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

I've worked remotely for 20 years on both salary and hourly (consulting). I found it especially hard to 'unplug' when working hourly, as you always feel like you could be making money. Doing laundry? You can get an hour billable while waiting. Watching a movie? Is the movie good enough you want to give up 2 hours billable? Also, this can be a lot worse when you're younger, just starting out, and money is generally tighter...Kids, mortgage, school loans can all make extra money from overtime very attractive.

On salary, I find its easy to lose track of time on an interesting problem. You get 'in the zone' and time just flies by...

As I've gotten older the first problem has sort of naturally resolved itself, as I start to value leisure over bill rate. Getting older - not only does your income tend to go up, but expenses can come down. Things like school loans, car notes and mortgages may be paid off. Kids grow up and become established in their own careers, requiring less support.

I still have the second problem though. In this case, I generally find having other _people_ ping me to be much more effective then alarms and to-do lists. Its too easy to turn off an alarm or ignore a list. Interacting with an actual person is much harder to ignore :-P

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 maintaining work-life balance. But this happened for me all the time, not only when there was a lockdown, but really all the time.

I'm not working on hourly basis, but I'm working on my side-product. And the thoughts in my head are "Okay, we can spend a few evenings coding and we'll have that feature. Probably it'd be enough to breakthrough and we will become millionaires!" :D I'm exaggerating but still.

Then, after I spent all the time thinkings, I accuse myself that I haven't been working.

This is a vicious circle.

And after that, the "trigger" in the behaviour formula is something I'm waiting for all my life: the secret sign to start planning.

That's fine it works for you but it just shifts the burden off yourself by putting it on your coworkers. Unless it's specifically discussed and agreed upon for your role, that's rather unfair to the rest of the team.

The coworkers should all be doing the same thing. Only the oncall and their official escalation paths should be expected to be available off-hours.

I've been working from home for five years, and on and off before that. I'm certainly no role model for it, but there are two things that have helped a lot:

- Start at a consistent time. Right now my daughter is in school so I have to get up and get her going on remote school. This usually gets me started around 9am.

- End at a consistent time. I have a hard stop every day at 7pm, because that's when Jeopardy! comes on, and when we have family dinner. I even went so far as to create a voice announcement through the whole house that it is time for dinner and Jeopardy! so my family keeps me accountable.

This ostensibly means I work for 10 hours a day, but I allow myself to not feel bad if I need to take a two hour break to go shopping or fold some laundry or just take a break to watch some TV, since I know that my default is 50 hours a week. A two hour break every day would get me to 40 hours and I don't take a two hour break every day.