I thought that I might as well contribute some experiences, given that I’m a remote worker since forever … except for about 80 days of work as a truck driver, which is also remote but in a different sense …
I noticed that most contributors in this topic (with the exception of @rebecca) seem to advise for setting clear boundaries between work and non-work, between professional and private life, even including the choice of location. Such as:
That is surprising, as I have the the opposite in my own remote work philosophy, and am quite sure I’ll not change that aspect. It’s called “full work-life integration” in my mind, and really means that: I have no concept of “after hours” or “weekend” since I started self-employment in 2008, but I do have concepts of freedoms and flexibility that I use to mix work and non-work in my days. I usually mix in too much work, but to me that’s a separate issue from “is it advisable to mix”.
I’ll quickly explain how (I think) it works for me … maybe it provides some inspirations:
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I want the freedom to switch between on-the-job activities and other activities at a moment’s notice, and use that a lot. For mental wellbeing, I need the space to think, to follow ideas and inspirations during the day, to take two hours off and research about a new cool invention that popped up in my mind. The idea that an employer would force me into an office building and then force me to deal with on-the-job things for eight hours straight is horror to me, and a reason why I never took up such a job and instead became self-employed.
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Me and two of my brothers (also remote digital workers) are the only people I know who like using a time tracking software to make the split between work and non-work at the push of a button. (We even all use the same time tracking tool called tom-ui, written by one of my brothers.) So while certainly unusual and perhaps due to genetics, for us it definitely helps: no need to feel bad when taking time off “at work” or working during my freetime, as designating time as work or not is just a click of a button, with the natural consequence of being paid for worktime and not paid for other time.
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For claiming and using the mental freedom to work when you want and not work when you don’t want, it definitely helps to be self-employed rather than being an employee. As an employee, it’s natural to feel under pressure to answer immediately etc. to keep up a good impression among so-called “superiors”, while as a self-employed person working among peers (or as a teamleader) the concern is rather with getting the project done in an efficient and enjoyable manner. And a need to answer immediately may just indicate a legacy culture of synchronous communication while remote work profits more from asynchronous, parallelized workstreams (at least according to my manual).
I hope that nobody working with us here in Edgeryders feels pressurized to perform well in a system that “we” (whoever that is) have set up; in that mindset, it’s natural to try to get away from work as far as possible in your hard-earned freetime. What I like to see is when people instead step up to improve the processes that make their work at Edgeryders tedious or boring or something that stresses them out when they have to touch it in their freetime. Haven’t seen that too much in Edgeryders, but was happy to see that @amelia started such an initiative just a few days ago.