According to the philosopher Hegel, history can be evaluated through the lens of (1) thesis—the beginning state, (2) antithesis—the negation of that thesis, and (3) synthesis—what happens when (1) and (2) are reconciled.
The world entered 2020 with an Industrial-Age thesis on the nature of work, and ended with a work-from-anywhere antithesis. As someone who has been working remotely since 2016, I would like to share how my perspective on how I’ve been managing its ever-evolving synthesis in my work life.
Thesis: Order
When I started working from home in 2016, it was the result of my company shuttering our local branch. “We have some bad news, followed by good news,” said HR. “We’re closing your branch but you’re keeping your job.”
I packed up my taupe cubicle with the scant office décor I had accumulated over four years: a pathetic basket of free pens, wrinkled papers, and unread books. As I passed the now-vacant, windowless offices of mid-level managers upon my exit, I observed how uninspiring the place was. “Why did we come here everyday?” I asked myself.
When I got home, I unpacked my stuff and got to work. Gradually, from a predictable and structured daily order emerged an amorphous, chaotic, disordered work day.
Antithesis: Chaos
Chaos is not an inherently bad thing. Often it’s the result of existing structures collapsing which are replaced by new ideas and ways of being. It is an inescapable part of life that occurs in cycles throughout history within human lives and societies alike.
Gone was the old, predictable order of office life: assigned seating, hour lunch breaks, and public beheadings for wearing jeans. When modeling your day around a pre-defined work paradigm, you become mentally dependent upon other people creating order on your behalf without consciously realizing it. No wonder work and prison are often mentioned in the same breath.
At first it felt good to shake off the shackles of my overlords. However, when too many daily milestones were removed, I found it difficult to stay anchored to a routine. Time became fluid. Mornings started later and the workday ended later. Because I had no commute, I saved two hours per day. Yet I had no clue where that extra time went. The distractions of being home creep in, as you realize that it’s possible to multitask throughout the day. What becomes a walk to the mailbox can turn into an hour of shopping for vintage Soviet watches on eBay.
My focus declined because there was always extra time in the day to get things done, and as a result, the quality of my work suffered. From the chaos, I made a conscious decision to create a new ordered workday that would be something that I could design, build, and own.
Synthesis: Own Your Day
Owning Your Day is when we decide how, when, where, and how often we work. Having the autonomy to design one’s day from scratch is an event horizon that has the potential to spark a revolution in how you see your career, yourself, and your life.
It allows workers to design their days like business owners, CEOs, and entrepreneurs. Whereas before you existed within a mental framework of working “for someone else” with a passive mindset, when you Own Your Day, you will start to think more critically about how you are utilizing your time. The emphasis of work shifts to tangible outputs, like a set of KPIs for your product, a milestone delivery, or a research report. Because it’s no longer possible for laggards to feign working, I believe remote work will accelerate the divergence of talent in all industries. Workers who demonstrate excellence will get ahead faster than ever before while the average worker will fall behind. A total reliance on results to judge one’s performance, instead of the vibrancy of one’s khaki collection will definitively and authoritatively separate the wheat from the chaff.
What once was a change in how I perceived my time eventually grew into a completely new work ethos, where I began to consciously design and control my work day.
How to Own Your Day
If we look at the high-performing people who were designing their own work hours before the pandemic, we must ask: what do these people have in common in how they work? How do they design their own workdays? How do they pursue success?
- They are proactive
- They are efficient
- They prioritize
Proactivity
A proactive mindset is one where we believe we are responsible for our own lives. We elicit behaviors that are a function of our decisions, not our conditions. Proactivity is the attempt to exercise influence over as many things in our lives as we possibly can while accepting that we may fail. It is the creative invention of new ways of thinking and working that originate deep within our character—in alignment with our greatest values.
One of my first jobs was mind-numbingly simple. So simple, in fact, that I found myself constantly making mistakes. How? Because I couldn’t stay focused on the minutiae of the tasks at hand. My boss called me into her office one day. “What’s going on?” she asked. “I’m trying to follow the instructions,” I answered. Then, she took the instruction manual and threw it into the trash can. “Let’s try this. You are going to figure things out in a way that works for you.”
Instead of relying on someone else’s method to complete the tasks, now I was forced to be proactive and figure it out for myself. The quality of my work actually increased in concert with the increased difficulty of the problems. My proactivity paid off: 36 versions later, I re-wrote our division’s marketing procedures manual. The best part? Nobody told me to do it.
The same lesson can be said of virtually every aspect of the workplace (and life itself). There is an almost infinite number of problems that need to be solved, yet your team has a finite number of people. You do the math. There will always be opportunities for you to fill in the gaps and build new skills if you are thinking proactively.
I think the reason working remotely facilitated this mental shift within me came from the simple fact that when you have less exposure to your boss on a daily basis, it forces you to think like one yourself. I no longer had the luxury of stopping by his office to ask questions. I couldn’t take comfort in being told what to do. That direction had to come from me.
Efficiency
I suspect that you will not find a single example of a successful person who cannot efficiently manage their time. When you wake up every day, there should be very little question about what’s on your schedule. Blank spots on a calendar are a big red flag unless it’s the weekend or you are intentionally saving that time for recreation. Schedule your meals, your sleep, everything. The goal is to create the most accurate depiction of your day as possible. When you add up personal care, administrative items, answering email, exercise, meals, time for recurring projects, and of course the obligatory slew of “check in” and “touch base” meetings, you’ll find you have way less free time than you originally thought.
Before I started organizing my life around a calendar, I used to let tasks come to me. “I have some spare time this afternoon. Let’s start this task.” When will I finish it? If you don’t allocate time to finish, it will never get done.
Here’s another example. You’re at work and remember you’ve run out of shampoo. Just go on Amazon and order a bottle before you forget, right? No, the correct way is write a note for later and set a designated time when you do your shopping. Building a calendar lets everything have its place and time, so that your current task goes uninterrupted. You can apply it to both work time and personal time. Focusing on the task at hand is your number one priority here. Don’t let distractions in.
Go ahead and allocate time to every project in your life—work, play, hobbies, everything. Give it space on your calendar on a recurring basis. This will create mental clarity in your workday because you will no longer find yourself searching for things to do. The overwhelming list of things that need to get completed in life are endless. Instead of chasing them at random times, put aside a predictable timeslot instead.
Pro tip: If you really want to nerd out, add up all the hours each of your projects/tasks take you each week, month, and year. You will be astounded at how many more projects you can take on.
Learning to efficiently organize, schedule, and manage my time was a necessary bulwark against the open-ended nature of the remote work day because it gave me the structure to perform. Better yet, it was something that I proactively built. What’s a better motivator than that?
Prioritization
One of the most powerful ways to clear your mind is to offload your thinking to systems. A basic example of a prioritization system is a to-do list. Write something down so you don’t have to remember it, then do it later.
Fine, but we can do better.
Building a system to prioritize and accomplish tasks goes hand-in-hand with proactivity and efficiency. You cannot have one without the others. Proactivity encourages you to take on new projects. Efficiency creates a predictable structure in which you can accomplish work by clearing your time. Prioritization tells you what tasks to work on next, and when to do them.
I’m a big fan of Kanban boards because they are superpowered to-do lists, allowing you to mark tasks as “to do,” “doing,” and “done.” I use 18 individual Kanban boards on Trello to manage my life as of this writing, ranging from work projects to books I’m reading, and everything in between. Trello is a fabulous product that has allowed me to track extreme levels of detail that a simple to-do list cannot.
For product managers, there comes a very palpable anxiety that comes when you don’t know what to do next on a project. The reason for that is simple; there’s always something to do. If you don’t know what to do next, you’re wasting time. What’s worse, if you don’t have a predictable structure in which you are accomplishing tasks (see efficiency), then you will find yourself endlessly running around completing tasks in a very reactive and passive manner.
There are a ton of books on this subject, but I gravitate to Getting Things Done by David Allen. He says if you can’t complete something in two minutes, you should either delegate it or defer it. So, every time something needs to get done that takes longer than two minutes, I add an item to Trello. It doesn’t matter how simple the task is. I also don’t rely on my memory if I can avoid it. My motto is if it’s not written down, it never happened.
I wait until the next calendar slot I’ve allocated for the specific project and tackle the task at that time. I simply open my Kanban board and get to work. So, suppose I have to conduct UAT for our rollout. I wait until the time I’ve allocated on my own calendar to do this. Until then, I don’t think about it. This creates lots of mental clarity.
The board tells me what to work on next. It’s predictable, simple, and dependable.
Make It Happen
In learning to Own Your Day, remote work may be one of the most incredible opportunities of your career. Since going remote in 2016, I believe being successful requires three core skills: proactivity, efficiency, and prioritization.
From the order of the Industrial Age workday has emerged a chaotic, disordered state of remote work. To stay productive, people must actively build order into their workdays to succeed. What’s your synthesis? It’s up to you.
