A 4-step productivity system to banish remote work anxiety

Today I’ll show you how to banish remote work anxiety. You’ll get more done at work. More importantly, you’ll feel like you’re able to actually switch off when you’re not working.

Working remotely for 9 years has been incredible for my career and life.

For most of that time, I’ve also dealt with low- to mid-level anxiety. Never to the point where it was debilitating, but more like this background noise I’m unable to switch off.

Because I can work anywhere, anytime, it felt like there was always something I could be doing.

It’s not just me. Look at recent vacation data (source):

• 60% of US professionals are working more on vacations
• 63% take shorter vacations
• And 37% log on multiple times per day during vacations

What should we take away from this?

Technology continues to exasperate the problem. When I first started, anxiety was confined to the flood of information in my email inbox.

Today, your typical remote worker is battling notifications from their project management app, workplace communication app, design app, and word processing app… all for a single project.

We spend most of our time tinkering with how to absorb the flow from the information fire hose faster, and more efficiently:

• Watch this webinar while washing dishes
• Listen to a sales podcast while walking the dog
• Get up earlier, work later, hustle harder

In a world of remote work, this isn’t just a game you can’t win. It’s a game you should avoid playing. Because there will always be more.

Instead, we need a system to defend our time, calendars, and minds so we can banish remote work anxiety while still producing our best work.

Let’s dig into the 4 steps:

1/ Reduce the noise

Before we start filtering through the information firehose for what’s critical, we need to improve the signal-to-noise ratio.

The fastest way? Reduce the noise

Here’s how to cut 80% of the noise in 20% of the time:

• Stop listening to the news. If it’s actually important or actionable, someone will tell you about it.
• Keep Do Not Disturb turned “on” on your phone. You can let critical calls and messages through by adding contacts to your “Favorites.”
• Turn off badging and notifications on your apps. Start with your email, news, and social media apps. Exceptions to this rule: messaging and food delivery apps.

This takes about 15 minutes. If you have extra time or want to take it to the next level, here’s what you can do next:

• Make email great again. Unsubscribe to all the newsletters and mailing lists you never open. Sign up for Unroll Me to make this easy.
• Install an app blocker. Cutting yourself off completely is the best way to save yourself from yourself. I recommend the Freedom App, which helped kill my YouTube and Instagram binge habits
• Mark as read. Give yourself permission to NOT hit inbox zero or read every Slack message. I recommend closing out every week with a clean slate: “Select all”, and “Mark as read.” If it’s important, it’ll resurface.

2/ Defend your time

Time is your valuable resource. It’s gold, spice, or an infinity stone. People will come for it. Defend it.

When you do, instead of feeling anxious on a Sunday evening about the week ahead, you’re excited because on Monday you’ll push your own goals forward.

There are two major ways to defend your time:

First, block your calendar.

Prioritize yourself and your family. Add family time (meals, school pickups, etc.) into your calendar as Out of Office blocks. Add your personal time (focus time, working out, sleeping). Get this in first, then schedule around it.

Next, set your working hours. Be explicit about when you’re available (and when you’re not). Google Calendar makes this easy with Office Hours

• Open Google Calendar
• Top right –> Click Settings
• Left –> In General –> Click Working hours
• Enable
• Pick your days/times

Make your calendar public. You’re clear about when you’re available. Now, trust your colleagues to navigate your calendar accordingly when requesting meetings.

When your calendar is public, they can make a judgment call if the meeting is urgent enough to prioritize over a coffee chat or a team sync.

• Open Google Calendar
• Top right –> Click Settings
• Left –> In General –> Settings for my calendars –> Calendar Settings
• Make avail for [Company]
• See all event details

If for privacy reasons, you only want to set your calendar public for specific people, you can do that too:

• Under Share, select specific people
• Click + Add People
• Enable See all event details

Second, make meetings valuable.

Meetings are events where other people literally set your agenda for you. The only thing worse than meetings are rudderless meetings, ones that drift from point to point, with no agenda and no action items

Most fact-gathering and discussion on a topic can happen async. Meetings are best used when there’s a clear and defined outcome the group needs to reach (more on that below).

Defend your time by adding forcing functions to make meetings as valuable as possible. Daniel Elk (CEO of Spotify) summarized his meeting forcing functions (source):

• The desired outcome of the meeting is clear ahead of time
• The various options are clear, ideally ahead of time
• The roles of the participants are clear at the time

3/ Separate work from discussion

Most people will squeeze their creative, high-cognitive work in the 20-minute blocks between meetings during a busy day. Or worse, while half-listening on a call.

Which means they do neither well.

At the end of the day, all they have to show for their efforts is anxiety over the details you missed from the meeting and a half-baked report.

To avoid the land of half-measures, separate work from discussion of the work. I look for two types of separation: time and space.

Time separation

When it’s time for high-cognitive deep work, carve this time out in the calendar (see Defend your time). Then turn off your chat apps (Slack, Teams). Close your email. If you’ve Cut down on noise, then your notifications are off. And you can devote yourself to the task.

Then when it’s time to communicate, be fast-twitch. Be online, be available, and help teams connect the dots with one another.

One objection I hear to this idea of time separation: there would be cataclysmic consequences if X happened and you missed it. My response: if your systems are so brittle that they’d break because you were away from Slack for 24 hours, that’s not your failure, it’s the failure of the system.

If you’re going to quiet the anxiety, get comfortable with small failures slipping through the cracks. Small failures are the cost of admission to big wins.

Space separation

Build the habit of deplatforming critical information from your communication tools to your work tools.

• Interesting competitor facts? Write it down in your notes ap
• Action items after a heated async discussion? Move these to your project management tool
• Did someone email you with an interesting product idea? Save it to a document

Use workplace communication tools for communication. Deplatform the ideas so you can develop them in a separate space, away from the anxiety-inducing cacophony that is Slack or your inbox.

4/ Design a shutdown routine

I’ve always struggled with “turning off” at the end of a workday. Living in Europe while most of my team is on the west coast of the states (7-8 time difference) has only exasperated this problem.

What’s helped dramatically is designing my “Shutdown routine”. Borrowed from Cal Newport’s Deep Work, this ritual reduces anxiety by:

Having a system to make sure all incomplete tasks, goals, or projects has been reviewed and that (1) you have a plan you trust for its completion, or (2) it’s captured in a place where it will be revisited when the time is right.

I’ve played with a few iterations. What currently works for me:

• Write tomorrow’s schedule
• Review Slack
• Email
• Social media
• Close laptop

This process usually takes 15 minutes and has removed 95% of that end-of-day, “did I get to that thing?” anxiety.

Because of my hours, I do this 2x a day: once before family time, and once when my work day is done at 10 pm.

Other people like to incorporate physical movement into their Shutdown routines, for example: putting away the laptop, going for a walk, or doing exercise. Experiment and find what works for you.

TL;DR By building a system that shields our time, calendars, and limited cognitive resources, we can banish remote work anxiety and still produce our best work.

The 4 steps in the productivity system:

1. Cut down noise
2. Defend your time
3. Separate work from discussion
4. Design a shutdown routine

Hope this helps you battle remote work anxiety.

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Photo Credit: Emily the Criminal starring Aubrey Plaza and Theo Rossi, written and directed by John Patton Ford. Loved this movie. Great exploration of themes like free work, debt, and the gig economy.