Last week I talked about the basics of landing a remote job in 2025.

Now let’s cover the other side: how to thrive while working remotely.

Working remotely for 11 years has been incredible for my career and life. I’ve been able to:

• Live in Ireland

• Travel the world

• Work with smart people in education, healthcare, and climate

But for most of that time, I’ve dealt with low- to mid-level anxiety. It’s been 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

Today, let’s look at ways to start solving this problem.

Here’s what you’ll learn today:

• How to stay focused and get more done in less time

• Simple ways to protect your mental health while working from home

• A proven system to balance work and life on your own terms

…and more!

Let’s jump in.

📝 Your Remote Work Reality Check

When I first started working remotely, all my anxiety was confined to the flood of information in my email inbox. Here’s what my tech stack looked like back then:

• Gchat (pre-Slack)

• Text messages (no sliding into DMs)

• 1-800-Conference-Call (everyone dialed in and shouted “are you on?” at each other)

Not to be all “man yelling at cloud” but…

By trying to communicate MORE! FASTER! BETTER! we’ve only made the problem worse (whoops).

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.

And instead of addressing the root cause of our anxiety…

We try drinking from the fire hose faster and more efficiently:

• Watch the webinar while washing dishes

• Listen to a sales podcast while walking the dog

• Get up earlier, work later, hustle harder

This isn’t just a game you can’t win.

Instead, it’s a game you should avoid playing.

Because there will always be more.

We need a system to defend our time, calendars, and minds so we can make the most of the freedom and flexibility of remote work.

We have to actively set up our lives to make remote work work for us.

The Simple Remote Work Playbook

Remote work became a reality for millions during the COVID-19 pandemic.

🤯 Before the pandemic, in 2019, only 5.7% of working Americans (about 9 million people) were working from home. By May 2020, that grew to about 48.7 million people (source).

Now that they’ve experienced the benefits, they want to keep working this way. But they need help making it sustainable.

Most remote workers aren’t trying to become productivity machines. They simply want to do good work and have a life outside their laptop screen.

The challenge: many jumped into remote work without learning the foundations first. They missed out on years of trial and error that could have helped them make the most of this flexible way of working.

So here’s a simple remote work playbook that will help you stay productive, balanced, and fully enjoy the freedom of remote work.

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:

Take a break from the news. If it’s important or actionable, someone will tell you about it.

Keep Do Not Disturb turned “on”. For the average American, this saves you from 146 notifications per day (or one notification every 10 minutes) (source). The exact number varies depending on age, job, and many other factors… but still. You can still 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, do this next:

🤓 Do this for the extra credit:

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 most valuable resource.

It’s the microfilm.

It’s spice.

It’s an infinity stone.

People will come for it.

You need to 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 meeting with no agenda. These are rudderless conversations that drift from topic to topic, with no point and no action items.

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

You can 10x the value of every meeting with a few simple rules:

📅 How to make meetings as valuable as possible:

Everyone knows exactly what needs to be decided before the meeting starts

Someone outlines all possible choices the team could make beforehand

Everyone understands their role and what they need to contribute

3/ Set “maker” hours for focused work

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 make remote work work for you, 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 ASAP

• 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/ Make fitness easy

Remote work rookies think that because they ditched their commute, they’ll suddenly have all this extra time for complex workout routines.

Ah, sweet summer child.

Two weeks later, those ambitious plans get abandoned because they’re just too overwhelming to maintain.

Instead, you want to make fitness easy.

First, prime your environment.

Place as many fitness “triggers” around you as possible:

• The kettlebell next to the desk

• Pull-up bar at the entrance

• Yoga mat on the floor

When you hit a “trigger”, do a few swings, pull-ups, push-ups (respectively).

James Clear calls this “priming the environment”.

Second, set the bar low.

Here’s the secret to consistent exercise when working remotely: a low bar.

🏃‍♂️ I mean, really low:

10 push-ups

10-minute walk

3 pull-ups

All of these count.

While these might not qualify as “workouts” in a fitness influencer’s world, they maintain the vital habit of daily movement.

Remember: consistency beats intensity.

5/ Design a shutdown routine

I’ve always struggled with “turning off” at the end of a workday.

This was particularly true while living in Ireland, when most of my team was on the west coast of the US (7-8 time difference).

I made it work. But I certainly wasn’t thriving.

One thing that dramatically helped: building 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:

• Check DMs

• Check Email

• Review Slack

• Plan tomorrow

• Check the socials

• Shutdown complete

When I reach “shutdown complete,” I scream, “Booyah, Baby!!!” at the top of my lungs. Optional but recommended.

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.

💫 The Bottom Line

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 five steps in my simple remote work playbook are:

1. Reduce the noise

2. Defend your time

3. Set “maker” hours for focused work

4. Make fitness easy

5. Design a shutdown routine

Hope this makes remote work work for you.