The async worker's guide to finding balance
Summary
For remote workers the boundaries between work and life can often feel blurred. In this article I discuss seven strategies to achieve work life balance.
Figure out the purpose that your job and work plays in your life. This can be a useful reflection exercise.
Set and manage your boundaries. Use a virtual commute and distraction blocking tools to enforce work-life boundaries.
Unsubscribe from mailing lists and chat rooms that only add to your communication overheads.
Avoid daily news and social media consumption. Choose slower mediums of engagement and learning.
Find ways to organise work in small groups - pairs or trios. This reduces the collaboration overhead you incur at work.
Batch all your coordination tasks. Block time to complete these so they don’t bleed into you personal time or deep work hours.
Practice time-blocking to focus on the things that matter most to you.
It’s 2023, and I hate to break it to you - burnout continues to be a problem. Many burnout-related problems have their roots in what Derek Thompson calls “workism”.
“It is the belief that work is not only necessary to economic production but also the centrepiece of one’s identity and life’s purpose; and the belief that any policy to promote human welfare must always encourage more work.”
No wonder, employers often seem to believe that the way to reward an employee who does a great job, is to not give them a raise, but more work. Before you know it, your best people are also the most burnt out.
It’ll be indelicate of me to dive into this topic, without recognising how systemic the problems are. With the way we organise work today, and all the surrounding incentives, we’ve doomed ourselves to lives out of balance. To surmise that I have a universal solution, would be, to quote Johann Hari, cruelly optimistic. I wish, my friends, that there was a lasting solution at the individual level. There isn’t. Sorry.
But there are ways to create subversive team environments. Team environments where everyone values the idea of balance. Where people can pursue balance without fear. Team environments where health, happiness and leisure can be just as important as work results. If you work in a team that cares about this stuff, the advice that follows in this article could be useful. I’m lucky to work in such a team right now, so let me tell you how I’ve been living a more balanced life in recent years. Caveat - your mileage may vary.
Define the purpose and boundaries of work
I’ll be honest with you. I have no ambition to be in the C-suite of any company, even if I have the opportunity. I’d rather be a foot soldier, who can end work each day with no baggage. Work doesn’t have to be my only identity. For me, work funds the real joys of my life: time with my loved ones, travel, and photography.
I encourage you to reflect on the place work has in your life. That salary of yours - what is it funding? If it’s only more work, I urge you to think again. The concept of “finitude” may help answer this question clearly for you. Imagine if you only had a finite number of days left in your life - a week, a month, maybe a year at most. What would you be doing with the fruits of your labour? If the answer is very different from what you’re doing today, perhaps you must reconsider your priorities. I apologise if this advice is too philosophical, but try it. Your reflections may surprise you.
“Life is very long, unless it’s not.” - Freda, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow and Tomorrow
The concept of finitude is a great way to look at your work as well. Consider Cal Newport’s concept of “fixed schedule productivity”. All the work you do, must fit within the constraints of a fixed schedule you define. In my case, it’s 9am to 6pm, Monday to Friday. Weekends are off limit. If your schedule is fixed, then you can’t fit an infinite number things in it. If a new piece of work comes in, then something must go out. Embracing finitude helps you prioritise. As you may imagine, this constraint frees you to do the work that matters most.
Separate work and life
Most people who prefer remote work despise the commute. The commute had a redeeming feature though. It gave us a way to separate work and the rest of our lives. When you’re remote, there’s always the tendency to let work bleed into personal time. If you aren’t vigilant enough, you’re catching up on work emails at breakfast and responding to instant messages in bed. It gets worse when your kids try to get your attention because you’re “done with work”, but you can’t get your mind off the presentation that’s due next week.
At this stage in life, I have the privilege to afford a home office. Each morning, I “commute” to this office to work, and when I’m done, I power down and commute back to my family. My work setup is rigid enough that it’s inconvenient for me to carry work around the house. I have a dedicated monitor, keyboard and trackpad that I’m used to by now. Working on a laptop screen is downright painful, so I don’t work anywhere but in my home office. So when I’m in the living room, I’m “living”, not working.
Using Freedom to block digital distractions
But I’d be lying if I told you I don’t have my moments of weakness, where I feel like checking into work, outside work hours. To enforce separation, I use a service called Freedom. It makes all work and communication apps unavailable to me for 12 hours each day. I use it to stop myself from looking at work tools during the weekend as well. This invisible hand helps me enforce work-life separation.
Broadcast your work hours to your co-workers
Consider embracing a virtual commute like mine and to stop work from encroaching into your life. At a bare minimum broadcast your working hours to everyone you work with. That helps you signal your availability and to switch off when necessary. Such discipline can be helpful to bring your complete self to each part of your life.
Ditch the work FOMO
I’ve been at my company for 16 years now. When you stay at a firm this long, you’ll gather digital baggage. You get on an awful number of mailing lists, and your chat rooms are out of control. No wonder my research showed that people experience 17 interruptions each day through a combination of emails, chat messages and meetings.
Most emails and messages are neither important nor urgent. We hang on to our subscriptions only for fear of missing out. You know, what if someone shares something interesting or important? Turns out though, that if something is important and needs your attention, people know they should contact you directly, instead of sending messages to broad mailing lists or chat rooms.
A year back, I unsubscribed from almost every company mailing list and chat room except the ones for my immediate team. The ones I keep memberships to, are on digest mode and automatically go into an archive that I peruse at my leisure if I have time. The result? I have fewer emails and messages to triage each day. My inboxes are always at a healthy zero and I have less anxiety and work-related hangovers. Isn’t that peace of mind worth it?
Resist the desire to keep up
When I was a kid, a teenager and later a young man, the only daily external stimulation I had was the newspaper. The family would subscribe to some periodicals; but choices, finances and political inclinations limited us. When I look back at those times, I think I did just fine. I could spend hours reading books or even hanging out with real friends. And then, “feeds” and “infinite scrolls” happened.
Today, with the number of news sites, apps and social media services that exist, we overstimulate ourselves. We can’t resist the urge to look at our phones every few minutes during our idle time. What if there’s a piece of news I missed? What if my friend posted a fun update? Did I just miss out on an important YouTube video? What are people debating on Twitter (X?) and LinkedIn? Even if you’re a master of self-control, your devices beg for your attention through notifications.
Get rid of them all.
Daily news - overrated. Focus on themes instead. Consuming a weekly podcast or newsletter that summarises these themes for you, is a far more calming endeavour.
Social media - toxic. I’ve deleted all social media apps from my phone and tablet. I keep the accounts so I can find content if I like, but it’s inconvenient enough that I’ve weaned myself off these platforms.
Notifications - annoying. I don’t have notifications on any of my devices. I’ll check in for updates, thank you very much. I don’t need my devices to beg for my attention.
Do I end up missing stuff? Sure I do. As I inevitably did when I was trying to keep up. It’s a losing battle to drink from the firehose of information that the internet produces. So I’m not even trying. I suggest you shouldn’t either - especially if you care about your mental health and capacity for deep work. You’ll notice that giving up on these sources of stimulation will automatically nudge you towards healthier forms of engagement. Reading, exercise, wholesome entertainment, time with family and friends - you’ll surprise yourself with the time you wrest back for these pursuits.
Reduce the collaboration tax
The funny thing about knowledge work is that making stuff is rarely a source of overwork. Most knowledge workers may finish their creative work in a fraction of their 40 hours each week. The reason they don’t is due to the collaboration tax they pay. Talk to this person, brainstorm with that colleague, coordinate with that team, and answer those questions. You know what I mean. I learned during my research for my book that the average technologist spends 14 hours in meetings each week!
The “Shape Up” approach gives our team the ability to focus without huge collaboration overheads
This is where teams must get together to agree on ways of working that reduce the communication and collaboration overhead. For example, in my team, we follow the “Shape Up” approach. We work in 5-week development cycles, either solo, in pairs or at most, in trios. This reduces the blast radius of communication. Decision-making happens at the lowest level possible. We have to deliver in a time box, so we move fast with reversible decisions and slow down only for irreversible ones.
Most importantly, the time box helps us focus on one thing at a time. We don’t juggle projects and make ourselves anxious. Instead, we give each piece of work a good hard crack, before we cool down and move to another cycle.
Think about how your team can organise itself and reduce the collaboration tax everyone has to pay. Between setting up small, autonomous pods and simplifying decisions, this site has loads of advice you can apply to achieve this goal.
Batch the coordination work
Regardless of how much you reduce the collaboration tax, there will always be some of this overhead at work. The best we can manage is by handling them in batches. Here are a few techniques that have worked for me in recent years.
I look at email and instant messaging only at certain times of the day. It helps that we have a team agreement about this. Neither of these mediums is for “instant” communication, anyway. If someone needs my attention about something urgent, they can always call me on my phone. That helps me hammer away at work for 3-4 hours at a stretch before I clear out my messages; usually twice a day.
For non-email overheads, such as setting up meetings, async reviews and feedback, I block admin slots every few days. These aren’t generic focus time events on my calendar. I commit to finishing specific tasks during this time, and I stay honest with myself about the things I accomplish. When I can’t get certain work done within a time block, it serves as feedback. It helps me learn about how much time certain work takes.
Blocking admin slots allows you to batch coordination tasks
As long as you and your team are transparent about how you handle various communication tools and coordination tasks, you’ll notice that it helps to batch such work. You can separate your deep work hours from these low-intensity, coordination hours. That way you become less anxious about these lingering commitments. Less anxiety, well-regulated work hours - who doesn’t want that?
Time blocking
If you ignored everything in this post and implemented only one piece of advice, it’ll be this. Block your time for the things that matter the most. If you have some level of autonomy at work because you’re good at what you do, use that autonomy to wrest back control of your life. There are three ways I control my calendar.
I block my time off work. Way in advance! To give you a sense of how much in advance, let me tell you I’ve planned my time off in September 2024, even as I write this post in September 2023. There are many advantages to this approach. For one, I get to dream (and daydream) about my time off for several months before I experience it. It increases the enjoyment I derive from that time. Moreover, if I’ve announced my time off so far in advance, my colleagues recognise how invested I am in the plan. As a result, no one has ever asked me to cancel the plans. Everyone knows about my availability and makes plans around it.
I block time for planning. Most companies do performance reviews and every new performance review cycle gives you an opportunity for long-range planning. This is when I write out what I want to accomplish in the next few months, what my measures of success will be and what support I need. I also set aside time every Monday and Friday to plan and review my weeks, in service of that long-range plan. On Mondays, I label my deep work slots to commit to work that’s in line with my plan. On Fridays, I review how well that weekly plan went. I repeat this cycle each week.
I protect my deep work slots fiercely! There’s no point in making commitments we won’t keep. And the first broken commitment normalises the next. My deep work slots are rarely ambitious. They’re about micro-accomplishments and making progress. These low stakes reduce my stress about the time-blocks and I look forward to them each day. Unless there’s an emergency, I don’t give in to any requests that conflict with my time block. Of course, I don’t want to come across as a curmudgeon when I protect my schedule, so I avoid the “naked no”. Here are some ways I address various requests.
I move quick syncs to async. When someone asks for a quick sync, I explain that it’ll help me if I have some context about the discussion. I then request them to write that context out for me, with specific questions they’d like me to answer. I also promise to get back to them within a reasonable time. Most people understand our need to focus and to keep meetings within control, so they don’t push back on requests to go async.
I say yes but for a later time. For example, if someone wants me to do a certain piece of work, I ask them when is the latest they need it done. Once I know, I block time for it and follow up on that commitment.
I stay transparent about what I’m doing. When I say, “Hey, I’d love to help, but I need to ship my project by Monday, so I really can’t drop what I’m doing right now.”, most people can think of reasonable alternatives.
I highly recommend time blocking. You’ll find that the focus on priorities will make you productive. And that productivity will give you the confidence to enjoy your time off work as well.
I wish I could be confident that every single trick that works for me will work for you too. But I’m no self-help guru to make such claims. A lot of this depends on your values and the team environment you work in. Your company’s ways of working may be hard to get around. So, I understand if some of my advice makes you sceptical.
But specifics aside, consider the sentiment behind each piece of advice. If you care about work-life balance, ask yourself the following questions.
What’s the purpose of work in your life?
How important is it for you to create clear boundaries between work and personal time?
What parts of work communication can you safely ignore?
What kinds of digital stimulation can you give up, for a healthier, more balanced lifestyle?
How can you reduce collaboration overheads at work?
How do you get through the kinds of work that you must do, but don’t bring you joy?
What will you do, to protect your time for the things that matter most to you?
The answer to those seven questions may reveal strategies that work in your context, much like my approach works for me.