Remote Business Series: Does Remote Work Really Give You Free Time?

pictured: the view from the Cronicle Press remote work house Silversides House neighborhood by Lake Michigan

How To Create Work-Life Balance Working Remotely

You went remote for more free time or flexibility in your schedule, and somehow ended up working pretty much nonstop without even taking evenings or weekends. How do you reclaim your personal time when working remote? Well, I've learned a few things about how to make this work after a dauntingly challenging couple of years figuring out how to run a business while being diagnosed with a chronic illness / invisible disability that leads to extra exhaustion and required extra focus on work-life balance. Hope some of these tips give you some ideas for improving your situation as well.

One of the inspirations for Cronicle to stay remote as a media agency and now publishing outlet was work-life balance. This is a misleading term in my situation because the decision was forced by a health crisis that could be solved with longterm low-stress flexible schedule work and nothing else. But, if you have gotten this far in life without being disabled by a stress-triggered genetic illness, cool. There is still time for you to get this right before you get it really wrong like I did at first. The challenge is this: working remotely or running a business from home has all kinds of flexibility benefits, but it's all too easy to start working on your own and never take those days off you are promising yourself -- as you would be a much better boss than your old meanie boss... right? Well, turns out even kind millennial bosses like myself can forget themselves in that equation of kindness and turn out to be real awful bosses to themselves. Here's how to reclaim your free time if you are going remote and need some structure.

1) Schedule Exercise and Rest First

I'm not kidding, it's that simple and that hard at the same time. When I schedule in rest first and stick to it (occasionally) I am more productive in my working hours while taking the time off I need to rejuvinate. That is a TALL order for anyone like myself working with a sensitive hypermobile body with lots of hard-to-treat health issues like frequent dislocated joints, stomach motility issues, fainting from low blood pressure, and of course our old friend MCAS that brings constant anaphylaxis triggered by just about everything. I'm not listing this mini list of horrors to compete with you or brag: this is to illustrate how someone who has a lot of extra sensitivities actually has to be MORE careful than the average to rest often enough and exercise just right. The more legitimate reasons you have not to do it, the more you really need to be doing it. Basically it's balance or bust over here, and the whole family is tired of me burning out and choosing bust by accident.

Try it, just for a week, for your own sake. Try scheduling in your exercise and rest first and sticking to it, and see if you are more productive and efficient with working hours. I'm not promising the paperwork will magically do itself -- falling behind is still a very real concern for any self-managed remote worker. But, making sure you stay in your best health possible will help you start well by making the most of your working hours and your rest hours for more sustainble longterm energy.

One caveat here: please don't schedule in "meditation time" if you don't even like meditating. What I'm talking about here is where you look at what drains you that you do every day, and what gives you energy or helps you feel rested, and shift the ratio in favor of what actually helps you live a better life. Please don't turn this into another hustle culture to-do list.

2) Delegate and Automate Repeat Tasks

Next up, delegate any repeat tasks you shouldn't be doing if your time is better spent on building your business or serving clients. Hire someone to clean your house if you don't have enough work hours. Maybe you already have an assistant or freelancers to handle bookkeeping or taxes. That's a great start on your startup budget. But have you thought about all the other things you do as a remote worker/business owner that are on repeat or that could be delegated? Check your phone calendar or productivity app for daily or weekly repeated tasks, and see if you can not only delegate them to a freelance shopper or an app, but automate them in some way that you can set and forget to save time. Better yet, cut things that don't need to be done. Such as ironing your jeans. I don't know. I've already cut all the fat.

First is the low-hanging fruit: reclaim your time by putting bills on autopay, and add pet meds and food from Chewy subscription as well as utilities or anything else that distracts you or that you might forget or worse, stress like I do about what you might be forgetting and waste more time constantly checking the to-do list (I know I'm not the only one).

Or, even better, cut tasks that don't need doing anymore. This could be cancelling unused subscriptions if you don't even use them, or it could look like not checking the mailbox every day when you don't use snail mail or condensing your errands for one day in one area of town and doing everything else online to save commuting time.

Maybe it's your personal time that could be used relaxing: say you shave every day. Laser off your hair with an IPL device. Seriously, shaving takes at least 20 minutes of every morning. You're a dude? Keep a simpler haircut or grow the nice gym bro beard that's in style. It even saves money as well as time.

Or maybe it's your mornings eaten up by meetings or email you need to extract yourself from. Make sure someone other than you is in charge of making decisions for everything. Every damn thing, I'm serious. Even if you're a small business owner like myself, there are all kinds of ways you are still the bottleneck stopping up your business growth, admit it. Or, instead of getting administrative help, just cut some things that aren't essential but are time-consuming. I stopped checking my email except for expected messages a year ago, and 110,000 emails later (mostly newsletters because I'm a journalist, don't be offended on their account) I only missed like 6 important emails in a year and the person texted me to get timely response.

During the pandemic, I quickly noticed that switching to remote Zoom interviews saved hours per interview not driving there in person (I knew this, but networking in person was the only kind that counted back then). Then I switched to.... drumroll.... asynchronous interviews/work. This needs its own section below.

3) Switch to Asynchronous Work

Hear me out, extroverts. Introverts, rejoice, you know you already are inside your heads. ;) If you can switch those meetings to emails and your emails to text messages and automated payroll that you don't have to calculate biweekly but can put on autopay, then you can also gradually shift your schedule toward asynchronous work, which saves you ALL scheduling time, communication back and forth playing phone tag, needing to be in a meeting at a particular time when otherwise you were being super productive, and so on.

Here's one way I do this: I don't answer the phone unless I have to, and I answer them after hours to avoid a 2-minute phone call turning into a half-hour conversation I will enjoy but can't afford to spend energy on as I easily get fatigued from talking or being upright but standing still (yes, it's POTS, the almost stupidly impossible neurological condition: basically I'm a fainting goat). I can't even explain to people why I can't spend time talking or standing still waiting in line at the post office without getting exhausted, so I just stopped doing it. Feelings were hurt, but it was that or be unable to run a business. Threw it overboard.

Now, what asynchronous work is NOT good for is staying in touch with extroverted managers who want creepy constant eye contact or anyone like me with object permanence issues. (I literally forget people exist because of ADHD, it's super professional and awesome of me.) You will need to manage your relationships somehow and stay in touch. But here's the thing: remote work puts control back in your hands, right? You're just not used to using it. So here's what you do: shift to asynchronous work only in the ways that really benefit YOU. This is a challenge for the people pleasers like me who can't even remember what they want, they're so used to making meeting times and locations work for other people. When I shifted to asynchronous work, it was to save my limited energy to keep a business running in an emergency. Therefore, I gave myself unusual permission to throw things overboard from my life that normally I would definitely keep: casual friendships I couldn't keep up with, time out in public people acted like I owed them even though it exhausted me and I'm allergic to air pollution and most restaurant food. If infrastructure feels positively hostile to you on a daily basis, you might be in a hidden challenging situation like I was, where you really need to start prioritizing your own needs to make your business sustainable. Or you might just be burned out. I see you, girl. I know you barely have time to see your s.o. much less spend time on yourself.

One thing that helped me sort this remote work balance out was to ask myself if I was trying to keep some standard norm to keep the peace or if I really felt energized by going somewhere. It took me several rounds of changes to find a workable lifestyle, but now I'm four times as productive and have energy to work almost a normal work day (ironic since that's what I was replacing). I even had to switch to remote fitness classes that are asynchronous because I don't have the time or energy to learn on demand when it works for someone else. Get the idea? Okay, now go make a list of what you do every day/month if it's not written in a schedule, and color code it for whether it drains your energy or makes you feel energized. If it's almost all draining stuff and isn't making your business move forward, that's where you start. Trust me, it's not only worth it because it feels good. It makes you a better business owner/self-boss.

Go forth and boss up for real, my fellow remote business owners and freelance remote workers. Use these new remote work tools we were gifted during the pandemic like shopping delivery of all kinds, remote banking tools, and remote networking on social media, and discover like I did that if you're working when no one else is, you can also rest when no one else can.