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How I was failing to find time for life while working remotely

timeawareness.substack.com

41–50 of 52 posts

Re: How I was failing to find time for life while working remotely

#41

Here’s what I do: - never install slack or email on your phone - use a separate laptop for personal stuff. I don’t/can’t log in to work stuff here. - put your work laptop away and out of sight when done work - (optionally) give a few trusted people your phone number if they absolutely must reach you The last point help alleviate the stress of “I absolutely must always check slack to deal with the latest crisis”

> (optionally) give a few trusted people your phone number if they absolutely must reach you

But HR has your number, for obvious reasons, and, as I've learned the hard way, cannot be trusted to not publicize it internally, even if you request that they not.

Re: How I was failing to find time for life while working remotely

#42
For those of you who follow the post’s idea of filling up your calendar, do you mark the time as “free” so that your employer/coworkers can schedule over your time for meetings? I’m thinking of the feature “find a convenient time for everyone in the invite” in calendars. If your calendar is booked, does that mean people have to come to you out of band to negotiate a time?

Do you fill your calendar up day of (I.e. Monday morning you fill in around the meetings you have)?

I have on my calendar a 2 and a half hour chunk of time every day for training/lunch. But that’s the only recurring meeting I have for delineating my day.

Re: How I was failing to find time for life while working remotely

#43
What's interesting to me about the comments here, is how much autonomy everyone seems to have about their work time.

I'm working 100% remote due to Covid, coming from a loosely enforced "only work remote if you need to be home for a plumber / cable install / snow day" policy.

We have a (loosely enforced) "start at 8pm" mandate, and mandatory daily calls at 9am and 3pm to report our "challenges".

Slack messages flow freely at all hours, with a policy that emails and Slack messages always be responded to within an hour. The culture is such that any Slack message not responded to promptly (even during lunch hours) is, at the very least, cause for concern. At no point would "taking 2 hours at lunch to run errands" be acceptable without prior approval, even if we routinely worked past 6pm (as I often do).

I expected this to be a bit extreme, but I'm beginning to wonder just how extreme is this culture right now in previously "non-remote" jobs?

Re: How I was failing to find time for life while working remotely

#44

What's interesting to me about the comments here, is how much autonomy everyone seems to have about their work time. I'm working 100% remote due to Covid, coming from a loosely enforced "only work remote if you need to be home for a plumber / cable install / snow day" policy. We have a (loosely enforced) "start at 8pm" mandate, and mandatory daily calls at 9am and 3pm to report our "challenges". Slack messages flow f…

Your job sounds horrible, look around more. The "respond within an hour to slack" sounds downright torturous.

Re: How I was failing to find time for life while working remotely

#45

What's interesting to me about the comments here, is how much autonomy everyone seems to have about their work time. I'm working 100% remote due to Covid, coming from a loosely enforced "only work remote if you need to be home for a plumber / cable install / snow day" policy. We have a (loosely enforced) "start at 8pm" mandate, and mandatory daily calls at 9am and 3pm to report our "challenges". Slack messages flow f…

Yeah, I’m in the same situation and have anxiety induced by the Teams notification sound

Re: How I was failing to find time for life while working remotely

#46

What's interesting to me about the comments here, is how much autonomy everyone seems to have about their work time. I'm working 100% remote due to Covid, coming from a loosely enforced "only work remote if you need to be home for a plumber / cable install / snow day" policy. We have a (loosely enforced) "start at 8pm" mandate, and mandatory daily calls at 9am and 3pm to report our "challenges". Slack messages flow f…

Your job sounds horrible, look around more. The "respond within an hour to slack" sounds downright torturous.

My last week of week consisted of my coworkers freaking out if I didn’t respond in 5 to 15 minutes

Re: How I was failing to find time for life while working remotely

#47
post #27
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have the same issue and two things: - go take a walk alone for one hour. No headphones, no device. I’m not kidding - make a list of tasks that you must accomplish. See it like a queue that you’ll pop from and get a task to focus on. Now take your days one at a time focusing on the task in front of you. Do this until you depleted the queue. For this to work the queue should not be vague, and have items that you real…

What kind of benefits have you felt from long walks with no devices? I was on a good routine doing that earlier in quarantine, and kind of fell off the wagon. Could use some inspiration to get re-started :)

I have a dog and have set times where I have to take it out.

The benefit is like rubber-duck debugging. For about 45 minutes I have no interesting things to distract my mind and I automatically start thrashing any meaty problems I left specifically for this. Works for me.

Re: How I was failing to find time for life while working remotely

#48
I've been working remotely for about 5 years and the first two were like this.

When I realized how unhappy it made me I made a conscious effort to stop.

I set an alarm at 6pm and when it rang I'd stop working.

The most difficult part was stopping to feel guilty when someone contacts you after hours. But after a while I managed to get over that as well.

It was practice, that's all. It got easier after a while.

There were two things that helped quite a lot (besides that I worked for decent people the entire time)

First, I told a few people who would contact me after hours frequently thay I wouldn't reply after office hours but that they're free to contact me and I'd get back to them first thing. And I always did. I also told them not to call unless shit is on fire. When they did call if things were on fire I'd fix them immediately, but if they weren't I'd repeat to not call me and told them I'd handle it tomorrow.

Second was to make a dedicated work area. In the beginning I was in a small shared apartment and the desk was next to my bed. After I'd moved to a bigger place I had a spot in the living room made up as my "office". I'd not use that space for anything else. It was just the corner where there desk and the chair were but I'd not sit at the desk or use that chair other than while at work.

I'd guess it took about a six months for this to be normal but it survived changing jobs.

Re: How I was failing to find time for life while working remotely

#49
post #32
post #4

Currently I'm in a big problem with time because of the mix of psychological problems including perfectionism. What I mean is: I spent almost all my time thinking how to plan my life. When I think about what I should do every day, I always find excuses why it won't work. So it turns out that everyday is spent by thinking instead of doing. Also I understand what the author meant when talking about the difficulty of ma…

It sounds like you are controlled by your thoughts. I'm looking into the concept of "Mindfulness" to get more control back and find more happiness. I also found that doing one workout every morning greatly improves my well-being and reduces thoughts that limit me. I, too, struggled with wanting to to everything as best as possible but found that it really limits me. I eventually just started with very small iteration…

Yeah, I'm looking into the concept too, as well as other therapy stuff. There is a therapy method called ACT, which has similar concepts I think

Re: How I was failing to find time for life while working remotely

#50
post #41

Here’s what I do: - never install slack or email on your phone - use a separate laptop for personal stuff. I don’t/can’t log in to work stuff here. - put your work laptop away and out of sight when done work - (optionally) give a few trusted people your phone number if they absolutely must reach you The last point help alleviate the stress of “I absolutely must always check slack to deal with the latest crisis”

> (optionally) give a few trusted people your phone number if they absolutely must reach you But HR has your number, for obvious reasons, and, as I've learned the hard way, cannot be trusted to not publicize it internally, even if you request that they not.

Good point. Phone numbers are cheap and it's worth thinking about having additional ones you can change. This also comes up for the problem of SMS 2FA, a coworker got tired of a headhunter (?) trying to reach me and finally gave him my cell phone. Very dangerous if it was a social engineer out to get enough data to break in.
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