Been moving, stopped writing for a few days. New city. The usual upending of everything that works so you can rebuild it somewhere slightly different. The SIM card, the café, the landlord's number, the wifi that was fine yesterday and requires a full restart today. The routine that took three weeks to build in the last place starting again from scratch.
Andrew's back.
Someone wrote something honest about remote work this week. Not the cheat code version. Not the month one version where the no-alarm and the no-commute and the cooking lunch at home feels like the life finally clicking into place. The month two version. The one where things get weird.
I want to talk about the things that got weird, because they're the things the content machine consistently undersells. Not the things that are bad about remote work. The things that are different. The problems you don't know you're going to have because nobody told you they were coming.
The Loneliness
It arrives slowly. That's the thing about it. It doesn't announce itself. It doesn't arrive on day one when you're too busy being relieved about the commute to notice anything else. It accumulates in the background across weeks six and seven and eight until one day you're in a coffee shop fumbling the order because you realise, in the middle of the fumble, that you haven't spoken out loud to another person in three days.
Not a bad conversation. Not a difficult conversation. Any conversation. The kind that happens automatically when you exist in proximity to other humans who also exist in proximity to you. The office provided this without either party trying. Remote work does not provide it at all and you have to go and find it deliberately, which requires a kind of social energy that the isolation itself has been quietly depleting.
I have fumbled the coffee shop order. Not once. It gets better. The muscle comes back. But it requires exercise and exercise requires showing up to places where other humans are and that requires leaving the apartment on days when the apartment is comfortable and the work is right there and the case for staying is easier than the case for going.
The discipline of going anyway is the thing.
The Slack At 9pm
The office had a door.
You walked out of it at 5pm or 6pm or whatever time the specific performance of your workplace required. The door was physical. The commute reinforced it. By the time you got home the work was behind a barrier of geography and time that required specific effort to cross.
The laptop has no door.
The laptop is ten feet from the bed. The notification arrives at 9pm and the answer is one minute of work and the client will be happy and it's not really working it's just this one thing and it's fine.
It is not fine. Not because the one thing is a problem. Because the habit of the one thing is a problem. Because the one thing at 9pm trains the brain that 9pm is available and then 10pm is available and then the boundary that should exist between work and not-work has dissolved so gradually that you don't know it's gone until you try to find it and it isn't there.
Someone in the honest version of this story said they put the laptop in a drawer at 6pm every day. Physically. In the drawer. To stop themselves.
This sounds dumb. It works. The physical barrier does something the psychological intention to stop working does not do, because the psychological intention encounters the notification at 9pm and loses, while the drawer is just a drawer and the laptop is in it.
Build the door. Whatever your door looks like. The drawer works.
The Structure
The office provided structure the way the door provided the barrier. Automatically. Without either party choosing it. You arrived at a time, you were there for a duration, you left. The structure was external and it worked because external structure requires nothing from you except compliance.
Remote work requires you to build the structure yourself. From scratch. For yourself. With no external enforcement and no audience and no consequences for the days when the structure collapses and you stare at the screen for three hours producing nothing and then feel vague guilt about the nothing and the guilt doesn't produce anything either.
Some days I'm on fire. Some days the three hours of staring happens and I've learned to distinguish between the days when pushing through produces something and the days when the fire isn't coming and the best decision is to close the laptop and go outside and try again tomorrow.
This is a skill that took two years to develop. The office didn't teach it because the office didn't require it. Remote work requires it immediately and gives you no instruction.
What's Also True
The Sunday night is gone.
This alone. If this were the only thing. The specific dread of Sunday evening. The knowledge of Monday arriving. The way the weekend's last hours were taxed by the anticipation of the week beginning. Gone. Not reduced. Gone. I did not know how much of my mental energy this was consuming until it stopped consuming it.
The commute is gone. The hour of sleep is back. The specific indignity of spending forty-five minutes in traffic to get somewhere you didn't choose to spend the day is gone. The lunch that cost too much and tasted like nothing because you had twenty minutes and nowhere to be alone is gone.
The performance of presence is gone. The being seen to be working as a substitute for working. The staying until 5:02 so nobody could say you left early. The meeting that communicated the same information as an email would have communicated in three minutes. Gone.
The problems that replaced them are at least mine. The loneliness is a problem I can address by choosing to go somewhere. The boundary is a problem I can address by building a door. The structure is a problem I can address by showing up to the structure I've built rather than waiting for an external one to appear.
These are harder problems in some ways. They require more from me than compliance. But they are mine and that makes them different from the office problems which were also mine but felt like they belonged to a system I hadn't chosen.
The 80% Number
80% happy with remote work.
I've seen a lot of numbers attached to this life. The content machine runs mostly on 100%. The transformation narrative requires 100%. The before and after requires a clear after that is unambiguously better.
80% is the most honest number I've encountered. It accounts for the loneliness. It accounts for the Slack at 9pm and the learning not to answer it. It accounts for the three-hour staring days and the fumbled coffee order and the structure that had to be built from scratch in a new city again this week.
It also accounts for the Sunday night that's gone. The commute that's gone. The indignity that's gone. The problems that are at least mine.
80% happy is way higher than 40% happy in the office. The gap is real and it matters. But the path from 40% to 80% runs through the weird month two version of this, not the cheat code version, and knowing that before you go in is the only honest preparation.
Go remote if you're thinking about it.
Go in knowing it's a different set of problems, not zero problems.
Build the door. Probably put the laptop in a drawer.
The coffee shop order will come back.
Andrew - No Refunds •••