The New Corner Office

How the Most Successful People Work from Home

Laura Vanderkam

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Copyright © 2020 Laura Vanderkam

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ISBN 9780593330050 (ebook)

Cover design by Sarah Brody

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Contents

Introduction

Chapter 1

Manage by Task, Not Time

Chapter 2

Get the Rhythm Right

Chapter 3

Build Your Team

Chapter 4

Think Big

Chapter 5

Optimize Well-Being

Notes

Introduction

On Thursday, March 12, 2020, my twelve-year-old rose at 6:45 A.M. to get ready for his 7:20 A.M. choir practice. My husband got ready for work, drove our son to his middle school, then hopped on a train. I read outside for a few minutes before supervising the morning routines for our other four children. At about 9:00 A.M., with everyone at school or in our nanny’s capable hands, I settled into my home office as I usually do—a nice spot on the northwest corner of my house in eastern Pennsylvania where I could watch the forsythia bloom through the window. I worked on my podcast and writing projects, but the news was darkening quickly. Cases of the novel coronavirus that had been making headlines were popping up around the United States. That afternoon, the governor ordered the kids’ schools closed for what would turn out to be the rest of the term. By the time my husband got off the train, he had, along with millions of people, become a full-time virtual worker like me, moving from an office downtown to a new corner office—his on the southeast side of the house.

I study time for a living. In normal times, my business involves speaking to corporate or conference audiences about productivity, and writing books based on my analysis of thousands of time logs. I know, from studying such logs over the past dozen years, that working from home has become more common. This is true both for employees and for the self-employed. A study by FlexJobs and Global Workplace Analytics found a 159 percent increase in remote work from 2005 to 2017, though with blurring boundaries between work and home these statistics are hard to pin down. Anybody who checks work email from her bed at 10:00 P.M. is technically working from home, even if she wouldn’t define it that way herself.

But before March 2020, working from home during business hours was still perceived as a questionable choice for anyone with big ambitions. Corporate work-from-home privileges were doled out mostly as a once-a-week perk for people who needed a better work/life balance and who’d proven themselves trustworthy. Even then, such a concession was usually reserved for Fridays. Everyone knows that Fridays are the least productive day of the week. The assumption was that anyone working from home wasn’t working, so best to minimize the opportunity cost. Sure, video conferencing had improved since the clunky webinars of the past. Organizations occasionally lamented the environmental costs of commuting (right before shipping their CEOs to Davos on a private jet). Still, with many managers assuming that work had to happen at set times in an office building—with the temperature locked at a frigid 68 degrees—millions of people braved traffic just to email and call people in other places. I remember one conversation with a business leader who was exploring remote work as a trend his organization needed to be aware of—“but,” he noted, “it would never work for us.”

Then the COVID-19 epidemic swept through the United States and Europe. In the space of days, people learned that their entire organizations could operate remotely (including that business leader’s). Gallup polls found that, as of March 13–15, 2020, only 31 percent of U.S. workers had ever worked remotely; by March 30—April 2, 2020, this had doubled to 62 percent.

Forced to figure it out, people learned that you could, in fact, pitch a million-dollar project to a client via Zoom. Many routine medical visits could be handled via telemedicine, raising the question of why people had wasted hours sitting in germ-filled waiting rooms. You could work closely—laughing, sharing moments—with people who weren’t in the same state. People suddenly juggling work and homeschooling or childcare figured out that, while it wasn’t easy by any means, with careful planning they could work at varying hours and still get some stuff done. If a proposal can’t be written on Tuesday at 10:00 A.M., maybe it can be written on Tuesday at 6:00 A.M., then presented while a partner covers, and toasted during nap time.

As daily life slowly clawed back toward normal, few could argue that remote and flexible work “would never work for us.” It has.

People always revert to old habits. The first post-quarantine trip to a coffee shop? It’s a celebration of human interaction. On the second, people avoid eye contact with the barista as usual. But some things do change. Maybe you are among the millions who worked from home for the first time during COVID-19. Maybe you cannot fathom strapping yourself back into your car to burn ten hours each week commuting. Maybe you used to spend your weekdays visiting client headquarters, but now your clients don’t want to battle traffic either. In April, Gallup found that 59 percent of those working from home during the pandemic wanted to keep doing so afterward. Maybe you want to explore new ways of working—ways that are more self-directed and where location and hours are less set than before.

If so, this book is for you.

It’s also for you if you’ve been running your own small firm (as I do) or managing a distributed team for years. It’s for anyone who wants to take the opportunity that a great upheaval provides to rethink time and life. Having seen what is possible, the smartest leaders are recognizing that structuring work to be more flexible in terms of time and place isn’t about work/life balance. The wisest professionals are recognizing that remote and flexible work styles can be huge strategic advantages for those bold enough to seize them. Organizations are more nimble; people are happier and healthier. Working face-to-face is great, but like everything, there is a point of diminishing returns. For many kinds of work, this point is far below the previous expectation of forty set hours a week in a cubicle. In the new corner office, results matter more than where and when work happens.

This book shares strategies from highly successful people who are thriving in this new world. We’ll talk about:

Managing by task, not time. Time is an incredibly useful concept, but structuring work differently allows for efficiency breakthroughs.

Getting the rhythm right. A well-planned workday ensures challenging but sustainable progress.

Building your team. Wise remote workers can create a more effective network than those sitting in the same cubicle five days per week.

Thinking big. There is no contradiction between working remotely/flexibly and nurturing your long-term career ambitions.

Optimizing well-being. Working from home at least a few days a week can help people maintain the energy necessary to succeed in a competitive world.

Each section has practical tips that you can try today. I’ve done my job if, at least a few times, you say, “I hadn’t thought of it that way before!” My goal is to motivate you to take charge of your workday, and your work life, and to achieve results that would not have been possible under the old operating instructions.

In my conversations with highly productive people, I’ve learned that the ones who seem to manufacture time don’t hold to rigid notions of how the 168 hours of a week should be used. They plan their workdays to tackle their most important work when they’re freshest. They meet their spouses for lunch on Tuesdays. They invite former colleagues to go run together at 6:00 A.M. and wind up hatching new business plans while getting some exercise. They head home (or out of the home office) in the evening for family dinner and then sometimes do more work building their empires at night after the kids go to bed. They work in different places, but it’s as much about getting new ideas, and managing energy, as it is about any traditional notions of balance.

Sometimes these people’s jobs are inherently flexible. If you run the show, that meeting happens when you want it to. Other times, people simply work as they wish to work, figuring that it is easier to ask for forgiveness than permission.

Now, with upheaval everywhere, far more people have been empowered to work differently. This isn’t easy. There are plenty of challenges in working from home, which this book will describe. No, not the usual assumptions. High-performing professionals do not take to watching Netflix all day just because they can. Bigger issues are if people don’t know when to stop working, or if people get stuck and don’t know what to do without their boss around the corner, or if managers set unclear goals. The self-direction required for remote work is tough—whether you work for someone else or for yourself. But success is possible by keeping in mind two principles we’ll return to frequently in this book.

First, working from home is a skill. People can learn to work from home just as they can learn to speak French or play basketball. It’s reassuring to realize that, as with most skills, people do a slipshod job on day one, but get better with time. Spring 2020 provided a crash course, and a lot of bad Zoom meetings with people speaking on top of one another. In crisis mode, many people used modern technology to replicate what they could of the work environments that they’d left behind during that dark week in mid-March. This makes sense and is also enlightening. (So much could be replicated!)

Emerging from that, though, is a desire to embrace the second principle: innovate, don’t replicate. This book is a manual for moving to this more mature stage—from the remote work of March 12 to a more thoughtful vision of what remote work can be. Working from home doesn’t need to be about making do, hanging on, and counting the days until everyone is back in the office. Mixed with in-person work, it can be a strategic advantage. In the new corner office, ideas matter more than ever. But shoes? Those are optional. This book is about how successful people thrive while working at home—and how, with their advice, you can too.

Chapter 1

Manage by Task, Not Time

When Meredith Monday Schwartz took over Here Comes the Guide in 2008, this California company that helps couples find the perfect wedding venue had a physical headquarters. But Schwartz, who’d been employed there since 1997, soon got a puppy. She had been working from home for a few weeks to manage his care when she had a revelation: “I was getting so much more done,” she says, even dealing with the puppy and the three kids she had at home at the time. “It felt so much more organic to work that way.” She appreciated the ability to focus, and the ability to work at what she discovered was her preferred rhythm: an hour first thing in the morning, getting the household started without a time-burning commute, then alternating blocks of time between solitary concentration and interaction with coworkers. She suspected that her employees might be happier and more productive working from home too.

So, through her tenure as CEO, the company went through a “long march” toward remote work. People worked at home one day a week, then two. Employees moved away, but stayed employed. By November 2016, Schwartz turned out the lights in the physical offices in Berkeley.

The team (currently 24 people) gets together twice a year for retreats, but almost all the day-to-day work of reaching out to venues and generating content is done virtually. So Schwartz, who now lives in Austin, has had to think about how to grow the company without the usual visual and time-based assurances—e.g. rows of busy-looking people sitting at desks from 9:00 A.M. to 5:00 P.M.—that great work is getting done.

“I manage more to the task than to the time,” she says. “I’m constantly asking, ‘What is the result we’re looking for here?’ Man, I ask that question a million times a day. It’s my North Star.” With her employees, “I ask myself, ‘What work do I want to be sure they are doing each day? What result am I looking for with that work? What will success look like?’ I don’t want them working like robots for eight hours just to bill the company that time.” This is particularly true as the wedding industry has faced a crisis of cancelations due to COVID-19. Making rote sales calls for eight hours a day is not just pointless but distasteful.

So Schwartz views her job as making sure everyone knows the “why” behind their work, so they know what success looks like in a bleak economy: that they are building relationships with partners at an economic low point that will last as the industry rises. She helps people set their daily goals both for reaching out to venues and for finding ways to be of service—which can mean lending a sympathetic ear to a venue owner who is distraught over laying off staff. “It’s very scary,” Schwartz says. “The only thing we can control is the level of connection we have with people.” At the end of each day, employees report on what tasks they’ve done toward that North Star. Sitting at a desk for eight hours doesn’t come into it, though Schwartz has been happy to see that she was right about working from home: employees who are trusted with autonomy and who hold one another accountable will cheerfully march where they intend to march. On sunny days, the march is swift. On stormy days, it’s slower—but people keep marching. Here Comes the Guide has almost zero turnover.

I think Schwartz is on to something wise here with her focus on tasks, not time—an idea that’s transformative both for managing others and for managing our own day-to-day work too. I’ve been puzzling through these different ways of managing work since I began working in my own first “corner office”—a corner of my kitchen table in a tiny New York City apartment with no dishwasher or bedroom closet. I had moved to the Upper East Side in the fall of 2002 with the vague hope of landing some sort of newspaper or magazine gig. In the meantime, I began freelancing. While I didn’t miss my previous hour-long commute, the sudden openness of my time was disorienting. I took a part-time job for the structure it provided. Then I proved to be utterly terrible at that job. So I had to figure out how to make my own schedule. As I began studying my own time, I began studying other people’s time too. My fascination turned, over the next decades, into my calling.

Time is an incredibly useful concept. We live our lives in hours. Anything we do with our lives will be a function of how we spend our hours. There is a strong correlation between time put into something, and how much we get done.

However, time is not the only marker of productivity. And unfortunately, once you start to study how even seemingly progressive workplaces operate, and how people measure their own productivity, you see that much work is still managed primarily by time. This is true in both obvious ways (billable hours) and in less obvious ways (perceived bonus points for responding to emails instantly). But it’s a huge waste of time, money, and much else.

For instance, why are all meetings thirty or sixty minutes long? Do all human gatherings accomplish their purposes in precise half hour–long and hour-long blocks? Of course not. But for the vast majority of meetings, people don’t plan out tight agendas, accounting for the energy and attention of everyone who is in the meeting. So they choose their default, and manage by time. In organizations with strong face-time cultures, someone leaving for a thirty-minute walk in the middle of the day looks unambitious, even though there’s good evidence that the walk enables a more productive afternoon than deleting email for an equivalent quantity of time. Even those of us who work for ourselves can slide into this way of thinking. Am I sitting at my desk because I am making steps toward my professional goals? Or am I sitting here because that’s what responsible people do at 4:00 P.M.? It’s easy to fill time if we think we’re supposed to be filling time.

Achieving the breakthroughs possible in the new corner office means breaking this habit, both in how we manage others and in how we manage ourselves. As organizations have been forced to try remote work, the initial tendency is always to replicate. But as long as people don’t legally need to be paid by the documented hour, this focus on time—that a workday is a certain number of hours, rather than an accomplishing of prescribed steps toward an organization’s goals—is a missed opportunity. As Schwartz has discovered, managing with a focus on tasks and their accomplishment lets people capture the benefits of efficiency and lets them work how they work best. It’s challenging—“There’s no question that there is a learning process. I am better at this now than I was when we first started,” she says. She opted in; COVID-19 forced change on others. You have to plan much better, including accounting for open-ended tasks that you’d like to think about and that you’d like other people to think about. But managing yourself and others this way ultimately gives people the satisfaction that comes from making progress. You haven’t just put in hours, you’ve put in a good day—which tends to motivate people to do more.

As you make the shift to focusing on results, here’s how to plan your weeks, how to plan your days, and how to rethink the ways in which you spend work hours.

PLAN ON FRIDAYS

Anyone working from home needs to be self-directed. While this is certainly true if you’re running your own show, it’s still true if you’re working for someone else. You’re not so subject to visible group norms; you’re largely going to have to manage yourself. And if you’re managing by task, not time, that means you need to be clear about what tasks you should be doing. This direction requires stepping outside your own workflow for a few minutes and asking what you should be doing with your time and attention. What tasks do you need to do immediately, and what steps should you take toward larger goals? We’ll talk about how to set those larger goals later in this book, but this section focuses on the question of how to figure out what tasks, on any given workday, you should do.

The key is to create a designated weekly planning time. Our schedules tend to repeat on a weekly basis, not a daily basis, and this slightly broader view of time allows you to manage personal and professional tasks with a sense of abundance. You don’t have to do everything that matters tomorrow. This designated weekly time allows you to pause and reflect and ask how you’d like to spend the next 168 hours. Ideally, you plan your weeks before you’re in them—which is why I plan my weeks on Fridays.

Since I began this habit a few years ago, I have become a Friday planning evangelist. Sure, any dedicated weekly planning time can work—Sunday evening and Monday morning are other popular options—but Friday afternoon in particular has the benefit of being a low-opportunity-cost time (you aren’t doing much else), it’s during business hours so you can reach people and preserve your weekend, and it lets you hit Monday ready to go, instead of trying to plan Monday during the Monday morning crush.

Here’s how it works: On Friday afternoons, take a few minutes to think through the week ahead. Make a list of your top priorities for the week. I like to use three categories: career, relationships, self. Some tasks will already be on your calendar, because of plans you’ve made in the past. Others will be things you’d like to do as you take steps toward your long-term goals. Figure out when these tasks can happen and any logistics required to make these activities possible. If you’re managing employees, you can check in on their work goals for the next week, and give any appropriate guidance. If you are reporting to someone, you can increase the odds of being managed by task, not time, by setting and sharing realistic but challenging goals, ones that would make any reasonable supervisor say, “Yep, that would be an awesome week.”

Friday is also a great time to look at what is already on your calendar for the next week, and ask if all of it needs to happen. Maybe things can be canceled or minimized or delegated. Do not skip this step, especially if you are busy. In a few minutes, you can buy yourself hours.

After you create a rough plan for the week, revisit the schedule each evening to think through the next day. What do you still need to accomplish? Note anything that has to happen at a specific time (calls/meetings) and anything else that should be done by the end of the day. This can help as you start making your daily to-do lists.

HOW TO MAKE A TO-DO LIST

Several years ago, I came across a planner advertised with a user’s alleged daily to-do list. Not only was this list-maker planning to run a marathon, she would travel to every continent, finish her dissertation, and make a perfect chocolate chip cookie. It was curious as a daily list, in that these activities would take more than twenty-four hours—but this sin of impossibility is surprisingly common.

“I always have big dreams for the day when I’m making my list,” confesses Anne Bogel, the Louisville-based founder of the popular What Should I Read Next? podcast, and the Modern Mrs. Darcy website and book club. “My eyes are bigger than my stomach. My natural inclination is to make a wish list rather than a to-do list.” The trouble? A wish list “is not good for morale.”

Perhaps you have experienced this same mismatch between the morning’s ambitions and evening’s reality. Over time, Bogel, who leads a remote team of twelve, has learned that a doable to-do list is short. She’s generally got three big priorities, and one major ongoing project that she focuses on for six to eight weeks. “I view it as a Ferris wheel with three things at the top of the Ferris wheel,” she says.

I think this target of three to five things is smart, and I like the Ferris wheel analogy because it answers that common complaint about short to-do lists: I have more than three to five things going on in my life! Of course you do. But you choose a few things each day and keep spinning the Ferris wheel and eventually you get to everything. If you aim to put everything on top of the Ferris wheel at the same time, no one wants to go on that ride.

Ideally, your to-do list is short enough to become a contract with yourself. Once an item goes on the list, you are guaranteeing that you will do it by the end of the day. Given that life doesn’t always go as planned—I say this as someone with five children who are currently all underfoot—this means the list has to be short. I have gotten through my daily to-do lists on days in which I have spent five hours in the ER. This is not because I’m superhuman. I’m not—and so I create to-do lists that don’t require me to be. I know I won’t complete a twenty-item to-do list. Neither will you. Maybe you’ll do five things, or eight things, but which eight things? The most important? The easiest? Who knows? By making my daily list short, I force myself to prioritize. (Anything else that occurs to me can either be assigned a future date as the Ferris wheel spins or go on what productivity guru David Allen calls a “Someday/Maybe” list). I have also learned—through hard experience—that there is no virtue in putting something on a to-do list and then not doing it. It’s just as not done as if it were never on the list in the first place, only now it’s sitting there, mocking me in its undoneness.

A well-edited daily to-do list also has this distinct virtue for work-at-home sorts: It lets you know when your workday can be done.

When your job involves reporting to an office for eight hours, you know when the day is over: when it’s 5:00 P.M. When you have a lot of control over your time and location, this can be more difficult to discern. This brings us back to the idea of managing by task, not time. The day is done when I have gotten through my daily to-do list. I can do more if I want to. But I don’t have to. If I have chosen my short list well, then it has been a good day, even if it’s only 11:30 A.M.

To be sure, it rarely is 11:30 A.M. That’s because new items come in that must be addressed, and because, over the years, I’ve become better at estimating how many tasks will fill the thirty-five to forty hours that I plan to work each week. You might try putting time estimates on your to-do lists. Bogel makes a loose schedule for the day as part of her list-making, because activities tend to take time, and if there isn’t a time, the activity either won’t happen or it will bump something else. “I can’t just manufacture another hour,” she says. “My natural tendency is to just do it and hope for the best, but that’s not a strategy.” I leave open space because stuff comes up—good stuff and bad stuff, with an equal mix of both. I also like my work enough that when I do finish early I tend to spend more time thinking about projects, or getting a jump on the next day’s list. If you’re managing someone else, the idea that he or she might finish the day’s tasks by 11:30 A.M. might be disconcerting. What about the opportunity cost?

But again, we chant out mantra: manage by task, not time. Done well, you’ll get far more productive work out of people with short, well-planned daily task lists than with requiring them to be in a chair for eight hours. People can definitely waste eight hours a day despite sitting in their chairs when their assignments aren’t well thought through. When you don’t know for sure that people are sitting there for eight hours a day, you have to be more thorough. You also need to communicate well to make sure that people’s assignments are taking an appropriate amount of time. (A one-hour workday might leave people bored. A thirteen-hour day burns them out.) You have to actively manage, which is not a bad thing. A January 2020 Gallup survey on remote work found that people working off-site 60–80 percent of the time were more likely than other workers to feel engaged, and to feel that someone was watching out for their development. I suspect that is because remote work requires actively thinking about these things.

But don’t worry. You don’t need to micromanage. Team members can and should propose their own task lists, and engaged employees will naturally put ideas on their lists like thinking through “What if?” scenarios. (“What will we do if our entire office needs to go virtual because of a pandemic?”) They will naturally propose potential clients and projects. A few prompts for speculative tasks: What are our competitors doing really well right now? What would we do if our budget doubled? Or if it was cut by 50 percent? If this project failed spectacularly, what would be the most likely reason? If it goes really well, what should we pitch as follow-up work?

For smaller teams, you can casually share your task lists each day. Larger teams might do better by tracking work in project management apps, so everyone knows who’s doing what and who’s waiting for what. And then you can all experience the satisfaction of looking at a to-do list where everything is crossed off. Day by day, week by week, this creates sustainable progress. And as researchers Teresa Amabile and Steven J. Kramer wrote in a Harvard Business Review article on their analysis of thousands of knowledge workers’ daily diaries, “Of all the things that can boost emotions, motivation, and perceptions during a workday, the single most important is making progress in meaningful work. And the more frequently people experience that sense of progress, the more likely they are to be creatively productive in the long run.” They call this the “power of small wins”—and when you manage by task, that’s exactly what you get.

RETHINK MEETINGS

Anyone trying to manage by task, not time, should rethink how to do meetings.

The fundamental concept of a meeting is sound. You bring people together—in-person or virtually—at an appointed time to reach a decision. If you’re in the rare organization that never has meetings (some medical practices or businesses centered around one creative individual are like this), you can experience big gains by going from zero to one. Anne Bogel reports that, “I am very meeting resistant. I don’t like to schedule them. I don’t like to have them. I don’t feel like they’re the best use of anyone’s time.” As her team grew to a dozen people, though, she realized that while everyone talked to her, they didn’t necessarily talk to one another. People didn’t know what everyone else was doing. “We were missing opportunities for cross promotion,” she says. And so, kicking and screaming, Bogel instituted one thirty-minute post-lunch check-in each week.

If going from zero to one is helpful, though, going from one to twenty-five meetings per week is less so. Meetings proliferate beyond the point of usefulness because people persist in managing by time, not by task. People meet because it is Tuesday at 10:00 A.M., and this team always meets on Tuesday at 10:00 A.M. People meet for an hour because that is how long meetings are. It’s unclear what your particular role is in a meeting, but you go because the meeting is happening and your employer is entitled to your time on Tuesday at 10:00 A.M. When everyone’s schedule is packed with meetings, they enact a secondary cost: people don’t feel they can talk to colleagues or clients without a scheduled meeting, and since these meetings can’t get scheduled until far in the future (because people’s schedules are packed with other meetings) work slows considerably. This is especially true for virtual work: while you might bump into that colleague you’re trying to connect with in the office elevator, and thus go around formal channels, this won’t happen in your home office.

Fortunately, virtual work presents an opportunity to innovate, not replicate. Theoretically, virtual meetings should already be more efficient, since you don’t need to travel between meetings. I have also heard the more cynical observation that if a meeting is going to be useless, a conference call at least allows you to multitask (more on that in the next section). But instead of just converting all your in-person meetings to conference calls and video calls—and using the transition time for more meetings, as an offering on the altar of collaboration—really think about which ones need to happen.

Dominic Benford is an astrophysicist who works for NASA. When most of the organization went virtual in March 2020, “we converted all sorts of meetings to virtual—but we figured out within two weeks that we had way too many meetings,” he says. “We were adding hour-long calendar meetings that were basically just tag-ups.” The team began requiring that agendas be mailed out in advance. They also figured out that structures built around in-person collaboration weren’t always ideal for virtual meetings. For instance, scientific review panels involved flying in scientists from all over the world. Sequestered from everything else, these experts would sit in a conference room debating ideas for ten hours a day. Benford and his colleagues soon realized that ten sequestered hours didn’t work when people were in home offices—not to mention that there is no ten-hour stretch that works for a scientist in San Francisco and a scientist in Rome. “A full day’s work in this kind of mode is maybe five hours,” Benford says, but since people weren’t flying in, the work could be spread over the days that would have been lost to flying and jet lag. The transition was rough, but “I suspect that a lot of people will find that this is preferable.”

Maybe you can change your culture to be more judicious with scheduled appointments. Managing by task, not time, means asking this: What is the most efficient way of achieving the desired result?

Often, with virtual work, the answer for tasks involving other people is to just pick up the phone and call them. Amy Laski, the Toronto-based founder of Felicity, an all-virtual PR firm, reports that her team has what she calls a “just call commitment.” This means that everyone decides it is OK to make and take unscheduled phone calls during certain hours. It’s the equivalent of an open-door policy. If someone’s on the phone with someone else or can’t pick up, they’ll call back or you can try again. “It sounds simplistic,” Laski says, “but it is a small thing that makes a big difference, accomplishing in a two-minute phone call what would otherwise take several email exchanges”—or an 11:00 A.M. Zoom session that sits there chopping up the calendar, requiring you to stop deep work ten minutes before, wait for everyone to log on, discuss what’s going on, get the answer quickly, but then keep talking because it says on your calendar that this meeting is supposed to take thirty minutes.

As for the meetings that do happen? Managing by task, not time, means focusing on results. Have a purpose: What will change in the world as a result of this meeting taking place? If nothing will change, think hard about whether you need to meet. What is the agenda? Who needs to be in the meeting or on the call to achieve the purpose? What will everyone in the meeting or on the call do with every minute they are there? If the answer is just sit there . . . then you’ve got an organization that’s stuck in the mind-set that employees owe you hours. Your employees’ time and attention is a valuable resource. Directed right, it can achieve great things. Misdirected, it presents a huge opportunity cost. At the end of each meeting or call, reflect on whether this gathering achieved its purpose. If not, why not? What could be done better?

Planning meetings this way takes more effort. Indeed, you can’t have many of them unless you’ve got a full-time chief of staff ensuring that your meetings are meticulously planned. For those of us who have not attained that level, this natural check on meetings is not a bad thing. The payoff of having only well-planned gatherings is huge. Benford reports that now that more meetings have an agenda sent out in advance, “we’re ending more meetings earlier than usual. When we’re done, we’re done.” The pandemic forced the issue, but “I think this new normal is ultimately going to be more effective for all of us.”

FOCUS ON RESULTS

When you manage yourself and others by time, accountability at least seems straightforward: Did you log the agreed upon hours? Focusing on results requires a different mind-set, though it doesn’t have to be complicated either. One approach: at the end of each day, list what you’ve done. You can call this a “to-done” list or a “ta-da” list (to quote Gretchen Rubin, cohost of the Happier podcast). You can look at your task list for the day and see that everything is crossed off, and that’s great, but inevitably we also do other things that have come up. It’s satisfying to get credit for these too. So list them next to the day’s tasks (and cross them off—why not?) or keep a running log somewhere. The latter format can help for those days when nothing seems to be going right. You can read back over the log and remind yourself that, yep, you are a productive person. You will manage today’s load too.

Meredith Monday Schwartz has her team at Here Comes the Guide send an end-of-day email. “It shouldn’t take more than five minutes to put it together. It isn’t supposed to be something arduous,” she says. By reminding people about their morning ambitions, the email holds them accountable for doing what they said they’d do. It keeps her apprised of what’s going on in the company, and allows her to spot problems early.

While simple, this constant focus on results isn’t automatic in a world oriented toward time. Amy Laski notes that she’s worked hard to find contractors who like the idea of being paid for ten media hits, rather than ten hours of work. Felicity charges clients flat fees rather than calculating fees in terms of billable hours. Laski has found that many clients “appreciate that they’re not on the clock,” but to make this fair for everyone, they’re careful about setting the parameters up front for what’s in scope and what’s not in scope.

With remote work, managers and team members alike need to figure out what’s in scope and what’s not in scope. One reason people don’t manage by task is that not everyone welcomes the responsibility for achieving things that are in scope, even if it means trying different ways of solving a problem. On the whole, it might be easier to agree to march for eight hours than it is to agree to march to a nearby mountain, which requires crossing a stream without your boss standing right there with a raft.

Arran Stewart, cofounder of Job.com, an employment site that had distributed teams before COVID-19, notes that many managers have encountered employees who “hit a challenge, and can’t immediately get an answer, so they’ll sit and wait to speak to someone to continue working.” If you’re walking around the office, you might see this and intervene. Or when you pass by someone’s desk on the way to the bathroom and say hello, an employee might start dropping hints that something is awry. A remote employee might have to take it upon herself to call up her boss to ask for help, which is hard on its own, and then either try new approaches without immediate direction or know enough about what’s important to choose new, worthwhile work to do while she waits. “It comes down to strong directives and routines,” Stewart says. “You have to give people more love in the beginning.” If you’re not sure they’ll call with a problem, call them.

Lots of encouragement helps more tentative remote workers move away from the mind-set that as long as you’re at the office, you’re OK, and pivot toward true accountability. This support is certainly preferable to installing monitoring software and other such lazy approaches toward management. Employees who know that their bosses are obsessed with putting in the time can figure out ways to post messages suggesting they’re rising early and burning the midnight oil, all the while slacking off in between. This tells you nothing, just as seeing someone in a chair ultimately tells you nothing either. The outputs of long hours can still be modest; better to help people figure out how to motivate themselves. “Being able to work independently is a life skill,” says James Hickey, managing director of alternative strategies at Spearhead Capital, who leads a Boston team from Dallas. “We’re not in kindergarten anymore, where everyone needs their hand held.” Focusing on what gets done, rather than time logged, amounts to treating people like adults.

RETHINK URGENCY

There’s one final aspect of managing by task, not time. In many cases, people value speed without thinking of the opportunity cost in results. Employees assume that answering a boss’s Slack message or a client’s email instantly wins them points. So they stay connected constantly . . . which cuts into the focused time necessary to think.

When people are working from home, the worry that they’re out-of-sight, out-of-mind causes some to go overboard on this. And some managers, worried that people are watching Netflix instead of working, will ping constantly. The explanation might be that you’re just re-creating the casual back and forth of the office, but ideally remote work offers an opportunity to rethink the tyranny of the urgent.

Few people work in factories where a manager’s job is to yell, “Hurry it up!” Anyone whose job can be done remotely is likely in the business of offering solutions to problems. Sure, managers and clients would love to have the right answer instantly, but they’d also rather have the right answer a little later than get the wrong answer, or at least a subpar answer, right away. Thoughtful deliberation is not a bad thing. Sometimes being a little less responsive allows you the space to come up with the ideas that make people want to work with you in the first place.

So, have honest conversations with clients and team members about what constitutes an appropriate response time for things. Some people like set rules—such as responding within twenty-four hours to colleagues’ emails, with the understanding that the phone be used for anything more urgent—but there don’t have to be set rules. When you study your schedule, you might see that it behooves you to be more responsive during some times than others. Elizabeth Morphis is an assistant professor of childhood education and literacy at SUNY Old Westbury. She and her students—all of them teacher trainees—switched to virtual learning in March 2020. She began sending lessons and assignments out on Sunday and quickly learned that “Mondays seem to be the day that many of my undergrad students use to get their work done.” So she would stay on email Monday morning so she could respond quickly as the questions came in. Rather than be a bottleneck, she made her peace with doing limited grading or lesson planning on Mondays. She didn’t have to be quite so immediately responsive later in the week, so that was a time for her to schedule other things.

As you discuss workflow with your colleagues, share guidance on after-hours emails and work in general. What is the expectation? Don’t overpromise and then burn out your team. This doesn’t make you look like a hero. Long term, it makes you look like a person who no one with options wants to work for.

Amy Laski says that often in public relations, “There is a sense that everything needs to be done yesterday. It’s really difficult to prioritize when you feel like you’re in a mad dash in every direction, all the time. I’ve consciously fostered a culture where we are able to prioritize the important things. Sure, there are sometimes urgent situations, and in such cases, we act with urgency. But otherwise? Emails received on the weekend can be responded to on Monday.”

Managing yourself and others by task, not time, doesn’t mean ignoring time. Good work takes time. On time logs, I see that most remote workers wind up putting in the same thirty to fifty hours per week that office workers do. Meredith Monday Schwartz notes that she and her employees set intentions that generally take about eight hours a day. That number isn’t random; I suspect its popularity has some basis in humans’ natural rhythms. But it does mean keeping time in its proper place—as one part of the equation of success, a variable that can be tweaked up and down as circumstances require, but not all that matters. The most important thing is achieving small wins, over and over again. As a task is set and accomplished, the power of progress kicks in. Do this day after day, and—no matter how many hours people are working—they soon feel unstoppable.

Chapter 2

Get the Rhythm Right

Visitors to certain monasteries over the centuries would not have needed to bring their clocks. Chants and readings marked time as the monks paced through the liturgy of hours: lauds at dawn, vespers in the evening, compline before bed. The thinking behind these rituals is that they encouraged mindfulness and a sense of calm. The monks didn’t struggle with the question of what they should be doing at any given point. Their rites provided the answer—and suggest an intriguing approach for others trying to manage day-to-day life.

That’s because a good day—whether in a monastery or a new corner office—has a rhythm. It has an opening and—just as important—it has an ending. There should be a general template that gives cues to the sort of work that you intend to do. A good rhythm helps you manage your energy, which in turn helps you get more done.

The upside of self-directed work is that, ideally—and here we depart sharply from the monks—you figure out what liturgy of hours works best for you. Some people like to have the same template each day, and others alternate templates to focus on interaction or quiet work on different days. With flexible hours, if you work best early, you don’t have to time your start around the doors being unlocked. If you’re an early rising manager, you don’t have to fret that employees will also start showing up at 6:00 A.M. because of some unspoken rule that go-getters should be at their desks when their bosses walk in. These early risers also don’t face pressure to stay at their desks, doing nothing, from 4:00 P.M. to 5:00 P.M., just because group norms dictate that no one walk out.

In extreme situations, you can get creative and choose unorthodox hours if this rhythm would help you and your team. Debra Scott, who does IT project and product management in the manufacturing business, reports that time differences caused communication problems with her teams in Southeast Asia. So she decided to start splitting her shifts. “I would go into the local office for four hours in the morning, then work four hours at night to connect directly with the teams and individuals in Southeast Asia. I realized that those hours from 8:00 P.M. to midnight or 9:00 P.M. to 1:00 A.M. were typically just spent watching TV, internet surfing, or playing games.” With this schedule, she could work better, and enjoy afternoons and evenings with her family before her second shift of working from home.

The one stipulation here—a little nod toward monastic community—is that flexible hours also need to complement how coworkers work best. Meredith Monday Schwartz of Here Comes the Guide asks employees to pick a certain schedule that they generally work. It could be 7:00 A.M. to 3:00 P.M. It could be 9:00 A.M. to 5:00 P.M. People don’t punch in or out; if someone has a dentist appointment some morning, she can start later, but when hours are relatively predictable, colleagues know when they can reliably reach one another. They can plan work to collaborate during the hours that overlap, or they can tag team to cover more hours.

For much work, I think this predictable-but-flexible approach is the right one. When companies went virtual overnight, many simply replicated their expected office hours. That might make sense for a temporary situation, but long-term remote work offers a chance to rethink timing. If an employee has always been useless before 10:00 A.M., but does such great work afterward that he’s always in demand, then what’s the point of forcing him to check in on Slack at 8:00 A.M.? Teams that work closely together might set core hours (e.g. 10:00 A.M. to 3:00 P.M.) where everyone is “on” but let people set their own rhythms around that.

This section looks at how to plot the rhythms of your days to open well, end well, and get a lot done in between.

OPEN WELL

How do you know you are in work mode? Commutes serve as a natural ritual that transitions you from home to work. In their absence, many people need something else. A “fake commute” need not be contrived. Plenty of remote workers still need to go places in the morning. Tim Peters, a lawyer for a Colorado company who’s worked from Ann Arbor, Michigan, for years, reports that he walks his two children a third of a mile to school, and then walks back, and so “I had a commute sort of built in”—at least until schools closed in spring 2020 for the pandemic. Doing this every morning gave him fresh air and a shift in mind-set from home to work life. “I think an affection for routine is helpful in this situation,” he says. “You tend to scramble a little less. You tend to be able to focus a little bit more.”

Matt Altmix, who runs a photography business out of his Atlanta home, and cohosts the How to Money podcast, normally bikes the eldest two of his four children to school in the morning. He then spends a few minutes reading, meditating, or praying, and is ready to work at 9:00 A.M. If you don’t need to run kids to school or a spouse to the train station, try something else: a walk around the block, a quick errand (the post office, an ATM), walking the dog. Or you could make a cup of coffee mindfully. You could sit down at your desk chair, open your planner, and read a daily affirmation. Water the plants. Create a musical cue. Katie Goudie, a marketing consultant, creates a soundtrack for work: “I have a playlist of inoffensive jazz piano music which I play through headphones when I really need to do a couple of hours of focused creative work,” she says. During social distancing, she started listening to YouTube live streams of music with a coffee shop vibe to replicate the feeling she would have had in that setting.

Teams can obviously start their days together too. During the pandemic, a number of organizations began doing daily 9:00 A.M. virtual check-ins. I have mixed feelings about these. They violate the major rules for meetings we discussed in the previous chapter. They happen not because something needs to change in the world, but because it is a certain time. However, if they can be more ritualistic, and less like normal meetings, then they can work. Ideally, an opening ceremony should be well-scripted, with every minute planned, and one person facilitating. Everyone should gain something by being on the call. Frankly, I would make these check-ins optional to force the organizers to prove their usefulness. And, above all, the ceremony should be short (less than ten minutes). If not, you’re just burning what often turns out to be people’s best work time.

MATCH YOUR MOST IMPORTANT WORK TO YOUR MOST PRODUCTIVE TIME

I love how Anne Bogel of Modern Mrs. Darcy sums up the secret of productivity. “This is the constant goal: To do work that requires deep thought when I have energy and when I don’t have distractions.”

The tragedy of office culture is that teams set meetings and schedules in general without regard to the opportunity cost in deep thought, or the likelihood of distractions. Most people are freshest in the mornings. Research into people’s reported energy levels finds that, on average, 8:00 A.M. is go-time. After that first cup of coffee, people believe that they can conquer the world. By 2:30 P.M., most of us are less concerned with conquering the world than with taking a nap. It makes no sense to schedule a check-in meeting—in which everyone reports that, yep, she’s still doing her job—at 9:30 A.M. when people could be doing intense work. That status meeting, if it needs to happen, should happen midafternoon. People will go to meetings on their calendars regardless of how they feel. They won’t, however, solve their most important business problems when their energy has dipped.

So, whenever possible, plan your days to do anything challenging, speculative, or just particularly important when you are best able to handle it. Track your time, and note your energy levels. If you, like most people, do your best work in the morning, then reserve the first sixty to ninety minutes of the workday for your top priority project. You might get another usable burst of energy in late morning, right after lunch (pre-slump), or an hour before quitting time. Night owl types might have more energy later in the day. If you know this about yourself, then you can plan for it. You can also triage your work by speculating about how you’ll feel. If meetings with a certain person always leave you drained, and that person appears on your calendar, don’t plan anything tough afterward. Best to use this knowledge as motivation to bang out the tough work beforehand.

Of course, you can’t always control these things—and life involves trade-offs. Theoretically, 9:30 A.M. is a productive time for me. Normally, I write and edit in the morning, and use my afternoons for phone calls and emails (with a short run to re-energize myself). But during the pandemic school closures, 9:30 A.M. was also when three of my children had daily Zoom meetings with their teachers. I have good systems (and a lot of Zoom-enabled devices), but someone inevitably needed tech support. In general, with five children, I cannot be too precious about when I tackle tasks. But if the baby is asleep at 6:30 A.M. and the house is quiet, I can resist the temptation to clean out my inbox. Because that can happen at any point. One of my blog readers posted a suggestion that people with frequently interrupted schedules should “allocate a minimum of sixty minutes of time for deep work, first thing in the morning.” Doing this hour before the normal start of the workday “gives you a head start,” she says. You score a victory early, and so you can be more relaxed when people need things from you. This is particularly important if you are in management, because when you’re supervising other people, those questions from team members aren’t distractions. They’re your job. It’s nice to treat them as such, and feel fully open and willing to deal with them. Many managers wind up using the normal workday to field questions, and then do focused work after 5:00 P.M., but unless you’re a night owl, your brain will be fuzzy as the clock wends toward vespers (or cocktail hour). Even night owls might feel tired after a long day of work. Doing focused work before the day starts allows you to take advantage of what can often be highly productive time to do critical thinking and to move major things forward.

BATTLE DISTRACTIONS

Now, on to actual distractions. Before COVID-19, I know a number of business leaders resisted remote work because they assumed that unsupervised employees would spend all day watching Netflix. Though I’m sure this could happen, in my study of hundreds of time logs with a remote day or more thrown in, I’ve never seen more than a single show watched over lunch. What 2020’s mass experiment with remote work has revealed is that motivated, engaged employees will continue to be so wherever they work. Unmotivated, unengaged employees will disappoint you anywhere. It’s not the location that turns a highflier into a delinquent.

That said, high performers and low performers alike can get distracted. Distracted low performers don’t get their work done. High performers cope with distractions by working extreme hours so they still meet expectations. Neither is great long term, so it’s wise to address this issue.

Some distractions are obvious, such as a coworker having a loud telephone conversation outside your office. Others are more insidious because they seem productive. You’re writing a proposal for a new client. You remember that a colleague sent you a statistic that would be great to include. You pop into your inbox to get it and . . . thirty minutes later you’re still working through “urgent” messages. When you’re working at home, you can have those distractions plus others that stem from being around household tasks. You recall that your spouse said something about making tacos for dinner. You head to the kitchen to see if the ground beef made it out of the freezer to thaw. Then, while you’re there, you notice the unsorted mail pile and . . . whoops. So much for that uninterrupted hour.

Fortunately, there are ways to minimize all kinds of distractions.

The best way to deal with “productive” distractions that pop into your head unbidden is to create a “later” list. Keep a notebook next to you while you’re doing focused work. Whenever a thought pops up of something you need to do, write it down. If you need to find a number, a quote, or a piece of information, just use the journalist trick of writing “TK.” It means “to come”—and then you put the item you’re going to find on the later list. When you take a break in thirty to forty-five minutes, you can go do all these undone tasks. The meat will be OK if it comes out of the freezer thirty minutes later, but uninterrupted working time is priceless.

During this uninterrupted time, stay focused by doing one thing at once. Otherwise you lose time in transition. Many people swear by the Pomodoro Technique, which involves working for twenty-five minutes and then taking a five-minute break. This makes such blocks fit well into a calendar with lots of things scheduled on the hour and the half hour, and it’s also smart for any work you find tough or that you’re not excited about. (It’s only twenty-five minutes! You can get through that!) Of course, there’s nothing magical about twenty-five minutes. Kaelyn Lopez, a former inpatient nurse turned work-from-home RN data analyst, reports that she will set a timer for thirty or sixty minutes, depending on the task. She calls the timer “a total game changer for me. Once I set the timer, it’s like I have signed a pact with myself to do nothing but work until the timer is up. If the timer isn’t going, I feel a strange freedom to Google things or just do nonwork-related tasks when I should not.”

Hilary Sutton, a Washington, D.C.—based consultant and content marketer, suggests that people “test different sprints of focus. I found that a ninety-minute to two-hour sprint is good for me. It’s good for me to get up and do something else every two hours or so.” Few people can concentrate for more than two to three hours at a time, but that’s fine—most of us get hungry, thirsty, or need to use the bathroom in any given span of three hours anyway.

I’d also caution against an insidious work-from-home distraction: the midday appointment. People with flexible schedules could, theoretically, take the 11:00 A.M. slot at the dentist. Occasionally, you may decide it’s worthwhile, if it means being able to see a specialist three weeks earlier than you would. But don’t routinely interrupt your days for what are, in essence, chores by a different name. Save the interruptions for career-advancing activities like networking lunches or things that cannot happen at other times, such as chaperoning a school field trip. Your doctor has 8:30 A.M. appointments. Ask for them. Same for meeting contractors and delivery people—shove these all to the same day if possible. Sutton suggests setting similar rules for yourself as you’d observe in a normal workplace. “Free yourself from feeling obligated to answer the doorbell, for example, if you wouldn’t be charged with doing that at an office,” she says.

If you’re working virtually, you’re probably spending more time on the phone. Gatherings are gatherings; conference calls should be planned as well as in-person meetings are. However, since most in-person meetings aren’t planned well and conference calls are even worse, it’s shockingly easy to get distracted. The best rule of thumb: if you can easily multitask, you shouldn’t be on that call. While showing your face on a large video call might have some benefit, there is close to zero benefit gained in sitting on a thirty-person audio-only call. Skip them when possible. If you really do need to be on a call, and to be paying attention, then do something to occupy yourself a little—burning off that excess physical energy that would have sent you to your inbox. One of my blog readers shares that her “secret weapon for audio-only conference calls is crafts—usually cross-stitch. It keeps my hands busy and keeps me from reading internet articles, which is what I used to do. It needs to be a craft you can set down, and one that is forgiving is also helpful, but it is so much easier to pay attention when my hands are busy.” You can doodle too—when my highly energetic five-year-old son was doing virtual preschool circle time, I would have him sit on my lap and draw or trace letters. This presented an alternative to his preferred hand activities, such as throwing things off my desk or hitting random keys on my laptop.

Of course, you can doodle all you want for self-management, but then there are the distractions that stem from other people. When remote work is done well, there should be far fewer of these. This is one reason why the 2019 annual survey from FlexJobs found that when people really had to get stuff done, 49 percent preferred a home office and only 8 percent felt most productive at a workplace during regular hours. Pre-COVID, I got a lot of questions about how to focus while sitting in a cubicle. With remote work, no one’s walking by to talk about the weighty topic of why Joe in accounting just showed up to the office in shorts. In your home office, you can, in fact, disconnect yourself from any messaging apps, put your phone in airplane mode, and be unreachable. The issue is that few people want to do that. Maybe they don’t want to be a workflow bottleneck, or maybe they don’t want their bosses to think they’re watching Netflix. In any case, teams need to work out communication rules. Ideally, you can agree on quiet hours and “office hours,” general collaboration/chitchat time. That way, if you do get a message during quiet hours, you know it’s probably important enough to look at, and it’s not about Joe’s shorts. (And if Joe is working at home, no one can see his shorts anyway!)

TAKE BREAKS

We are more prone to distractions when we’re tired. So, as you work to avoid distractions, you should proactively design your schedule to recognize energy peaks and valleys. The most productive people figure out a template for their days that recognizes when the low energy moments will happen. Then they plan real breaks—pauses from normal work centered on rejuvenating activities—into these spots.

Everyone takes breaks, even if people don’t admit it. What tends to happen in office environments, where breaks are sometimes frowned upon, is that people take breaks by doing something that still looks like work—as defined by being at their desks, or on their laptop or phones. But they’re panic-reading headlines, or lost in some Facebook drama. These activities aren’t actually rejuvenating. While remote work should feature fewer of these face-to-face group norms, some cultures still prize availability to the point that people, working from home, hire dog walkers, because they don’t think they can leave their desks for ten to fifteen minutes twice a day.

I’m all for outsourcing anything you don’t want to do, but real breaks are, generally, an efficient use of time. Most people will not take two forty-five-minute walks on a Tuesday afternoon, but people will absolutely spend this much time reading the same emails over and over again, getting distracted by clickbait articles that came through in newsletters, and then finding themselves mindlessly perusing furniture at potterybarn.com. Far better to take two fifteen-minute real breaks and recoup that lost hour.

So, make a list of short break options that do add to your energy levels. For many people, these options include physical activity, fresh air, chatting with a friend or family member or colleague, reading something relaxing, eating, and maybe caffeine if used responsibly. Choose a handful, ideally at least one physical, and one social. Even introverts tend to like social breaks when working from home, since we don’t suffer the same overstimulation that we do in crowded workplaces. You can plan these into your day to correspond to your energy troughs.

For instance, here’s one solid work-from-home schedule:

8:30–10:30  A.M.

Write proposal for new client

10:30–11:00

FaceTime coffee with a friend, then check email

11:00  A.M.—12:00 P.M.

Video conference with team on another project

12:00–12:30

Conference call (doodle during!)

12:30–1:00

Lunch with spouse who is also working from home and who is keeping this half hour free

1:00–2:50

Emails/daily crises/phone check-ins/unscheduled

2:50–3:00

Change into running clothes

3:00–3:30

Run outside!

3:30–4:00

Change, then dig through email

4:00–4:30

Conference call (more doodling . . . )

4:30–5:30

Do anything else that’s undone from day, plan tomorrow’s schedule

5:30

Cocktail hour

This is a good day. It features seven hours of fairly focused work. Those hours include doing an important, speculative project first thing in the morning. There’s time to react and time to plan. There are three breaks: two social and one physical. And how great for the cause of work/life balance to get an outdoor run and a lunch with a spouse?

Here’s another schedule, which is more geared toward managers:

6:30–8:30  A.M.

Design next year’s ideal department budget

8:30–9:30

Breakfast with family, kids to school (virtual or in person)

9:30  A.M.—12:00 P.M.

Daily to-dos, prep for afternoon meetings, available for/follow-up with direct reports

12:00–1:00

Lunch time yoga class (eat something quickly at the end)

1:00–3:00

Three forty-minute back-to-back videoconferences with teams 1, 2, and 3

3:00–3:15

Snack & sit outside in blessed silence

3:15–4:00

Do anything that’s undone from day, plan tomorrow’s schedule

4:00

Kids are back!

This schedule likewise features just over seven hours of solid work, including focused time in the early morning. This enables our manager to complete a project before other people start asking questions. The yoga class and the outside time bookend her intense meetings, allowing her to manage her energy through what might otherwise be a low-energy time.

If you like to work in the evenings, that’s fine too. Spearhead Capital’s James Hickey, whose kids are teenagers and young adults who don’t require evening supervision, reports that he often works three hours in the morning, takes a longer break, logs three hours in the afternoon, takes another break, and then does two hours after dinner.

If your schedule is variable, there’s no need to be militant about your shorter breaks. Just make sure there’s a spot somewhere. I would suggest consciously blocking out a longer break for lunch. You don’t need to eat during this time if you’d like to do a workout or practice a musical instrument or something like that. You could also split the time. Cheryl K. Johnson tells me, “I’ve been practicing what I call a ‘Box Lunch Lifestyle’ for a while now: a thirty-minute break that’s a chance to enjoy homemade food for fifteen minutes, and fifteen minutes to spend on a personal aspiration that never otherwise gets a chance (e.g. reading, drawing, getting outside, learning Italian, etc.).” While people might feel funny practicing Italian pronunciation out loud at the office, no one is watching you at home. Handled right, these chunks of time can be a great way to learn and grow.

KEEP ONE DAY (OR A FEW HOURS EACH DAY) OPEN

When I plan my weeks, I try not to assign myself work (beyond planning the next week!) for Friday. Anything I need to do during the week needs a designated spot before end-of-day Thursday.

This doesn’t mean I take Fridays off. Instead, this open space acts as a buffer to absorb any spillover from the rest of the week. When something takes longer than expected, the extra work can still get done before the weekend. If some crisis consumes Tuesday, Tuesday’s original work can be rescheduled to Friday. If you can’t keep an open day—and I recognize that this is challenging for people who work with a lot of colleagues—keep a few hours open on each day. A hack for people with many appointments: schedule morning ones on the hour, and afternoon ones on the half hour, skipping the 12:30 P.M. spot. This guarantees ninety minutes open—which can be enough for a lunch break, and can absorb the morning’s delays and emergencies. Extra space keeps people from falling behind. “But something came up!” isn’t really an excuse. Stuff always comes up. Few of us know, at 9:00 A.M., everything that will need to be addressed by 5:00 P.M. Self-directed professionals keep their deadlines even when life happens, knowing that this reliability makes people trip over themselves to work with them.

I like to think of this open space as a “time emergency fund”—like the rainy day cash that keeps a roof repair from being a problem—with a caveat. Time can’t be saved. Your open week in 2006 can’t be cashed in with interest in 2021. However, on a shorter time frame, the funds can be used. If you’ve got two hours open on Thursday and life is feeling good, you can knock some things off from Friday’s tasks, or from the next week’s. You can also “bank” time in other people. If you help a colleague who’s in a pinch, she will help you on that day you’ve got six hours of work to get through in four. You still stay on track.

END WELL

Just as a day needs an opening, it needs an ending. Curiously, while many companies instituted 9:00 A.M. check-ins during the social distancing era, far fewer held 4:45 P.M. Zoom goodbye ceremonies to indicate that the day was done.

This is a missed opportunity. Sustainable progress requires stopping before you’re completely spent. This way, you live to march again another day.

Many people who work from home find it helpful to create their own ending rituals. Whenever your task list is finished and you have decided to be done, do something to close out your session. Write your to-done list. Review your to-do list for the next day. Meditate for five minutes or write in a journal. Reverse whatever fake commute you orchestrated in the morning. Put yourself in the right headspace for the rest of life. Matt Altmix, the photographer and podcaster, reports that he spends the last half hour before the 4:30 P.M. end of his workday on tasks that don’t require tremendous feats of brainpower. (Perhaps this is why he requested we speak at 4:00 P.M.!) “If I’m doing creative brainstorming up until it’s time to quit, it’s tough to disengage my brain to be present with the family,” he says. “I know if I’m grappling with anything really stressful, right up until 4:30, I’ll carry that stress with me into my personal life, and it’s just not fair to my family.” Another cue: He tracks his time with an app called Clockify and, right at 4:30 P.M., he clicks to change activities. “It signals to my brain that, OK, we’re shifting gears now.”

I confess that I do not follow my own advice here. For many years—until I learned to get more childcare—I would dive straight from work into kid craziness. My justification for leaving my laptop open and waiting for me was that I often planned to work again after the kids went to bed. But even if you do such a “split shift,” taking a moment to pause and power down can make the transition less fraught. After my beloved MacBook Pro fried because I never turned it off, I started shutting down the laptop around 7:30 P.M. I can fire it back up again, but I sometimes think better of it and pick up a book instead.

DAILY RHYTHMS AND KIDS

It is particularly important to match the right work with the right time if you are caring for small children. Long term, people who work from home and have small children need childcare during the hours they work (a topic we’ll return to later in this book). With schools and day cares closed during the pandemic, however, many people were left scrambling, trying to figure out ways to work while supervising kids too.

I hope that by the time you’re reading this, everyone has resumed their normal care arrangements, or has found new ones that can work with the restrictions. But childcare emergencies can happen to people who work from home just as they can to people who work in an office. Successful remote workers have a plan for any long-term coverage gaps in the future, whether that’s because of snow days, a nanny’s illness, or a day care closure.

If you’ve got older children (ages nine and up), you might be able to log a reasonably focused day without childcare by setting very clear guidelines on your availability. If the kids know that you will be available to them before 9:00 A.M., from 12:00 P.M. to 1:00 P.M., and that you’ll start a Fortnite marathon with them at 4:30 P.M., they can develop the discipline not to bang down your office door at other times. Put a red stop sign on your office door, in case they forget.

However, this discipline doesn’t arise until the preteen years (and it’s not 100 percent then either, but at least it’s a more reasonable bet). Thus, the strategy pursued by most people who had children too young to watch themselves during the pandemic was to trade hours with a co-parent. This limits both people’s hours, but it is the most sustainable and fair solution. When work is planned well, you can be reasonably productive in five to six hours a day (with a few bits of time caught elsewhere). A blog reader of mine who works in academia devised a family system where she worked from 1:00 P.M. to 5:30 P.M. (when her partner would cover) and 7:30 P.M. to 8:30 P.M. “What’s key for me is to use the evening block for planning,” she wrote in a comment. “I outline what I need to write the following day and when I get to my desk at 1:00, I am ready to write. I also do no admin or emails during that 1:00 to 5:30 block, just pure writing and research. I can normally grab a few minutes for email or admin on the weekends or when my son is occupied in play during the morning.” She reported that “I’ve found that protecting that time is really helpful.”

If both parties can’t commit to a regular child-swap schedule, you can each study your calendars the night before and figure out who can cover what hours, or when you’ll need to load up the Daniel Tiger marathon. A box of hidden toys, with a new one pulled out right before an important call, might keep children occupied. If you run a small child around outside for a while, she might be more inclined to flop onto the couch or play with toys afterward. An older child (over age nine or ten) might serve as a parents’ helper for forty-five minutes or so when necessary. To distinguish this gig from your normal admonitions to “go play with your sister!” you could pay the child in a currency she values (e.g. cash or iPad time). You can also make use of early morning hours, post-bedtime hours, and nap hours, particularly if you are on your own. If only one party works at home and winds up covering a larger portion of emergency childcare, the other party can cover weekends. During one particularly snowy winter several years ago, I wound up doing all my focused work for the week on Sundays, while my husband took the kids. That way when he was off traveling somewhere during the week, and school was closed for a blizzard and our nanny couldn’t safely come work, I could still make progress on long-term projects.

Since I run my own business, I have some control of my schedule. Not everyone does. I also know that comparisons come into play, even if the objective amount of work done is reasonable. I heard from a number of parents during social distancing time that their colleagues without kids were working longer hours out of sheer boredom. With homeschooling or baby coverage demanding hours, many parents worried that they looked like slackers. One person even told me that she was thinking of quitting because she didn’t like doing B− work!

I am not sure how this played out, but I hope she stuck with it, because a B− is still passing. From an employer perspective, I’d rather have a long-term A+ employee do B− work for six months than have them walk out. I know many people just tried to muddle along and act like nothing was happening during this time, but I’d suggest showing the courage to be transparent about why you’re doing B− work. Better to let your colleagues know that you are on toddler duty in the morning and you’re happy to work like a fiend all afternoon than to have them keep sending you stuff in the morning, pinging you constantly, and making you (and the toddler) miserable.

I’d also counsel that while your colleagues may have sharp elbows, you are supposed to be on the same team. If someone without caregiving responsibilities wants to work more hours, how about being . . . happy? Ideally, we all contribute as we can. Your colleagues contribute in hours, and you contribute in some other way, either through standard forms of career capital (expertise, connections) or something else (the way you start each video call with the perfect quotation). Over time, you will make it up. It will be OK.

GET A LIFE

If the last section was aimed at parents, this is for others. Before the pandemic, I led time-management workshops at a number of all-virtual companies’ in-person annual retreats. We studied schedules together; we hashed out improvements. I soon noticed something. People with kids or other caregiving responsibilities were much better about observing an end to the workday. This makes sense: someone has to pick up the kids at day care, meet a bus, or send a sitter home. People who lived on their own or with unrelated roommates often let work bleed into all hours of the night (and weekend).

I know this from my own experience. During my early work-from-home days in my Upper East Side apartment, I would spend the evenings half working and half surfing the web. I wasn’t relaxed, but I wasn’t getting much done either. What broke this cycle for me was joining three community choirs. Each had weekly rehearsals on a different night, which meant that on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays, I had to stop work at 6:00 P.M. to go somewhere. This made me much more efficient (and enforced a more regular showering schedule).

Likewise, even if you’re busy with work, don’t shy from making nonwork commitments. Join a softball team, sign up to serve weekly at a soup kitchen, or make an appointment with a trainer at 7:30 P.M. on Tuesdays and Thursdays. You and your colleagues will respect a formal commitment more than a general desire to stop working at some point. You will plan your energy and workflow with your commitments in mind. Even in social distancing situations, there are options: a weekly Thursday night video chat with friends, a 6:00 P.M. appointment with your garden to work for an hour before sunset, loading up a virtual vespers service.

Adopt the same mind-set for weekends too. I won’t say “don’t work on weekends” because we all need to sometimes. Occasionally, we want to tackle something big or speculative. But without conscious markers of time, Wednesday and Sunday can wind up looking exactly the same. Instead, push this work to designated windows (e.g. Saturday morning, Sunday after 7:00 P.M.). Proactively plan in fun stuff: a hike, an elaborate baking project. A satisfying rhythm is achieved not by working less, but by having a compelling life outside of work. It’s worthwhile to get this right.

Chapter 3

Build Your Team

Before March 2020, I heard many versions of this argument against remote and flexible work:

- People need to build relationships to work well together

- The best way to build relationships is to be face to face

These statements are both true, but they are not the whole story. Many of us have close professional relationships with people who don’t sit in the same office building with us forty hours a week. I have seen my Best of Both Worlds podcast cohost, Sarah Hart-Unger, in person just half a dozen times over the years. Nonetheless, thanks to technology, we’ve built an enterprise together. Our video calls once every week or two, supplemented by lots of emails and texts, suffice for collaboration. Indeed, on our recording days, as we’re popping in and out of SquadCast and texting back and forth and FaceTiming, I sometimes forget that all these interactions are virtual and that she’s in Florida, not sitting in an office down the hall.

But more importantly: work need not be either/or. Virtual work does not preclude in-person work. These types of work complement one another. I suspect that once the pandemic recedes in memory, many employers will land on a compromise in which people work in an office two to three days per week and remotely two to three days per week. A few will decide that they can be almost entirely virtual, with the mix depending on what organizations find most valuable.

Either can work, and can support real trust and collaboration. Indeed, structuring work to be flexible—particularly in terms of location—can be a strategic advantage for forward-thinking leaders who want to build a great team and a broad, robust network. Individuals can also use some of the flexibility that working from home provides to build their own “teams” of anyone who wants to see them succeed. This chapter covers strategies that both managers and individuals can use to nurture connections—not despite working remotely, but in many cases, because they do so.

This is why I push back on the narrative that working from home is somehow less collaborative than full-time in-office work. For starters, collaboration is more effective with people who are really good at what they do, which suggests one obvious advantage for managers who let people work from home: your pool of talent isn’t limited to people who live within an hour’s drive of you. If people come into the office twice a week, you could probably double that radius. If the expectation for in-person work is one week every month, then you can hire from just about anywhere. (Given the transaction costs involved in traveling, if your team is far flung, one week a month is preferable to one day a week.)

In addition to stretching the hiring radius for companies, virtual work is a major perk for people choosing an employer. Multiple surveys have found that sizable proportions of people are willing to take pay cuts in order to be able to work from home. For an employer, the implication is that virtual work lets you get good people at a bargain. Or you can use the money that you save on real estate to lure the cream of the crop. Amy Laski says that founding Felicity, her PR firm, was partly about giving seasoned professionals the opportunity for great work/life integration. “Our virtual structure means our clients invest in ‘brains not bricks,’” she says.

Then, once you bring in good people, you can keep them. Here Comes the Guide accelerated the transition to virtual work when two highly valued team members had to move for their partners’ jobs. “We asked, ‘Do we just lose these employees, or do we find a way to continue to let them work for us?” says Schwartz. “It was a no-brainer.” When employees can work from anywhere, you will naturally have lower turnover, and the longer you work with people, the more you build those trusting relationships that produce good work.

Of course, building great relationships with colleagues, clients, and future collaborators requires more mindfulness when you’re not always in the same building. But the good news is that there are plenty of practical steps you can take to nurture your connections—both virtually and in person—when you work from home. When any relationship is approached mindfully, it’s going to be better than when it’s taken for granted. Here’s how wise folks build a professional team, and a home team when necessary, to help them succeed.

RE-CREATE THE WATER COOLER

The Zoom happy hour became a pandemic cliché. And yep, I have spotted my husband walking around the house with his laptop and a glass of Scotch. But clichés become clichés for a reason, and what those of us who had Zoom Pro accounts before March 2020 have figured out is that, for most small group business purposes (e.g. your get-together doesn’t center around touching one another!), seeing one another’s faces is about 75 percent as good for connecting and nurturing relationships as seeing one another in person. Yes, there are slight sound delays that need to be managed, but with a little mindfulness, this is doable. Since video calls also cut down on multitasking, they, rather than audio-only calls, should be any remote worker’s default.

To make the most of the social engagement that video calls enable, be sure to start virtual meetings with a few minutes of scheduled chitchat. Everyone will do this anyway, and putting it on the agenda means it’s accounted for (some folks also open the meeting a few minutes early and encourage people to chat during this time, which is great, but I like acknowledging that connecting is part of any meeting’s purpose). Whoever is convening the meeting can ask everyone a social question in turn, using names so people know who is supposed to be speaking. This way, all voices get heard. Of course, some of the socializing that goes on around meetings is informal (or back channel) too. One reader posted on my blog that she makes a point of “calling colleagues after meetings to replicate the chatting and discussion that happens when people leave meetings at the same time.” If you would have made a joke about something on the way to the ladies’ room, or taken a colleague aside to say something to her privately, you can call that same colleague to make that point. (Internal chat apps can provide the same outlet, with the caveat that those might wind up visible to others.)

While Zoom happy hours are fun, organizations that really think about virtual work tend to give these gatherings more direction. Maria LeBlanc, who works in fundraising, reports that she started a team book club devoted to reading books related to the industry. “This brings us together for a more informal chat that feels like professional development but also checks the box of small talk/connection,” she says.

You can “grab lunch” with colleagues or other connections virtually by, well, eating at the same time (pay for someone’s Seamless order if you’d like to treat). The first time I ate lunch on a video call I thought it was incredibly weird, but then I realized that this was because I could see myself eating. This doesn’t happen in a restaurant unless it’s got a lot of mirrors, but your lunch companion can see you chewing in real life too. So unless you’re slovenly, there’s no need to be self-conscious. Hide your own window and you’ll be fine.

Almost anything that might have happened in person—from yoga classes to lunchtime parenting discussions—can happen via video conference. You can do a wine tasting by sending bottles to employees. You can send a birthday cake to an employee and then sing (though the smartest option is to have mercy on your colleagues and appoint whoever dominates the holiday party karaoke to sing—using the excuse that video conference programs don’t do multiple voices well). Virtual options are sometimes easier than real-life equivalents. I’m a fan of home office tours, which Erin Ruane, senior vice president of marketing and sales at real estate site homes.com, reports that her company started doing during the pandemic. Employees would show off their office spaces, their homes in general, and introduce willing family members. As a side note, when everyone has met someone’s kid or dog, it makes the inevitable unplanned Zoom appearance of said kids and dogs a lighter moment. We’re also all curious about our colleagues’ homes, but inviting a dozen colleagues over for a drink is not a casual undertaking. A quick sweep with the laptop, on the other hand, can show off a garden or your IKEA bookshelf-building skills to that many colleagues without nearly as much work.

The key for any virtual social event is that it must be facilitated. Someone needs to direct who is talking, using names to make cues clear, just as a gracious host would make sure the dinner table conversation is engaging and inclusive. Smaller is better. While you could have twenty-five people stand in the same bar and move back and forth between small group conversations, this is harder in a video chat (though, honestly, I’ve gotten stuck talking to one person the whole time during live events that are supposed to be mixers—my guess is that you have too). So, just as it’s tough to have a good conversation when you’ve got twelve people at a restaurant table, you’re better off splitting into smaller groups, and then mixing up the groups—like a round-robin dinner where you’d move for the dessert course.

These virtual social options can work, though in the long term, people won’t rely on them as much because, when the world isn’t battling a pandemic, virtual teams can and should get together in person. If you’re in the office one day a week, or everyone’s together three days a month, pack those days with breakfasts, coffees, lunches, happy hours. The basic work can be done anywhere, so face-to-face time should be used for what it is best suited for: nurturing relationships. Indeed, I’d argue that relationships can be better when in-person time is consciously planned around social engagement, rather than everyone assuming relationships naturally grow by sitting passively next to other people in meetings.

Amy Laski says that Felicity’s annual one-day Urban Retreat sets the stage for team interactions year-round as people are “literally putting a face to a name.” These gatherings don’t have to involve flying off to Fiji (though if you can afford it . . . go for it). Since most of Laski’s team is around Toronto, they can do activities there, such as taking over a cooking school, tackling a ropes course, or visiting a transit-repair center turned artists’ colony. “I know I’ll have the greatest engagement at our retreat if I make the timing—starting after 9:00 A.M. and finishing by 4:00 P.M.—ish—and the format conducive to the team’s lifestyles,” Laski says. “We keep commutes to a minimum so we can maximize the use of our time together.”

REACH OUT

If relationships are best built face to face, then there’s a little downside to cubicle life that’s seldom discussed: being in an office forty hours a week results in an overinvestment of time (probably beyond the point of diminishing returns) with a small group of people, and generally a massive underinvestment of time in anybody else—who might also be professionally useful. When you work in an office, you eat lunch with your coworkers. If you are not in the office forty hours a week, it’s easier to get together with people who are not your immediate coworkers . . . and you should.

In his book Face to Face, producer Brian Grazer credits “curiosity conversations” for much of his professional success. He’ll ask someone fascinating to dinner just to get to know the person—with no obvious purpose in mind. Most of us can’t sustain a regular swanky restaurant habit, nor will Eminem return our calls, but pretty much all of us could schedule at least one lunch or coffee per week with someone worth knowing better. This gives structure to a day, creates a social break, and extends a network. Any given meeting might be more pleasant than useful, but this is about discipline. With fifty coffees a year, someone’s going to wind up introducing a new client to your firm . . . or sending over their resume when you ask. When curiosity conversations can’t be done in person, do them virtually. This extends your reach to people who live more than an hour from you, and means you don’t need to wait until a connection is traveling through town to meet.

To schedule these coffees and lunches, you need to get in the habit of reaching out to people. Aim to send a note each workday to someone. There are all sorts of authentic reasons to do so: You read an article about the person’s organization. You just talked to a mutual friend. You saw on Facebook that the person’s birthday is coming up, so you reached out with an actual personal note, rather than just hitting “like” on the birthday photo (good for you). Subscribe to industry newsletters and reach out to congratulate acquaintances who are mentioned. Meet up with interesting people you think of as being in the “personal” category too. The lines are always blurry. Neighbors, fellow parishioners, and your kids’ friends’ parents all have networks. Everybody should be doing these things, including people who sit in the same cubicle five days a week, but I find that people who work full-time in traditional offices often feel that their need for a network is satisfied. They’re around people in their industry all day! That’s fine, until it isn’t. Few jobs are 100 percent secure. If your organization goes through mass layoffs, your laid off colleagues are going to be less helpful than your fellow Cub Scout leader whose spouse is the CFO of another major employer in town.

To be sure, some remote workers just sit in their home offices all day. Believe me, I understand that temptation. But without the time sink of a daily commute, and without the group norms that make you feel like you need to explain where you’re going if you pop out forty-five minutes early for a “curiosity conversation” before day care pickup, you can build a broader network if you’d like. Wise remote workers do just that.

GATHER

When you’re not in an office all the time, professional gatherings become even more important—but like all things, they are best approached mindfully.

Take conferences. When I first started going to conferences, I found them almost unbearably frustrating. This is because listening to a panel discussion might be the world’s least efficient way to glean information. I later learned that the panel format persists because it enables organizers to invite bigger name people to a conference without the commitment of a keynote speaker slot. The real work of a conference is almost always happening outside the formal programming.

Approached well, a conference is largely a chance to meet with people in person that you know virtually. I like to arrange coffees with people who I want to chat with one-on-one. Unlike, say, blind dates, it’s fine to stack these social appointments close together; if they overlap, you can introduce people. I park myself in the hotel bar for two hours early in the conference and invite anyone that I know tangentially to drop by. Many of these people will bring a friend too; it’s a bonus to meet people that your professional acquaintances find worth knowing.

You can also stage your own small events. If you’ll be visiting a city for work, think about who you might know there. Ask friends for referrals until you get four to six people confirmed. Arrange a casual dinner somewhere. Do a little background research on everyone so that you can guide the discussion toward topics of mutual interest. If the chemistry isn’t there, oh well. It’s one night. It probably still beats lukewarm room service. But it might be fun. If you or anyone you love has something to celebrate, throw a party. Yes, it’s a lot of bother, but so what? What exactly are you saving your energy for? In a day or two, everyone will be well rested again, and your house will be clean, or you can just pay a venue and walk away from the dirty dishes. You’ll be left with memories of sharing a profound moment with people who care about you. Which is worth having. Fundamentally, people are a good use of time.

GROW YOUR TEAM

In normal times, if you’re hiring for your remote team, you’ll want people who think the remote part is a plus. You’ll want to look for people who work well with a bit of ambiguity. Meredith Monday Schwartz of Here Comes the Guide says that in interviews she looks for people “who are very much harder on themselves than I would ever be,” she says. “I’m looking for that trait. You could not pay them to not do their best work.” Many times, the sweet spot is seasoned professionals who have lifestyle reasons for preferring remote work. Or maybe there’s some strange concoction of personality and family dynamics. Anne Bogel of Modern Mrs. Darcy surveyed her team and found that the ten female members were all eldest daughters.

That said, you fight your wars with the army you have. Companies that hadn’t built their businesses around remote work still figured out how to pull it off during the pandemic. Some people require more hand-holding, especially in the beginning, but everyone can learn to be more self-directed, particularly if they’re matched with the right work and are held accountable. Working from home is a skill. Like most skills, people get better with practice. If you’re hiring someone who hasn’t done a lot of remote work before, just be mindful during the on-boarding process. Arran Stewart of Job.com recommends having a first day meet and greet where the new person says hello to everyone, virtually, so she can put faces with the names she’ll see in her inbox. During this meet and greet, have everyone add the new person to any meeting invites she needs to know about for the next week. Yes, you should all sit there and take a few minutes to do this together. One of the quirks of human nature is that we don’t always think about people we don’t see right in front of us, and while you might walk past a new employee’s cubicle and think, “Oh yes, Leigh needs to come to that project meeting on Friday,” with remote work, you might get to Friday and think, “Oh wait—we forgot to invite Leigh!” (This will not give Leigh warm and fuzzy feelings about remote work.) As the new person’s supervisor, you should also call her, possibly multiple times on the first day. You’re checking in, sure, but it’s also to show that it’s totally fine to call. You want her to reach out if there are issues, rather than suffering in silence, and one way to show that it’s OK is to do it yourself.

If you’re running your own enterprise from home, it’s doubly exciting to build your team, since you have the satisfaction of knowing that you’ve created these jobs yourself. Small businesses that allow people to work flexibly, from anywhere, can sometimes work with people as contractors rather than as full-time employees—which allows them to be nimble, scaling up and down depending on their project mix. As you track your time, think about what is consuming your hours, and what you might not be good at doing, or what you do decently, but that may not be the best use of what is ultimately a limited resource. Anne Bogel notes, “I have been a very reluctant boss.” As her books empire grew, she simply had to acknowledge that she would need to lead a team. However, “Over time I have evolved my own position to focus more on what I want to do.” Her operations manager handles day-to-day supervision as she focuses on creative matters. “Just the sheer amount of time he spends on Zoom talking to everyone every week is significant,” she says.

As you think about what you need, you can ask your network for referrals (for web people, communications folk, design people, and so on). I have also found that, as I blab to the universe about how I’m spending my time, sometimes people appear. Be open to this. One much appreciated creative professional sent me an email last fall out of the blue, describing exactly how she could help, which was in the exact way that I had been thinking I needed help. Given that she reads books for a living, it’s not surprising that Bogel has been introduced to people—including two current team members—who’ve said “working for you would be my dream job.” Since she knew that these people would be good catches, she has said, “Let’s talk. It’s not necessarily that I had a role for them, but knowing what I knew about their experience and talents, I knew we could find a place for them.”

My usual approach is to try people out with a small project. If it doesn’t work, they haven’t invested much time and I haven’t invested much money. But if it does work well, then we can try bigger things—even if we’ve never met face to face.

BUILD A HOME TEAM

Just as a work team makes it possible to do more than you could do on your own, a home team lets you focus at work, and spend your off-hours in enjoyable ways.

For many of us, the primary home-team need is childcare. In non–social distancing times, this might not be necessary for people whose children are old enough to be in school and camp all day. With little ones, though, it will be challenging to grow your empire without childcare. It’s not impossible—as people discovered during the COVID-19 epidemic. But many people’s takeaway from the pandemic experience is that working without childcare is frustrating. The distractions pile up, you feel like you’re failing at parenting when you suggest the kids watch another movie, and the limit on hours means that deeper thinking gets pushed forward. Yes, you can and should train your kids to play independently. But in general, having adult coverage, whether that is your co-parent, another family member, or a paid professional, makes life so much calmer. It is inevitably the day that you have a call with a potential new client when your child, who normally naps at 1:00 P.M., just . . . doesn’t.

Of course, if you are working from home and have young kids, you may have noted this issue: even if they are being cared for by someone else, you are all still in the same space. The kids may hear you. You may hear them. They may want to visit you. When my husband and I had our first child many years ago, we were living in a one-bedroom apartment. I did not see how this could work with me working at home, so we sent our son to a lovely day care/preschool a few blocks away. That solved the noise problem, though the lack of flexibility on hours, and the frequent illnesses, proved to be stressful. We wound up moving to a two-bedroom apartment and then hiring a nanny when we had our second child. As we’ve interviewed caregivers over the years, I’ve been transparent that, while the job is primarily about keeping the children safe when my husband and I are working, a secondary responsibility is keeping the kids out of my office. We buy memberships to all area zoos, museums, and play-places to make that feasible. Matt Altmix’s wife, Kate, cares for their four children during the day. He notes that setting “very hard hours” for starting and stopping work has helped with creating boundaries. “Kate knows I’m unavailable during this time to help with the kids,” he says. “We’ve talked about this extensively,” with both of them agreeing that, as the sole breadwinner, it’s helpful for him to focus and not have interruptions during work hours. But the hard stopping time “also gives her some reassurance, some peace of mind knowing that at 4:30 she can completely count on me to be there.”

Good childcare is expensive, so I know it’s tempting to pay for less, rather than more, but if you’ve got big ambitions, try to think of this as an investment that will pay off in your long-term earning potential. For instance, having an after-school sitter who could get the kids started on homework and make dinner means that you could talk to a client who likes to check in at 4:30 P.M. and not have to rush to get him off the phone. If you need to travel to headquarters from time to time, and your co-parent also travels or works late, or if you’re solo, then a reliable overnight childcare option means that you can focus on your work trips without all sorts of crazy logistical gymnastics.

You might also consider help with the housework. Many people assume that if they’re home during the day, they’ll have more time for housework, but the problem with being home during the day is that you keep seeing the messes, and soon housework can consume all available time. Hire someone to come clean and you can consider this task to be off your plate. As for those plates? You might look into hiring someone to cook dinner occasionally. It’s really lovely to know that dinner will be ready right when you’re ready to emerge, victorious, from your new corner office.

Having a team—personally and professionally—reminds you that your time is valuable. You do something very well, and it is in many people’s best interests for you to spend your time doing that thing on as big a stage as possible.

Chapter 4

Think Big

Landing a corner office is exciting. It means you’ve arrived. You’re calling the shots. You’re working from a position of power.

There is no reason this can’t still be the case when your new corner office is a corner of your house. It can still be the seat from where you build your empire.

Key to thinking big is giving yourself the time and space to ask what you want from life. You can think and dream on many levels. You can create habits and structures that nudge your career forward. This chapter has ideas for how to nurture your ambitions even if you rarely sport a power suit.

CREATE A “LIST OF 100 DREAMS”

When I first started studying time, I realized that people with big beautiful lives were generally not obsessed with hacks that allowed them to cook pasta more quickly or answer ten emails in the time a mere mortal could handle eight. Instead, they focused on filling their time with the things that deserved to be there. And that meant that they thought about how they’d like to fill their time both immediately and in the future, professionally and personally.

If you haven’t given yourself permission to ask this question—what would I like to do with my time?—I highly recommend it. My favorite exercise for this, shared by career coach Caroline Ceniza-Levine for my book 168 Hours, is called the “List of 100 Dreams.” This is a completely unedited list of anything you might want to do in life. It’s basically a bucket list . . . but most bucket lists stop long before item one hundred. You have to think hard to get to a hundred. You go beyond the obvious (see the Eiffel Tower!) to ideas that are more specific to you (in my case: write a collection of seasonal sonnets; furnish a really cool dollhouse; visit Perth).

While bucket lists lean more to the personal side, when you go to one hundred items, you’ve got space for a professional section too. These dreams can range from the more doable (starting a mentoring program) to ones that will involve steps that are not within your immediate control (becoming CEO of your company).

Don’t talk yourself out of ideas. You are not holding yourself to any of this. You’re just playing around with scenarios for your life. Revisit this list every few years as your desires and ambitions change. If you’d like, you can share your list with supportive friends, family members, or mentors. You could cross some items off this weekend. For the bigger ones, choose one or two professional and personal goals to focus on per year. Come December, what would you like to be able to say you’ve done? Write these goals somewhere prominently, so you can think about taking steps toward these goals when you plan your weekly schedule on Fridays. And, of course, be open to opportunity. When you articulate desires, you start seeing possibilities. You note that a conference you’d had on your radar screen for a while will be held in Perth in two years. That gives you time to finagle your way into a speaking invitation and coordinate your vacation schedule to add on some days. Just like that, you’re knocking multiple items off the list. Or at least trying to. Sometimes pandemics or other crises upend our plans. But enough of the joy of any event is experienced in the anticipation that even thinking about a List of 100 Dreams can be enough to make the future seem more open.

DESIGN A REALISTIC IDEAL WEEK

Another form of thinking big is designing a “realistic ideal week”—that is, imagining what you would like your life to look like, hour by hour, given the constraints of biology and physics. What kind of work would you be doing? What hours would you work? Who would you be working with? When would you do your hobbies? What would your evenings look like, and your weekends?

Creating a realistic ideal schedule is particularly useful for people who work from home, because, if you have more control over your schedule, you can view this schedule as a guide, rather than a wish list, and try it out. Maybe you’ve always thought that morning exercise sounded good, but your commute was long enough that this would have meant really, really early morning exercise—precluding your usual creative burst at ten o’clock at night. If your ideal schedule in the post-COVID era has you working from home two days per week, you could exercise on those mornings and still get your late-night brainstorming done. Creating a realistic ideal schedule helps you see possibilities. Even if you can’t implement it completely, it can offer guidance on the days when you do have control. My ideal schedule is to work hard in the morning, exercise and take a nap in the afternoon, and then work in the evening (from about dinner time to midnight). This schedule is almost impossible to pull off when I’m around my family. But when I’m on my own for a few days, it’s exactly how I work, and I know not to fight it.

BECOME A THOUGHT LEADER

As the world gets back to normal, some workplaces have marched, or will march, everyone back to traditional schedules. If you’d like to keep a more flexible one, you need to think about what sort of leverage you have. A discovery: it’s easier to control your work hours and location when people come to you rather than you needing to go to them.

As my friend Dorie Clark puts it in her book Stand Out, “Building a strong professional reputation is the best way to protect, and advance, your career. When you’re recognized by others as an authority in your field, clients and employers want to work with you, specifically—and if you do lose your job, you’re equipped to bounce back.”

Expertise is a nebulous concept. There are obvious markers, such as degrees, but they are not the only ones, and generally degrees themselves are insufficient to become established as a thought leader. You need a good idea—and a good sense of your brand or your professional superpower. What could make you stand out? If you haven’t thought much about this, try asking people that you’ve worked with over the years how they see you. When are you at your best? What do you do that is most distinctive? What seems easy to you that is hard for others? Ask several people. Any one person’s thoughts are interesting, but subject to their own quirks. When eight of ten people all mention that they have never seen anyone read as quickly as you, or that you always come up with the perfect project name, or that your ability to explain complex mathematical concepts is dizzying, that’s worth acknowledging. Sometimes, when you examine disparate threads of your life, you see that there are actually common themes. Maybe things you loved as a kid show up in the kind of work that makes you happiest now. You loved getting your friends to put on plays as a kid and, sure enough, you’ve now coached colleagues into the best presentations of their lives. Really think about these subjects to see which ideas and expertise you could start sharing more broadly.

To be taken seriously for your great ideas, it helps to have institutions or people with clout who can vouch for you. This explains the appeal of TED Talks and books, though these tend to be verifying checkmarks on expertise. Earlier steps might include giving lunchtime presentations about your good ideas to colleagues, or through a professional network, or attracting big audiences to your Facebook Live sessions or Instagram stories. You can start a professional blog or post articles on LinkedIn. Research a topic of professional interest, then write a paper advancing and defending a thesis. Circulate this around your organization and you may soon be cited as the resident expert on the subject. You may be invited to share your thoughts on the topic to senior management. Or, if you’re constantly explaining to colleagues how to do certain tasks, film yourself doing short how-to videos. These will likely be shared around and make you famous inside your organization.

Being a thought leader is about having important thoughts, but the leader part matters too. You need followers who agree that you are an expert, and, ideally, you need a way to reach these followers. Someone should give a commencement address based solely on this advice: start collecting email addresses. Even if you don’t use them, it’s nice to know that you could reach out to people to tell them about your work. You might also consider using them. Whether you run your own show or work for someone else, you can start a newsletter with interesting content: book or podcast recommendations, curated links, interviews with other thought leaders. An email newsletter is one of the easiest ways to remind people—on your terms—that you exist. Our own existence is pretty central to our experience, so we sometimes forget that we might not be at the top of everyone else’s minds. Make sure your social media profiles are consistent with your image. Get professional headshots that convey your professional personality: intellectual, creative, no-nonsense, etc.

Even your backdrop can be an opportunity to advance your personal brand. Back in the infancy of video conferencing technology, this section might have been an admonition not to show your dirty laundry or unmade bed. We’ve moved beyond that. Succeeding in the new corner office means making conscious use of whatever visuals you share on-screen to convey something important about yourself. A piece of original art on the wall shows your sophistication. A cheerful aquarium doesn’t just mean you like fish. It means you’re approachable—because it gives people an obvious subject for the small talk that starts most virtual meetings. If you’re known as a straightlaced person, a framed album cover from the band you led in college can hint at more complexity. Even your attire can shape the conversation. Dominic Benford of NASA normally wears a tie to the office and elected to keep doing so once he began working from home. In the office, he’d rotate through a series of five different tie knots, but once quarantine began, he decided to start showcasing a new tie knot every day. When we talked, he was thirty days into the streak and sporting a “resurrection knot,” which turns out to involve tying a second “trinity knot.” (Let that send you down an internet rabbit hole for a while.) “It was something I was already known for,” he says, and so when people would sign in to video conferences early, somebody would invariably ask him the name of the knot.

As you get a better sense of who you are, and of what is unique to you, you can start talking about these traits when you introduce yourself or when someone asks for a bio or when you produce marketing materials. You want to do this in an authentic way. But if you pay attention, you’ll notice how often people ask, “What do you do?” I’m a writer, speaker, and podcaster, but if someone bothers to ask a follow-up question, I can mention that my goal with all these activities is to help people spend more time on things that matter and less time on things that don’t. Having a sense of what language you’d put at the top of your personal website (or actually creating that site!) lets people know what you’re known for. It lets them know why they’d want to work, specifically, with you—which increases the likelihood that they will decide they absolutely must do so.

GET FEEDBACK

Feedback is a gift, and formalizing the process of receiving it from thoughtful people can light a fire under your career. This is the theory behind mastermind groups, and you should definitely join or start one. Gather with a few people in similar career stages. They could be in your company or industry, though some diversity might be helpful for broadening your network too. Come to each meeting with a problem that you’re looking to solve. Get these people’s feedback on your problem. Give your feedback on their problems. Check in regularly to cheer on one another.

You might also consider an accountability partner. If you work in an organization, hopefully your manager is providing the basic accountability for getting your work done, but a partner can nudge you to propose new projects, negotiate better terms, and seek out awards. And if you run your own show, an accountability partner can remind you to keep pitching work even when you’re busy, or just to dream big in general. My accountability partner and I have checked in with each other almost every Friday for seven years now. It’s great to have a reason to think through what you’ve done for the week, and if you haven’t done anything, knowing that you’ll need to send this email to your accountability partner can be a kick in the pants to get going.

TRY STUFF OUT

People who think big about their careers give themselves time and space to try stuff out. This is why people go on retreats—taking time away from daily responsibilities to play around with ideas—but whether you work for an organization that does these well or not, you can still create solo retreats to ponder your own dilemmas or empire-building possibilities. I have done a few of these, often when I am nearing a book deadline. I like to be able to work through a manuscript without the interruptions inherent in family life. Choose a spot that isn’t too far away; you don’t want to burn retreat time with travel. Enlist your home team to make the logistics possible. Then go for at least two nights. This gives you a full day in which you don’t have to think about transit or family responsibilities. Having a specific problem you want to work through is key. If you go away just to think deep thoughts, you might not have as many useful deep thoughts as you would like. That can be frustrating if you’ve called in favors to make your absence possible. I have noticed, however, that simply stepping away from things can help you recognize opportunities. I was on a book-finishing retreat in the Poconos in 2017 when I clicked over to The SHU Box, one of my favorite blogs, and read that Sarah Hart-Unger was thinking of starting a podcast. I reached out to see if she might want to start one with me, and we launched Best of Both Worlds about a month later. This began my general career pivot toward podcasting. Would I have thought to send that note if I had read her blog post while half watching a karate lesson? It’s hard to know.

Some opportunities come to us because we’re actively looking. And sometimes we are just making little bets, being open to what happens. You might think of this as playing around or maybe as planting seeds. They don’t all grow, but in good soil, many do. If you sow enough, you will reap quite a harvest.

So to keep pushing your career to higher levels, get in the habit of tackling speculative projects. What happens if you decide to write a series of articles for a popular website? What happens if you decide to track your time for a year, or run every day for a year, or memorize a hundred poems and film yourself reciting them? What happens if you decide to do a double opt-in introduction daily for a month? What happens if you send a short note every day to a random person from your contact list? I have no idea. But something will happen. This much activity tends to generate some reciprocal response from the universe.

You’ll get new ideas, and you’ll find new opportunities. One of the old arguments against remote work was that serendipity leads to breakthroughs. You sit next to someone new in the office cafeteria and, just like that, your company develops a billion-dollar product! And yet, curiously, this billion-dollar idea is so fleeting that it won’t happen when people work from home once a week. I jest, but if new ideas come from new inputs, you can figure out ways to engineer more serendipity into your life wherever you’re working. I’m quite sure that with self-directed work, when you don’t have to follow the in-person group norms of not leaving the office, or of having only certain things on your screen, you can engineer more serendipity than you would sitting in a cubicle for forty hours a week. So try speculative stuff. Go new places. Take the occasional phone call from someone just because. You can stack these together to keep them from taking over your schedule, but do try at least some of them. And whenever you sense something that really intrigues you, pay attention. It may be time to act.

SAY BIG YESES

To feel that magical rush of progress in work and in life, you should say yes to anything that excites you, even if you aren’t sure how it will work. You’re smart; you’ll figure it out. You’ll reach out to your network to get advice from someone who has attempted what you’re trying to do and you’ll hire magnificent people to magnify your impact. If you need more time, you’ll call in the reinforcements, and maybe log some evening or weekend hours.

Just remember this: part of having the headspace to say yes to big things is not crowding your life with little stuff. When you say yes to lots of little things, you feel overwhelmed. Then it’s hard to see that the little stuff doesn’t matter.

To avoid this trap, commit yourself to considering the opportunity cost. When someone asks you to do something, don’t look to see if you’re free. Think about what else you might do with the time. In the sixty minutes that you’re on the phone about a project that you would rate as a five on a ten-point scale, you could send notes to four former clients that you’d consider eights or nines. Ambitious people can almost always engineer some eights and nines into their lives when they try. So when you’re thinking about taking on that five-out-of-ten gig, the opportunity cost is not zero. Here’s a script you can borrow: “Thanks so much for thinking of me. I’m not going to be able to take this on right now, but I wish you the best of luck with your project!”

To be sure, this might not be the right script to use on your supervisor. But even here, people often have more control over their time than they think. Proactively propose projects that excite you. Sure, we all need to pitch in on things, and some work you’d consider a four or five on a ten-point scale still needs to get done, but the more big stuff that you’re bringing in, the less sense it makes to have the small stuff be done by you. And unless your organization is purposefully doing pointless stuff, your five might be someone else’s ten. Keep abreast of your colleagues’ interests. Here’s another perfectly acceptable answer: “I’d be happy to help, but can I suggest bringing in Jane? She mentioned over lunch last week that she wanted to work with client X. . . .” Time spent on one thing is time not spent on something else. It’s your life—so be bold.

BE PREPARED TO PIVOT

All these little bets that you place will, over time, make you more broadly marketable. It’s good to have options. This is particularly true in uncertain economic times. Few business plans account for a multimonth government-ordered shutdown. Over the past few years, a big chunk of my income has come from speaking at events that, as I’m writing this, now constitute illegally large gatherings. I’m glad that these gigs were not my family’s sole source of income.

Part of thinking big is being prepared to pivot when you need to—whether for economic reasons or personal ones. Matt Altmix’s wedding photography business has often had him working on Saturdays. Before his kids started school, that was fine. He’d just take Friday off to hang out with them instead. But once they became beholden to the school schedule, “Weekends became more valuable,” he says, and he and his How to Money cohost Joel Larsgaard began scaling up their podcast partly to have more flexibility.

I’m sure the How to Money guys would agree with me that life feels better when you’ve built up enough of an emergency fund that you’ve got the runway to try something new. If you’ve never really thought about this, and you’re working remotely, you have an opportunity to start with the money that you would have spent on transportation, dry cleaning, and other such expenses. FlexJobs has estimated this number to be about $4,000 a year on average. This won’t make you wealthy in itself, but as the pile grows, you will be motivated to look for more substantial ways to add to it. As much as possible, I’d also recommend that any family have a portfolio of income sources. Two jobs for two people is the obvious portfolio, but there can be others, including income from rental properties, side hustles, and the like. Financial security, and knowing you have career options, can allow you to think big. You can take risks. Despite the popular perception, most people aren’t actually more creative when their backs are against the wall. A sense of abundance allows us to see possibilities. When you know that if one thing doesn’t work out, you can always find something else, and when you have the time and connections to do so, you operate from a position of power. You have full command of your corner office. You are the architect of your career—your means for impacting the world—whether you’re part of an organization or running your own.

Chapter 5

Optimize Well-Being

Remote workers tend to be happier. One survey by TINYPulse, an employee-engagement company, found that remote workers scored an 8.10 on a ten-point happiness scale, compared with 7.42 for all workers. Remote workers also take fewer sick days—though that wouldn’t automatically mean they’re healthier. If you aren’t exposing other people to your germs, you can keep working while moderately sick (or if you’re caring for a moderately sick family member). However, some other evidence suggests that remote workers do engage in healthier behaviors. An Airtasker survey of 1,004 full-time employees, half of whom worked remotely, found that the remote workers clocked twenty-five more minutes of exercise during the work week than in-office sorts.

This last finding is intriguing as people ponder post-pandemic ways of working. The pace of modern business is swift. It requires energy. Exercise and sleep add to energy levels. Working from home a few days per week might be a way for people to consciously manage their energy as they work toward achieving their professional goals. These remote workers can turn commuting time into exercise time. Someone who doesn’t bookend the workday with a long commute five days a week might be able to sleep more. Not all remote workers make these smart choices, but those who do can reap the benefits.

Another source of strategic advantage: people can work more without feeling like their lives are falling apart. One study of IBM workers found that those who could set their own hours and work from home occasionally could work fifty-seven hours a week before a large chunk experienced work/family conflict. For those stuck in an office at set times, the breaking point was thirty-eight hours.

Who wouldn’t want energized employees who can work 50 percent more? Remote work is a tool for achieving that, and organizations that deploy it are well-positioned for success.

Of course, if you’ve read this far, I don’t have to convince you that remote work is good for well-being. So this chapter is about some practical tips for truly optimizing well-being within your new corner office—so that you can get even more great things done.

GET COMFORTABLE

I’ve had ups and downs in my career, but a particularly low moment came after a move when I wound up without a desk. My old one was built specifically to fit one apartment, and it didn’t fit in the new one. I worked while sitting on the floor for several months. Yes, in retrospect, this is absolutely as ridiculous as it sounds. My back hurt, among other problems. A fancy new office rug, a solid desk, a work chair, and a reading chair gave me a new outlook on life.

If your company went virtual overnight, you may have grabbed whatever spot in the house seemed most convenient in which to work. But if your new normal will involve more remote work, then it’s wise to invest time and money in creating a comfortable and productive workspace. Long term, you might consider moving somewhere that allows you to have a real office. If that’s not happening, at least set your desk or table at an ergonomically correct height. Get a good chair. Dining room chairs look lovely, but trust me, you will rip the upholstery sitting on them for forty hours a week, even if your pants don’t seem particularly rough. Check in with your body. Do your shoulders feel hunched or is your neck tight on one side? If so, move around and adjust things until you’ve fixed the situation. Some people like to sit on exercise balls and some like to use an adjustable desk that allows them to work while standing. Figure out what works for you.

Create some space for storage. Where will you put papers, office supplies, books, or anything you reference frequently? Filing cabinets tend to be more trouble than they’re worth, but a nice basket can corral random objects (and allow for speedy cleanup).

Make sure your workspace is near a window. I know there’s a school of thought that frowns on creating a workspace in your bedroom, but if you’re in a small home where that is the only spot with natural light and a door, I think you’re better off there than some place that is less appealing or private. Clean up any clutter blocking your new corner office window. And then make sure what you see through the window makes you smile. Move the garbage cans or the broken outdoor furniture you haven’t gotten around to dumping. Plant some flowers or put potted plants on your apartment balcony. I particularly love my office view during the two weeks in spring when the plum trees bloom bright and pink, and the two weeks in fall when my Japanese maple turns a brilliant red. My husband planted some skip laurels near the fence so I wouldn’t see the neighbors’ garage. Occasionally looking up from your computer is wise for preventing eye strain anyway, and much more exciting when there’s something good to look at.

Then, turn your attention to the ambience. One of the best parts of working remotely is not having to suffer through uncomfortable, productivity-killing office building conditions that you can do nothing about. All my in-office gigs have been freezing, particularly in the summer. I do not do my best work when my fingers are turning blue. Forcing men to wear hot, uncomfortable suits and then setting the office temperature to a range that they find tolerable but that women, who can’t easily wear socks with work-appropriate heels, find teeth-chattering is mind-bogglingly wasteful. In your own home, you can set the temperature to your exact happy spot (or, at least, you can run a space heater or a fan without judgment if you live in an apartment building that runs too cold or hot). If your house is loud, get a white-noise machine or noise-canceling headphones. Elisabeth Frost, who has run a business from home for years and works part-time, remotely, for a university, suggests that people “make it nice to settle into your workday. If something isn’t working, identify the problem and fix it. You get to choose the paint color, the office chair, the smells, etc. Make the most of that!” You will not get away with burning a pumpkin spice candle at headquarters, but if that smell is your secret weapon, go for it at home.

Another perk of working from home: you don’t always have to work from home. You can change your space sometimes to spark different thinking. A library or coffee shop can serve this function nicely. One blog reader suggested that, during social distancing, people could think of having a primary and a secondary workspace within their homes. “My primary workspace is a desk in a spare bedroom, which is set up much like my office at work,” she says. “My secondary workspace is a comfortable armchair that I can take conference calls from.” During nice weather, I will sometimes take my laptop out onto the back porch to nudge my brain to consider things in, literally, a different light.

BUY GOOD PENS

Let’s talk about office supplies. This seems like a trivial thing, and I don’t like to spend money when I don’t “have” to. The world abounds in free notebooks and pens. It’s taken a long time for me to realize that I am much happier when I don’t settle for free ones that I got at a bank.

If you’re working outside a traditional office, then you are your own office manager, responsible for your own supplies. You want good tools that make you want to work. So buy pens that make writing a pleasure. If you want a stapler with some heft that feels good in your hand, get it (one in your favorite color will be harder for family members to steal). If a second monitor would make it easier to do your job, get one. A $200 monitor, averaged over a year of working from home one day a week, is $4 per session, and this becomes more economical the more often you skip your commute. If you’re a naturally high-rolling person, you might want to set a budget, but the good news is that even extravagant office supplies are fairly cheap. You can get a lot for $100. And if companies are convinced that people can come up with billion-dollar ideas by serendipitously bumping into each other in the ladies’ room, then there’s no reason that the happiness you feel by looking at a well-designed pen container couldn’t also spark something. That would be money well spent.

GET SOME RESISTANCE BANDS

As noted above, time spent commuting is often inversely proportional to time spent exercising. People who don’t have a five-day-a-week commute will theoretically have more time to move. The paradox of this, though, is that they have less occasion to. The walk from your bed to your home office might be twenty-five steps. People who work from home need to consciously build movement into their days.

That doesn’t mean you need to buy a treadmill or a rowing machine. Most people shouldn’t. These large investments of cash and square footage make the most sense for committed runners or rowers who already exercise most days and want an option for poor weather. To put it more bluntly: buying equipment will not make you exercise. (I hope this advice, right there, made this book a good use of money!) Since that’s true, you’re better off buying inexpensive, light equipment that won’t represent a real loss if you don’t use it. And if it’s unobtrusive enough that you can keep it close by, you will increase the chances that you’ll actually use it during your breaks.

Pamela Hernandez, a Springfield, Missouri, trainer who works with several clients who work from home, suggests getting some resistance bands and dumbbells. Coupled with your body weight, these can work just about every muscle (Google “resistance band workouts” for ideas). By keeping these objects in sight, they will provide a visual nudge to pick them up anytime you have a spare few minutes. Do some bicep curls before you dial in to a call. Hold a plank pose while a document is printing. A good rule of thumb: make sure you’ve logged some movement each day by 3:00 P.M. Put a check mark on a notebook every time you spend a minute or two on strength training and, coupled with a break to walk somewhere, you’ll meet current exercise guidelines. While there’s nothing stopping anyone from doing such strength training in a normal office, almost no one does. Group norms are powerful things—but when you escape them by working from home, you just might find yourself becoming more powerful physically.

EAT WELL

Theoretically, working from home lets people exchange evening commuting time for cooking time. Some culinary sorts do enjoy creating more elaborate meals. If you don’t (and I include myself in this category), simple meals (or outsourcing) is the way to go. But I have found that working from home does enable healthier lunch choices.

For starters, your lunch is more likely to be homemade. Restaurant meals tend to be higher in calories and sodium. If you eat leftovers for lunch (as I almost always do) and your dinner had vegetables, then your lunch will have vegetables, and right there you’ve hit two servings per day. If you don’t do leftovers, a general go-to lunch enables you to eat something healthy without spending much time on it during the workday. For instance, washed, cut lettuce, a ready-made protein (cooked chicken, etc.), nuts, cut-up veggies, and a few dressings can be combined in varying proportions to make a different salad every day. Stir-fried frozen veggies over boil-in-a-bag (or microwave) brown rice can be cooked in ten minutes. You can even cook fish, that ultimate health food, and not incur any wrath beyond that of your housemates’.

HAVE LITTLE ADVENTURES

If you spend Tuesday and Saturday in the exact same place, the days can feel the same too. That’s unfortunate, because life is more exciting when the days don’t bleed into one another. A daily routine helps manage energy, but doing at least one thing each day to bust the routine will force your brain to pay attention. This is how today is different from other days. Such novelty makes life more memorable. Since it turns out that the density of memories affects our perception of how much time has passed (which explains why the first day of vacation somewhere exotic feels very long), this means adventures can stretch the experience of time.

So aim to have at least one little adventure each day. There are all kinds of possibilities. This was true under social distancing orders, and is also true as life opens up again. Instead of taking your usual route along the sidewalks, go run on a trail. Try a picnic breakfast. Organize a family scavenger hunt. Cook a new recipe for dinner on the same night that a friend is also giving it a whirl and video chat to compare notes. Meet a friend for a twenty-minute spin through a nearby museum where you each pick one work of art to ponder together for half the time. If museums are closed, meet to ponder an outdoor sculpture or fountain.

It’s hard to plan these things in the moment. Your inbox will always be beckoning. So as you design your weeks, brainstorm a handful of micro-adventures. Put one on your to-do list for each day, and switch them up if the designated picnic breakfast day dawns cold and rainy. The admonition of “Where did the time go?” is really a statement that we don’t remember where the time went. Make life memorable and you won’t have this problem.

EMBRACE WORK/LIFE INTEGRATION

Unlike many people, I did not start working from home because of the upside to my work/life balance. As a newbie freelancer, I couldn’t afford to work from anywhere other than my tiny, ground-floor apartment. But over the years the life aspect has become more important as my family has grown. I like that I can say hello to the kids as they get off the school bus. I’ve been able to nurse my babies during the workday, which is infinitely more pleasant than tethering myself to a pump. I go to school events during the day. And to make that possible, I have worked in the early mornings, after my kids go to bed, on weekends, on holidays, and so forth. For me, work/life integration has meant moving between the two as I need. Working from home makes the transition time negligible. I can go back and forth.

As with most aspects of working from home, you can replicate your exact schedule from the office. Some people suggest keeping work and home completely separate and never letting them overlap. Personalities differ; compartmentalizers may do better with strict lines. But I’d challenge folks to experiment. I’ve found that there is happiness to be gained from making the lines between work and life more porous—by making more of the 168 hours of the week available for work or life or both.

For starters, it’s nice to have your kids see what you do for a living. There’s no mystery to be breached only on Take Our Sons and Daughters to Work Day. Elisabeth Frost says that she and her husband “don’t shy away from having our kids see us work, or telling them, when necessary, that we have something important we’re working on. We explain, clearly, that Mommy and Daddy work to provide for our family. We spend a tremendous amount of time with them! But we also have jobs, and we want them to know what that looks like. It means I might have to say no to a second bedtime story because I have a phone call . . . but it also might mean I can take a long walk with them after lunch on a Wednesday.” If you are running your own enterprise, you can use teen and preteen kids as occasional assistants, capable of making a post office run or tallying up expenses. Over at lauravanderkam.com, my eldest son has become my favorite guest blogger by far—posting movie reviews, rankings of amusement park rides, and other content I wouldn’t think to generate on my own.

Second, integration allows for schedules that seems to manufacture time. You might log reasonable miles running on a busy day by changing into exercise clothes during a pause between calls, heading out the door for a twenty-five-minute run during a half hour break, and then heading out again later for another twenty-five-minute run. I see on time logs that these thirty-minute gaps between meetings are often used for inbox cleaning—a futile activity, since email expands to fill all available space. Better to seize the moment and toggle back and forth to personal priorities instead. Your integration can even serve everyone else in your life. On a nice day, you can head out early and snag a patio table at a popular bar or restaurant. Order a drink to keep the space, spend a half hour answering those pesky emails if you like, and then be ready for all your friends to join you when they crash the bar (with the rest of the office crowd) at 5:00 P.M.

When work and home mix, you can also use small bits of time to nurture your relationships. This deepens time in a profound way. Done carelessly, you’ll be battling constant distractions. But done mindfully, you can do low-key tasks alongside a kid who’s doing homework, pet a puppy while editing a document, or enjoy a well-timed private lunch break (while the kids are at school!) with your spouse who is also working at home.

Just another perk of the new corner office.

Notes

Introduction

A study by FlexJobs and Global Workplace Analytics: Brie Weiler Reynolds, “159% Increase in Remote Work Since 2005: FlexJobs & Global Workplace Analytics Report,” July 29, 2019, www.flexjobs.com/blog/post/flexjobs-gwa-report-remote-growth.

Gallup polls found that, as of March 13–15, 2020, only 31 percent of U.S. workers had ever worked remotely: Megan Brenan, “U.S. Workers Discovering Affinity for Remote Work,” Gallup, April 3, 2020, https://news.gallup.com/poll/306695/workers-discovering-affinity-remote-work.aspx.

In April, Gallup found that 59 percent of those working from home: Brenan, “U.S. Workers Discovering Affinity.”

Chapter 1: Manage by Task, Not Time

A January 2020 Gallup survey on remote work: Adam Hickman, Ph.D., and Jennifer Robison, “Is Working Remotely Effective? Gallup Research Says Yes,” Gallup, January 24, 2020, available at www.gallup.com/workplace/283985/working-remotely-effective-gallup-research-says-yes.aspx.

And as researchers Teresa Amabile and Steven J. Kramer wrote in a Harvard Business Review article: Teresa Amabile and Steven J. Kramer, “The Power of Small Wins,” Harvard Business Review, May 2011, https://hbr.org/2011/05/the-power-of-small-wins.

Chapter 2: Get the Rhythm Right

Research into people’s reported energy levels: Janeta Nikolovski and Jack Groppel. “The Power of an Energy Microburst,” white paper, January 2013, www.researchgate.net/publication/280683168_The_power_of_an_energy_microburst.

This is one reason why the 2019 annual survey from FlexJobs: Brie Weiler Reynolds, “FlexJobs 2019 Annual Survey: Flexible Work Plays Big Role in Job Choices,” FlexJobs, August 13, 2019, https://www.flexjobs.com/blog/post/survey-flexible-work-job-choices/.

Chapter 3: Build Your Team

In his book Face to Face: Brian Grazer, Face to Face: The Art of Human Connection (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2019).

Chapter 4: Think Big

As my friend Dorie Clark puts it in her book Stand Out: Dorie Clark, Stand Out: How to Find Your Breakthrough Idea and Build a Following Around It (New York: Portfolio/Penguin, 2015), 7.

FlexJobs has estimated this number to be about $4,000 a year on average: Brie Weiler Reynolds, “6 Ways Working Remotely Will Save You $4,000 Annually, or More,” January 9, 2018, www.flexjobs.com/blog/post/6-ways-working-remotely-will-save-you-money.

Chapter 5: Optimize Well-Being

One survey by TINYPulse: “What Leaders Need to Know about Remote Workers: Surprising Differences in Workplace Happiness & Relationships,” TINYPulse, 2016, https://cdn2.hubspot.net/hubfs/443262/pdf/TINYpulse_What_Leaders_Need_to_Know_About_Remote_Workers.pdf.

An Airtasker survey of 1,004 full-time employees: “The Benefits of Working From Home,” Airtasker Blog, March 31, 2020, www.airtasker.com/blog/the-benefits-of-working-from-home.

One study of IBM workers: “Telecommuters with Flextime Stay Balanced up to 19 Hours Longer,” BYU University Communications, Brigham Young University, May 31, 2010, https://news.byu.edu/news/telecommuters-flextime-stay-balanced-19-hours-longer.

About the Author

Laura Vanderkam is the author of several time management and productivity books, including Juliet's School of Possibilities, Off the Clock, I Know How She Does It, What the Most Successful People Do Before Breakfast, and 168 Hours. Her work has appeared in publications including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Fast Company, and Fortune. She is the host of the podcasts The New Corner Office and Before Breakfast and the co-host, with Sarah Hart-Unger, of the podcast Best of Both Worlds.

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