Remote Work for Humans

It’s hard to imagine what it can feel like to work like a human when the systems we work within feel designed to strip us of our humanity. In this post, I want to highlight what it means to work like a human and how working like a human can feel.

You understand that hours worked does not equal a job well done

When you work like a human, you release yourself from the notion that you need to be “on” for 8 hours, 5 days a week in order to be successful. This “ideal” work week was never designed for remote knowledge workers (defined as those whose job involves handling or using information). In fact, it was established in the 1920s for factory workers, those who were using or handling physical materials. When you realize how ridiculous it is that our working hours have not changed since the 1920s despite our work world completely transforming thanks to advances in technology, it becomes pretty easy to start to imaging new ways of working.

Those of us who work in the realm of ideas, data, and complex problems that need solutions, do not need to be busy for 8 hours a day. We need the space to actually work, think, day dream – without distractions. In his book Deep Work, Cal Newport writes that the upper limit that we can work deeply (that is, focusing on a cognitively demanding task without interruptions) in a day is 4 hours (half the traditional work day!). With the current tradition of busyness that is pervasive in our workplaces, how often do we ever get a solid 4 hour (or even 2 hour) block to do deep work? Would we even know what we wanted to work on if that block were available to us or have we been so busy running from task to task that we believe chasing tasks is our work now?

When you recognize that the ability to focus, even for just a couple of hours in your day, is going to help the quality of your work so much more than working a 10 hour day to try to do everything, you’re ready to work like a human.

You are able to honor your energy levels in the way you work

Now that you know the 8 hour, 5 day work week is a scam and that shorter hours of deep focus work is more ideal for knowledge workers, you can begin to construct a working day that honors your energy levels.

Perhaps on Monday, you keep it light. One focused hour to plan your week and look at the bigger picture of the meetings and projects ahead of you. Wednesday, you’d like to deeply focus on a project and are able to start earlier that day to get your 4 hour focus time in, taking a longer lunch as you started earlier than usual. Your schedule will be in accordance with your energy levels. You don’t need to be “on” every day or every week – you just need to know how to respect where you are and do what you can with that.

Some ways I have respected my particularly low energy days as a remote worker:

• Taking the meeting lying down
• Spending the last couple of hours of work “on call” – doing tasks around my house but having my phone on me in case anyone needs me
• Napping during my lunch break

You form systems with your coworkers to work like humans

Sorry, friend, you can’t work like a human in a vacuum. This isn’t solo dolo work. One of the biggest factors in being able to cut down on tasks and busyness at work is developing workflows with your coworkers that center around the work itself.

Sadly, in my experience, people do not jump at the chance to work like a human. It’s understandable. Working like a human flies in the face of everything they have been taught about working. The change to working like a human is good and necessary AND change, even good change, is hard.

Grounding in your humanity means holding space to meet people where they are – understanding their hesitancy, and honoring that. Taking small, incremental steps to developing workflows that make everyone’s life easier is so, so worth it in the end.

You find purpose outside of your job description

In one of my previous jobs, we had a self proclaimed “team wellness”. This was a group of coworkers on my team that had organized themselves to ensure our team environment was creating a healthy, engaged, and happy remote team. The work they did was incredible: surveys to understand how we could work better together, weekly fun activities for the team, and the rare occurrence of a team culture not just being driven by leadership.

None of what they did was in their official job description but they were able to connect something they did at work to their larger purpose – the thing that really gets them up in the morning.

How you do this does not need to be as large as a team wellness initiative, but I do want to invite you to get creative about how you honor your purpose at work even if it’s not built in to your job description.

The book Why are We Here?: Creating a Work Culture that Everyone Wants by Jennifer Moss has a whole section on purpose and how it relates to our work satisfaction. While Moss ties a lot of the research back to companies’ bottom line as a motivating factor for “allowing” employees to explore purpose, I’m more interested in the research she cites on the health effects of honoring our purpose:

“A 2022 research study published in the Journal of Preventative Medicine analyzed over thirteen thousand participants and found that regardless of race and ethnicity, purpose lowers the risk of death significantly.”

Not to be dramatic, but honoring your purpose is literally life and death.

Unfortunately, many people (70 percent, per Moss) say their sense of purpose is defined by their work. This is simply not true and I believe it’s more a reflection of a culture that wants us to define ourselves by our ability to produce capital.

To quote Toni Morrison, “You are not the work you do; you are the person you are”. Your purpose is larger than your job description and there is always space to bring your purpose with you wherever you go.

You become radically intentional

To work like a human means you are radically intentional about how you want work to feel. While there are always going to be times of urgency and more work demands, you get really intentional about not manufacturing urgency yourself, and sniffing out manufactured urgency from others.

You’re able to set and hold your boundaries because you understand that in order to do your deepest and most creative work (you know, the thing that will actually please people) you need to get over your people pleasing tendencies that lead to overwork.

You seek calm and clarity in your day and you find that with radical intentionality, you don’t need to become ruthlessly efficient and work 10 hour days checking off task after task.

You understand that the work will always be there and that you need downtime and rest to process your day – not so that you can work better tomorrow – but so that you can be human, with downtime, and rest.

Work like a human

Anything I write about in this blog is centered around the idea of working like a human.

I hope that this post has helped to clarify what working like a human means.

I hope this blog helps you believe that you can work like a human.