and schedule can be uplifting, especially over the long term. Deciding that instead of eating lunch at noon, you are going to go for a short walk instead might seem like a small thing, but these little victories lead to large-scale effects that can improve your mood, energy, and creativity. In addition, getting away from the herd can reduce your stress, allow you to have the superpower of being weird, and encourage more independent thinking.

Better Coworkers

Your employer allowing you to work from home is not simply a perk; it is a declaration that they don’t follow tradition blindly. Implicit in their belief in remote work is a belief that they are hiring a professional; it comes with a higher level of built-in trust. If you have never worked at a place that works like this, it is a large change for the positive. By working for companies that can run distributed teams, you are filtering out companies with certain old-school bad management practices.

In addition, you are selecting to work with coworkers that can work in this way. They are better communicators, can work independently, are more loyal, and are better able to focus. Working remotely places a big filter on your work life where you lessen the amount of bullshit and bad practices you have to deal with.

Changing The World

In 2010 only 4.3% of the US workforce worked at home the majority of the time; that number is now up between 47% and 180% depending on which survey you read. In 2020 we saw a massive spike of people working from home due to shelter-in-place orders, and many of these people will not return to an office.

Let’s just imagine for a few moments that 25% of the current US workforce started working from home full-time. How would that change society?

People who work from where they want:

drive significantly less, creating less pollution.
are more involved in their children’s day-to-day lives.
are more likely to become more healthy when working remotely, as they avoid time in the car and eat out less.
become more involved in their communities.

These differences are massive. Remote work is about to open up a canyon in the middle of society, with people that are able to do it living on one side able to live a much more advantaged life.

Remote work will disrupt entire industries, as it is currently doing to traditional real estate. If you don’t have to drive to your office, then living in a city is not the only path to financial freedom. You can live where you want, near who you want to, doing what you want.

Make Sure You Enjoy It

Remote work separates you from the group, which in the worst case, can mean less visibility for advancement at your company, more social isolation from teammates, and less opportunity to meet others in your field. But by separating yourself, you also find that you can more easily design your own lifestyle and move at your own speed, thus achieving some of the goals that you wanted to achieve by moving up within a traditional company path.

Just because we work from home doesn’t mean that we take advantage of all these wonderful long-term benefits. We have to make an effort to exercise more, or get outside, or stay inside and read, or whatever activities motivate us rather than drain us. If you work hard to make working remotely part of your entire career, make sure that you also take the time to step back and enjoy it as well.

Remote work has allowed me to be more present in my children’s lives, to grow and learn more independently as a person, and avoid many of the stressors of modern life. All of us with a chance to try out remote work are very lucky, and knowing how to harness this power allows us to design the life we want. Good luck in your journey.