The Challenges of Remote Work, As Seen Through The Eyes of “10 Things I Hate About You”, Part Two

If you haven’t read Part One, head there now.

6. I feel less creative/driven/productive

Remote work is not for everyone except when it’s for everyone. You need to develop new channels to fuel your mind and provide it with raw materials it needs to be creative, driven, and productive. If you think of your productivity machine before remote life, what inputs did it have and what could you substitute in for now? Here’s a list of inspirations:

• Go on a run. Dance. Balance on something. Get out of your chair and into your body.

• Unsubscribe from email lists that doesn’t matter. You know which ones those probably are. They’re distractions.

• Block off one hour a week to read something unrelated to work but interesting to you.

• Put your goals on post-its right next to your computer screen.

• Develop a mantra and say it at the start of your workday. You set a start time, right? Number 1 from this list?

• Schedule a Beer and Brainstorms for Fridays at 4pm with creative people

• Buy a cheap art kit like paint-by-numbers and set aside time to work on being creative. 

• Subscribe to the TL;DR because there are tons of interesting articles out there to stimulate your thinker.

7. There are so many distractions

Pure motivation can’t keep your eyes from drifting to the laundry or other chores that watch you work. Ideally you use the evenings and weekends to do your chores like before remote work was your new life. You can postpone the dishes to when you used to typically do them. However, a tip from Chip and Dan Heath’s book Switch can help.

Make a habit that you want to adopt 15 seconds easier or a habit you want to stop 15 seconds harder. Perhaps you want to practice guitar: move the guitar from its case in the closet to the couch. Perhaps you want to watch less TV: take out the batteries from the remote and put them in a drawer. Perhaps you want to be less distracted during the workday: move the laundry basket out of the room, the broom to the back of the closet, or the dishes into the dishwasher.

And if you gaze long enough into the laundry, the laundry will gaze back into you.

-Nietzsche

8. I don’t have to work out because this remote work is a temporary change. I can make it a few months without the gym.

You sure can but it won’t make you feel great. It’s pretty undisputed that physical activity, even short walks, improve mental acuity, focus, feeling of happiness, and general health and well-being. You want to argue that the 20 minutes of you scrolling on Instagram is making you feel better than a short walk around the block?

The excuse of access to fitness opportunities is also a straw man. Here are a lot of options to get physical activity without a gym membership:

• Fitness Blender, Popsugar, Les Mills, and more free workout videos are on YouTube. Don’t forget yoga like Yoga with Adrienne.

• Many local gyms offer Instagram Live workouts with their trainers, totally free. Heck, why not host one?

• Run and find an accountabilibuddy to keep you on track with your running goals.

• Google “bodyweight workout” and just grab one of the many options. If you can squat, pushup, and crunch, you can get a great workout. Use a tabata timer to raise the intensity.

As a word of advice, if you are weighing yourself as justification that you’re not gaining a lot of weight when abandoning your typical gym routine, note that muscle mass is the first part to atrophy from disuse and by mass that tissue tends to take up less space than fatty tissue. The scale might not move, but those muscles are going bye-bye. Do some squats.

9. I am anxious because I get no feedback as a remote employee.

A conversation with your manager about what kind of feedback you need is a big fix to this issue, but also talking to yourself about what is causing this anxiety might need to come first. Are you feeling unsure that your work is acceptable? Do you suffer Imposter Syndrome? Take a gut check on what is inspiring these feelings and then develop a proposal for your manager about how they can help you mitigate those feelings. 

Some suggestions to improve feedback to remote employees:

• Create regular team meeting touchpoints and use video to promote engagement.

• Have regular 1-1s where both parties can contribute to the agenda.

• Specifically ask for feedback (as the employee) or ask if they want detailed feedback (as the manager) on select projects.

• Document positive and critical feedback. Having a track record to point at achievements and lessons learned helps foster a sense of trajectory and mastery.

• Ask the employee/tell the manager what kind of feedback is most useful and how they’d like to communicate that feedback. It may differ across cultural boundaries...

10. I’m not a part of important conversations because I’m not physically there.

This is common for remote employees as well as employees outside of a corporate headquarters, especially in organizations with a strong command-and-control culture where decisions are made by the players physically at the table in the corner office. You, as a remote employee, can’t change an entire organization’s culture and if that’s how business goes at your organization, that’s a reality you have to face.

Being involved in decision making is part politics and part results. If you do great work, you play well with others, and you take the time to recognize and connect with people across the business, your voice being ignored becomes somewhat mitigated. Additionally, signing up for projects or additional responsibilities that are very public to the organization helps keep your name top of mind.

Even still, if you’re not seeing the kind of impact from your own work that you expect to see, change your tactics. Talking with a coach, changing the way you present your ideas, or polishing your public speaking are ways to level up your communication skills to get better outcomes.