Maybe it’s the time of year, and we’re feeling a warm and fuzzy feeling — one only amplified by strings of twinkling little lights and the promise of food-filled family get-togethers. Maybe it’s the overly saccharine overtones Mariah hitting the high notes in ‘All I Want for Christmas is You’ on repeat. Or maybe it’s that we’ve learned that one of the best things about remote work had nothing to do with work at all.

Over the last couple of years, many of us have slowly come to the same realization: that working a 9-5 meant we could only be with our families and loved ones from 5-9. And in retrospect, that didn’t seem like a very good trade-off.

Because even if companies say that their culture is like a family, it’s no substitute for spending time with the real thing. As our priorities have begun to shift, we’ve recentered our schedules around spending time with people that make our lives better.

That means taking your kid to the park, or spending time reconnecting with friends. Or as Chris says later on in this episode, getting more time with the people we care about the most, and doing the things that make us the happiest. And once you realize that, the whole work/life balance thing seems pretty simple. Because at the heart of it, it’s giving us time back to reconnect.

In this week’s episode, we’re getting right to the heart of what makes remote work so special. Carlos, Clare, and Chris reflect on how remote work has given them more time to be present with those most important to them.

“I can be there for bathtime, or if my daughter wakes up crying. So many parents don’t get that chance.”

Carlos Silva, SEO Content Manager, Chili Piper, Valencia, Spain

Carlos’ favorite thing to do is take his daughter to the park. His daughter, Chloe, is 15 months old, with dark brown eyes and rosy, cherubic cheeks. Her current favorite things, Carlos says, are Disney’s Frozen, tangerines, and opening the fridge. She hates having her hair brushed.

“She’s at that age where she’s starting to discover things,” he smiles. “She’s getting more comfortable with running and jumping and learning. She’s so much fun.”

Carlos takes Chloe to the park all the time. He’s there when she wakes up from her nap, when she needs dinner, or if it’s playtime. And he can because he works remotely, and because his company trusts him to have a life on work time. And that, he says, means the world to him.

“You see all these remote workers working in coworking spaces with their three screens,” he says. “They just go there for eight hours a day instead of an office. Their working environment and circumstances have changed, but their mentality hasn’t.

“Remote working means I can set my own hours. I might work really early in the morning, or really late at night — but I don’t mind, as long as I can spend time with Chloe.”

Carlos originally started working remotely because his life, in his own words, fell apart. 

“I moved here from Venezuela eight years ago. And one of the things I always wanted to do was set up my own business. My wife and I set up a little coffee shop… But things ended up not working out with my wife. I lost the business along with it. I was in a really bad situation — I was not in my home country, and I didn’t have a job.”

But if remote work was the catalyst that helped Carlos get out of a bad situation, Chloe is the reason he keeps doing it. Now, he runs a popular newsletter called Hello Remote to pay it forward to other marketers looking for remote roles — because he wants others to have the same opportunities that he has.

“People send me emails to say ‘thanks’ all the time. They tell me they got the job. I wanted to help people like me, in bad situations, to find access to opportunities they wouldn’t otherwise have.

​​“Because for me, having that trust to work remotely and asynchronously — and to be a dad at the same time — is huge. Nobody expects me to be at my desk for eight hours. When I’m not working, I’m taking Chloe to the park. I can be there for bathtime. I can comfort her if she wakes up crying from her nap. So many parents don’t get that chance.”

“I’m not that interested in the future of work — I’m far more interested in the future of living.”

Chris Herd, Founder and CEO, Firstbase, Aberdeen, Scotland

Chris says he missed a lot of his daughter’s ‘firsts’ when he worked in an office. Like her first steps, for example. Or her first babbled words. But he’s missed a lot fewer of these moments since he went remote and founded his company, Firstbase, from the north of Scotland.

Chris founded Firstbase to help companies deal with the logistical complexities of remote working, like sourcing desks and chairs for ill-equipped employees globally. But it was those missed parental milestones that became the catalyst for remote working, rather than the promise of solving a growing problem.

“I missed my daughter walking for the first time,” he says. “I missed her laughing and talking. That was the real reason I decided to go remote. I wasn’t around to see the people I care about progress.”

Chris now defines the rhythm of his day by his life, not his work. He puts in a few hours of work in the mornings before he takes his kids to school. He goes for a workout when he needs a boost. He’s there at the school gates when it’s hometime.  

“It doesn’t really make sense to put myself and my team in a position where they’re not able to do great work,” he says. “For me, that’s getting up super early, working for a few hours, and taking some time off to reinvigorate myself. I’m able to produce far better work than I’ve ever been able to produce in my life, because I’m able to focus on how I work best.

“But I’m also able to be there for my daughter. I can be there to drop her off for her first day of nursery, and pick her up at the end of the day.

“I'm not that interested in the future work, if I'm honest,” he adds. “I don’t think people care about that. I think what people care most about is the future of living.

“Remote work has let me live closer to my family and the friends I grew up with. It meant I got to experience some of my daughter’s milestones, like her first day of school. It meant I could build a global technology company from a small city in the north of Scotland.

“I can be there to drop my daughter off for her first day of nursery or school — or attend 

things I otherwise wouldn’t, because I’d be traveling. Ultimately, I get to spend more time with the people I care most about, and doing the things that make me happiest.”

“I have more connection, less stress, and less guilt.”

Clare Jones, Digital Marketing Manager, Custom Neon, Perth, Australia

Clare says one of her greatest fears when she was remote working involved a Nerf gun.

“I was always wondering if a child or a foam bullet would come whistling past me in the background,” she laughs. “I started sticking a sign on my office door saying ‘call in progress’, but they got wise to the fact that sometimes that was a lie.”

Clare is a busy mom of three, and it turns out that her fears that her teenage stepsons would storm her home office and pelt her with aerodynamic foam projectiles in front of her whole company were definitely founded. It happened more than once, she says.

But for Clare, these initial fears of losing face professionally gave way to something she valued much more. For the first time, she was able to experience more of those little family moments she’d been missing, like coaching her youngest son to ride a bike for the first time, or hunting for pine cones in the forests that border Perth, where they live.

“He had a fear of riding a bike ever since an accident when he was two,” she says. “We’d take just a few minutes every day on our lunch break to really focus on it and he finally cracked it. We’d go on a walk each day and play outdoor bingo. We followed the journey of a family of purple swamphens, watching their two chicks hatch and grow over the months. I really valued that time at home with the boys — even just a few days a week means I have more connection, less stress and less guilt.”

If there’s one thing that Clare hopes for the future, it’s that organizations start to re-examine their biases around working parents, and how remote work can enable them to do both, better.

“I think that it goes back to that feeling of having to choose between work and your kids — feeling like you might have to show up earlier, work harder, or that your efforts aren’t quantified in the same way as an employee without children,” she says. “I do both — I’m a full-time working mom. Organizations are starting to see employees as the people they are. That can only be a good thing.”

If we think about it, remote work was never really created equal — the pandemic was just the catalyst to magnify some of the gaps that were already there. 

Like women, shouldering the burden of unpaid domestic labour, juggling teaching and childcare alongside full-time work. Or how lack of access to high-speed internet exposed digital inequality the whole world over. Or how our backgrounds on Zoom said a lot more about our socioeconomic and cultural circumstances than we intended.

Remote work has the potential to equalize employee experiences. It has the power to provide access and opportunities to employees that never had a look-in before. It can rebalance salaries and benefits based on needs, not locations.  It can improve working experiences for those from marginalized groups. 

But we’re not there yet, and it’s clear that building true employee equity is far more complex and nuanced than just providing a chair and monitor for your workforce. 

We have to do better in creating a more sustainable foundation. Because if we don’t, we risk jeopardizing the progress we’ve made already.

The question now becomes: How can we avoid widening these gaps further — and how can remote work help us build more diverse, inclusive companies?

In today’s episode, We Are Rosie’s Corean Canty shares her perspectives on what the future looks like for diversity, equity and inclusion in a remote-first context, and what we need to do to level the playing field if remote work is going to work — for everyone.

“One of the mistakes we’re making about remote work is assuming that it means the same thing for everyone.”

Corean Canty, COO, We Are Rosie, Georgia, US

Corean thinks that remote working has allowed us to shed the masks we wear at work.

She went remote back in 2015. Before that, she’d dabbled in occasionally working from home. But it wasn’t until she went fully remote that she realized how much more inclusive remote working felt — and how it gave her and others more space to be truly themselves.

“So many people put on this work mask and their work face and you never really know who they are as humans,” she says. “You build a relationship with them based on their work persona, but they could be someone totally different at home.”

“But there’s just a different mentality in remote-first cultures. Communication is more intentional, more effective. I realized that I was seeing little pieces of people’s lives that almost never get shared at work, like their spouses or their kids or their pets — or how they are in their own environment. Having that little view into their worlds means I’ve built stronger relationships with remote co-workers in a few months than the people I sat next to in an office for years.”

“Remote work helps me feel like I belong in the room — because this is who I am in my own space.”

Corean knows a lot about wearing masks, because she’s always worn them too.

“As a woman of color in corporate America, there are so many ways you wear a mask at work,” she says. “Sometimes you choose one for yourself, but often, they’re applied to you. You’re put in these boxes, and you’re constantly worrying about perpetuating a false stereotype about yourself. It’s almost like when you go to school and you’re figuring out which table to eat lunch at, who to go to break with.”

Corean says masks were her armor — forged partly from self-preservation, and partly expectation that she needed to act and be a certain way. They were encoded in how she presented herself physically, the way she spoke, and in her behavior, helping her prove that she “belonged in the room”.

But in a remote-first context, Corean now feels like she belongs in the room, because remote work has helped her create the environment where she can be her full self.

“Now we’re working remotely from the environments we feel most comfortable in, we’re able to take those masks off a little more. You don’t have to walk into a room and have that pressure to find where you fit. You don’t have to figure out your relationships with people right away. You’re more protected in your own space.

“This is who I am in my own space,” she adds as a cat wanders in and out of frame behind her. “I’ve realized that I’m better when I’m my whole self. And if there’s somewhere that doesn’t accept my whole self, then they don’t deserve to have me.”

“We have an opportunity to connect with and learn from a wider variety of people.”

Corean believes that remote work is giving organizations an opportunity — not just to hire more employees globally, but to shake up ways of working and diversify our knowledge and ways of thinking.

“When we’re restricted to working in the same place, people have the same cultures, and they’ve been conditioned into similar ways of thinking,” she says. “But remote work gives us this opportunity to connect to a wider variety of people. We’ve all been raised in different ways, and different environments, we all think differently. And now we have this chance to build new connections with different types of people. That opportunity is where we need to anchor our experience of remote work.”

Now, Corean works with We Are Rosie, a flexible, globally distributed talent solution that connects underrepresented marketers with access to work opportunities. Diversity and inclusion are the company’s backbone.

“Often when we talk about diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging (DEIB), it always goes to recruiting practices and all of these tools that can either be lived, or can become mouthpieces,” she says. “But one of the things about remote work is that it covers a base that a lot of people leave out of the conversation with DEIB — location bias. If you think about a lot of these big brands, they’re often in cities. 

“Even if you’re willing to recruit and bring people there, they might not want to go. It might not be an environment they want to raise their children in, or where they’ll feel like they’ll be treated well — or a place they’ll feel welcome. And so not only does it benefit companies being able to have access to a much larger talent pool, so you're actually being able to grow and accelerate and be innovative.

“So now people have more access to opportunity, the next step is figuring out what that actually looks like. Are people going to have the same amount of visibility, and be able to contribute meaningfully? Are we acknowledging their work style preferences, or providing the right type of work rhythms for different needs? How are we setting up the way we communicate? Does everyone have to work from their home, or do you have stipends so people can get things set up to work the way they need to?

“I believe one of the mistakes we’re making about remote work is assuming it means the same thing for everyone. This isn't just considering where people work, but how. 

“If we really think about working remotely, are we creating the environment where they can find their way to do their best work and not be forced into one way of working? Because if we’re not, then things need to change.”

For a lot of us, our first experiences of remote work were just something that happened to us. It wasn’t something we had any choice in. 

We didn’t get to decide when work happened, or set hard boundaries when work time bled over into home time. We didn’t have much of a choice of what the structure of our days looked like, because other people decided that for us as they crammed our calendars with call after call after call. And somewhere along the line, we developed this creeping feeling that if there wasn’t a little green dot next to our name, were we really even working at all?

All of this happened because when we boxed up our desks to work remotely in 2020, we also boxed up all of the rituals that came with them. We tried to unpack them in a remote-first context, forcing our typical working hours, methods of communication and brainstorming sessions to fit. Trouble is, we didn’t really know what the shape of true remote work looked like yet.

It’s something that Rodolphe Dutel, founder of Remotive, knows well — because he did it too. Now, as he heads up his own remote-first company, he reflects on some of the things that need to change if we’re going to get remote work right.

Here’s Rodolphe’s Remote Works story.

“Remote work is about learning new codes of conduct in how we express ourselves.”

Rodolphe Dutel, Founder at Remotive, France

Rodolphe says he almost got fired from his first remote job. He’d moved to Buffer after two years at Google, curious to experience something different after a steady diet of corporate culture.

Rodolphe was used to a working world that had clearly defined borders. Working hours were regular. Communication was direct and to the point, often with little room for superfluous detail or feeling. Ways of working were structured and hierarchical. But by the end of his three-month trial period at Buffer, he realized that wouldn’t work in this new remote-first context. He had to adapt quickly, or leave.

“I’d been working in corporate America, in organizations with 10,000-plus employees,” he says. “I learned to be very formal, very direct. When I joined Buffer, I didn’t know how to work with people you don’t see every day. I didn’t know the codes of conduct for asynchronous work — I’m not sure I had the empathy either. It was about learning the difference between explicit and implicit communication. It was about understanding and navigating the cultural nuances we all have of expressing ourselves — about relearning hierarchy and permission.

“I realized slowly but surely that we had the power to make a lot of things happen remotely, but we had to put in the work and focus — the groundwork — to do that.”

“Trust is the baseline principle of remote working. You have to assume good intent at every step.”

The groundwork, or part of it at least, was trust. Trust that his team members were getting their work done. Trust that if someone didn’t reply immediately, it didn’t mean they were slacking off. Trust that people don’t need to punch in on the clock for eight hours a day. 

“Working in corporate America, there was always this reward attached to being responsive,” he says. “If you want to be visible, you have to be responsive. And if you want a promotion, you have to be visible. It was all gamified to an extent.

“But with remote work, we’ve seen a shift in that power dynamic — because you can’t reward visibility when you don’t see the people you work with every day.

“Trust became my baseline principle.  You have to assume good intent at every step. You have to trust that maybe someone isn’t responding to you because they have something else to attend to, which is equally important — if not more — than you. 

“To make that work as a system, you’ve got to build empathy. If someone is managing their workload in, say, 30 hours — that’s great. But you also need to detach that from the guilt. 

“We need to plan according to our energy, rather than because of the 40-hour work week. We need to design processes with empathy that get away from this culture of urgency in the first place. We need to lead with the things we want to achieve on a quarterly basis, instead of constantly sprinting for the next deadline.

“We're not heart surgeons, so we can delay most decisions by 24 hours. That’s why remote work is a gateway to a better way of working — asynchronous work. And async, for me, is just the next logical conclusion.”

“If you don’t own your calendar, then someone else is setting the rhythm for the only non-renewable resource you have — time.”

Rodolphe quit Buffer in 2017 to work on his own company, Remotive, which he founded in 2014. Remotive connects job seekers globally with remote-first companies — “because talent is everywhere,” he says, “and they’re voting with their feet. They’re looking for a job board where they can see what’s going on on both sides of the table.”

So what’s on the table at Remotive? Rodolphe is a firm believer in practicing what he preaches. He favors working in the mornings, but he’s led by his own energy — “if you have a cloudy mind, you’re better off doing it tomorrow,” he notes. He opts out of what he needs to, depending on where he feels he can deliver the most value.

“It took me a long time not to feel guilty about that,” he says. “I try to lead by example. So as a leader, are you going to say that your Tuesday afternoon is blocked out for rock climbing or childcare or whatever — and that no matter what, nobody can reach you? That sets a precedent.

“But if you’re not walking the talk, people are always going to default to being present — and that’s where the guilt comes in. And everyone’s been petrified to let go of that during this pandemic, because if your entire team is online and you’re not, then that singles you out.

“It creates this stressful online environment that allows those that shout the loudest or get paid the highest to gain the upper hand. We’ve seen so many organizations go from no remote working at all to forced working from home — which is different to giving people an active choice in how they work remotely. Forcing people to work from home is a desocialization process where our old ways of working have collided with our environment. It’s not true remote working — it’s building a culture based on fear instead of freedom and flexibility.”

“So it's documenting and owning topics rather than owning hours. It’s about zooming out, and going to do that thing you want to do, without guilt or restrictions. Because when we’re working asynchronously, we need to use the time around work to be a little more synchronous with our direct environment.”

Being synchronous for Rodolphe means sailing. He tries to get out on the sea a couple of times a week. He’s sailed across the Atlantic twice.

“We really need to learn how to disconnect from the virtual world,” he emphasizes. “Because the next dilemma will be when we get to retirement age and realize that we’ve spent the last 40 years behind a screen, ruled by a calendar that has been decided by other people.

“And if you don’t own your calendar, then someone else is setting the rhythm for the only non-renewable resource you have as a human — time.”

Share your Remote Works story

If you believe the rumors, remote work is killing our creativity. It’s dulling our synapses, and holding us back from being our most innovative selves at work. It’s robbing us of our good ideas.

Except that’s not true — not by a long stretch. Because our creativity never went anywhere — it’s more that the rituals that we relied on to drive innovation before were built on the assumption that we need to be physically together to have new ideas and solve problems.

And those no longer work when we’re working remotely.

But instead of trying to make our old ways fit into new norms, we now need to focus on the ways that remote work can make us more creative. We need to create new rituals that redefine how we collaborate, share ideas, and explore new ways of thinking together beyond post-it notes or virtual brainstorming meetings. We need to shake up our environment to drive creativity, make time for it in our schedule, and optimize our routines around how we work best.

Because when we have the flexibility to work smarter and better, we have more time to focus on ourselves, and do the things that re-energize us and help us fuller lives. And when we’re able to rebuild our lives around work, we can see that our lives around work give us the fresh perspectives that drive true creativity.

In today’s episode, we zero in on how remote work and creativity intersect for Nino, Naida, and Cecile — and explore how each is rediscovering creativity on their own terms.

“Having more flexibility fuels my creativity.”

Nino Filiu, Developer at Toucan Toco, France

Nino has been making art since he was old enough to hold a crayon. But when it came to picking his future career track back in school, he didn’t choose art — he picked science instead. He figured the pay was better. 

Up until he started working remotely, he was living a bit of a double life. By day, he was a software developer at a busy Parisian startup. By night, he stole back every moment he could to do something creative. It was an alter-ego of sorts.

“Kind of like Batman,” he jokes. “I always kept a clear separation between my creative mind and my technical mind — I found it really hard to have a dialogue between the two. And when I was working nine to five, it didn’t leave much time to meet with my creative friends — to create anything. I had to meet them in the evenings or on weekends. It wasn’t a productive way to be creative. We never finished anything.”

Much like Batman, Nino’s creativity after 5pm was lonelier, his process pared down, his art constrained to inked sketches on a page. But remote working has given him the time back to create on his own terms.

“It was really great to go from drawings that fit inside this,” he breaks off and motions to his sketchbook, “to things that were really physical and big. I have more flexibility during the day to meet creative people. Every time I showcase my work to someone, I get this instant feedback that motivates me to do more.”

Remote working has evolved Nino’s style beyond the borders of his sketchbook, because it allows him to meet creative new friends, and find fresh perspectives. 

But it’s also intertwining his technical and creative personalities in new ways. Coding has become part of his art, as he layers algorithms with photography to create a clash of distorted colors and pixels. He has the flexibility to work on bigger projects, and exchange ideas with people — he’s just participated in a collaborative installation.

Nino’s creativity is dependent on his environment — he calls it “setting up a playground.” When he wants to draw, he assembles his art supplies in his room. If he wants to do some creative coding, he heads to a cafe. 

“Timing and organization is more important,” he says. “I must have at least several hours in front of me where I have the freedom to be creative without being disturbed. And some days when I just know I’m going to do something different, it’s very important to set up the day so I get the most out of it.

“It's a whole different order of magnitude in terms of motivation,” he adds. “If you go to a 9-5 job everyday, you become convinced that you have to be something, pursue the same goals or progression as everyone else. But even just having the flexibility to work at a cafe instead of an office, you look around and see that life isn’t about that. This tiny change to how I work has made me much more flexible to take my art more seriously — it’s fueling my creativity.”

“Nothing is more annoying than a call in the middle of a great sentence.”

Naida Allen, Content Writer and Blogger, London

Naida never saw herself ending up in sales. She fell into a role at a busy London startup straight after university, because she was trying to — as she puts it — “get my act together”.

“I did enjoy it at first, but it was very emotionally taxing,” she says. “In sales, you have to have the personality, but also the strength to push yourself to overcome rejection. I was spending a lot of time having stressful conversations.”

Naida spent the majority of her time warming up new leads to part with cold, hard cash. But it wasn’t until she started doing the role remotely that she realized she didn’t enjoy it. Unmoored from the office, team in-jokes and restorative rants over a cup of tea with a colleague, Naida found that the parts of the job she enjoyed the most — “writing sales emails and marketing scripts, mainly,” she says — were things she wanted to do more of.

“At first, remote working was just a change in my routine. But when you take away the office vibe from a job like that, you don’t have much left. My mental health was feeling low. I was just... tired of it. My brain was telling me this felt wrong, and I believe that if something’s costing you your mental health, it’s too expensive.”

Naida quit. But she didn’t go back into sales — instead, she used her newfound mental freedom to tap into her creativity, and restart her career.

“I was writing a blog with a friend at the time. But after I quit, I did a few creative internships and started writing more. I was like, ‘oh my god, I’ve finally found my thing’. And then that creativity opened up.”

Naida’s creative process looks a little different to her sales pitch. She usually needs to get some energy out first, she says, to shake out the restlessness in her limbs. Then, she carefully arranges her schedule, carving out undisturbed blocks of time to be creative.

“I mute all notifications, I leave my phone in another room. I make sure that I write when I know no one will disturb me — so I block out two hours in my calendar around meetings. Nothing is more annoying than a call in the middle of a great sentence.”

When writer’s block strikes, Naida doesn’t force it. Instead, she gets up and takes a walk to refresh, has a chat with a friend, or listens to a podcast. She can do that, because she has the flexibility to own her time.

“I think remote working made me realize I needed a life change,” she says. “I have this new energy and ownership over my time and work. I went from feeling trapped to having so much more mental freedom to do a job I enjoy.”

“Remote work makes me better at my job.”

Cecile Bussy, Writer and Community Builder, London

Cecile says she feels at her most creative when she’s connecting with new people, and exploring new places. She’s been working remotely and meandering her way around Europe since 2017, after completing her degree in Vancouver. 

“I've used my university education to travel and when I graduated from my Master's degree, I didn't want to stop,” she says. “I started to wonder if this kind of lifestyle would be possible for me.”

When the pandemic happened, Cecile was working as a journalist at a tech publication. She moved to Spain and Portugal when the UK went into lockdown — and when her company called her back, she realized that she wasn’t ready to box her world back in.

“They were ready to be back in the office in London again,” she says. “I wasn’t. I never really understood why we have to go to the same place every day — I can work from my laptop from anywhere. We don't need a physical space to be able to connect with people.”

A change of environment is the thing that drives Cecile. It ignites her creative process. It brews animated conversations and connections that lead to new ideas. It makes her a better writer. And that, she says, isn’t as easy when she’s tied down in one place doing the same thing every day. 

“It’s a matter of changing your environment,” she says. “When you stay too long in your comfort zone, you do the same thing every day, you tend to create the same things." 

She now travels slower and stays at least two months in one place. To keep her creative flow going, she switches work environments from her Airbnb to cafes to coworking spaces throughout the week.

"That’s why I like working remotely. I can travel, work in different places, and get new ideas. I can get inspired by eavesdropping in a cafe or have conversations about a similar topic with different people –– I always get different perspectives." 

“That exchange of ideas, getting out of your comfort zone, discovering new places … It drives my creativity and fuels my writing. It makes me better at my job.”

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There are 3.5 million #digitalnomad posts on Instagram. It’s an endless scrolling vista of mountaintops threaded with clouds, pristine beaches at sunset when the shadows are long, bustling cities, and remote island getaways. You can almost feel the sand between your toes.

It’s the image of a lifestyle that was not an option to many of us before — but remote work has brought it closer to being within our reach.

Because now, we have borderless opportunities for work. We can choose to work on what excites us the most, rather than simply what’s available where we live. We have ownership over when and how we work — whether that’s 10 hours a week from a far-flung beach, or working night shifts to experience a new city by day.

But things aren’t always sunny when you’re WFA. We’re still figuring out what equity looks like in geographically distributed teams — financially and experientially. Work can transcend borders and time zones, but there’s an invisible wall the second we talk about employee rights, visas, and pensions. We don’t have all the right tools to connect with one another — and we’re still figuring out what great collaboration looks like when we’re scattered to the winds.

Also, sand is a real nightmare to get out of a laptop keyboard.

But most of all, we’ve realized that remote work offers us a freeing — and sometimes challenging — new reality. In today’s post, Sam and Rachel reflect on the lessons they’ve learned while working from anywhere — and why it’s not about the quest for an ideal.

“Remote work isn't about recreating an idealized Instagram lifestyle — it’s literally about building whatever you want.”

Sam Claassen, Head of Growth, Safetywing, Colorado, US

Sam was on a beach in Bali when he realized that there’s no right way to be a digital nomad. He’d gone there right after college to try the “typical digital nomad thing”, after a brief stint in a strip-lit office threatened to dull his sense of adventure.

“Remote work forces you to learn a lot about yourself really quickly,” he says. “I had one of those moments when the switch flipped in Bali. I was only working about 10 hours a week, and I was just surfing and hanging out the rest of the time. I realized really quickly that I’m not actually a beach person, and that I didn’t see an increase in happiness as I reduced the amount of work I did. 

“It forced me to take a step back and think, ‘what life do I actually want? What makes me happy? What should I be optimizing for?’ It wasn’t until I’d gotten started in this lifestyle that I’d even given that any thought.”

Sam didn’t figure out all of those answers immediately, but he had a pretty good idea of what he valued. Freedom to go wherever he wanted was high on the list — but he didn’t want not being tied to a location to cost him job satisfaction. Since then, home has been wherever he’s set his suitcase down for a spell — 66 countries and counting.

Right now, he’s in his home base in Boulder. But he could be anywhere, he says, he’d pick Slovenia, because “it’s like this hidden gem just tucked up away above Italy, where there are very few tourists.”

Ultimately, Sam thinks that if we’re going to get remote working right, it’s going to take a larger value shift for workers and companies.

“It’s about valuing outputs and results over inputs. When you’re remote, you’re not focused on how late people are in the office, how many meetings they’ve been in, or how much networking they’re doing — none of that actually matters. Because at the end of the day, nobody’s checking if you’re online on Slack. What really matters is: What are we achieving? Are we happy? How can we do more of what we love?

“Remote working isn’t about creating an idealized Instagram lifestyle — it’s literally building whatever you want.”

“I don’t want my freedom to be at the expense of my work.”

Rachel Coleman, Independent Education Consultant and co-founder of College Essay Editor, Malta

Rachel wanted to get into politics before she became a digital nomad. She started her career, fresh out of college, amid the neoclassical grandeur of the US Senate — “I thought I was going to get into politics and change the world!” — she says, wryly. She loved the work, but she didn’t love the long commute, the short holidays, or the thought of being confined to an office, no matter how grand and hallowed its halls.

So when she decided to start her own business, an independent education consultancy with her partner, she had one stipulation: that the work was 100% remote.

“I made this move into college counseling because I wanted to work with students all over the globe on their writing, and help them articulate who they are. But I can be anywhere in the world and still be fully employed, fully working — just in a different location.”

Eight years later, Rachel travels all over the world, leapfrogging time zones while running her consultancy out of Airbnbs and local rentals. Today, she’s in Malta. She’s got her sights set on Iceland next.

“There are two really important things for me,” she says. “One is that there’s this self-determination of running your own business. I set my own hours. I’m responsible for my own work. Being able to take ownership of that process is phenomenal.

“And then, there’s the freedom I think that comes with being a digital nomad, and saying, not only am I responsible for my work, but I’m responsible for my life. I’m responsible for the things that I value.”

Rachel sets her working clock by the West Coast, usually picking up her work in her Maltese home between 6pm and 1am. She spends the rest of her time immersing herself in the local culture, exploring, and making herself at home in places far from home.

“We have all these inherited social structures that say success looks a particular way — a big salary, or a leadership role. But I think a big part of the digital nomad ethos is saying that success is on my terms — you might value money, but I value time. 

“So much of life is about achieving all these ‘normal’ things we need to be functioning responsible adults, too: you must work, feed yourself, pay for healthcare, save for retirement. But the better question is, how do you do them — and do you do them on your own terms?

“Freedom, to me, is being the author of my own fate — the one who gets to live the best life I can, and doing the best work I can. I don’t want one to be at the expense of the other.”

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Remote work has reminded us that work and life were never really separate to begin with — even though we tried really hard to keep them apart.

For decades, the hours between 9-5 were the time when work got done. And around that eight-hour window, we’d hurry to the gym while the world was still dark in the mornings, or fight to schedule an appointment in those oversubscribed after-work slots.

But life doesn’t begin when work stops. And work doesn’t begin after we’re done living. 

Now that we’ve erased those invisible boundaries between work and life, we’ve realized that one does not need to come at the expense of the other. What matters most is how we adapt to this new dynamic.

We know that we still have challenges to overcome in a remote-first future. Research shows that we’re working longer hours than ever. Burnout is on the rise. People are feeling more isolated. Our ‘always on’ mentality is leading to mental health challenges — and we’re still learning what that looks like when we work together.

But we also know that it’s not an either/or scenario. Working better makes our lives better — and living fuller lives makes us energized and motivated to enjoy both, equally. And that’s something Darragh, Caitlyn and Rebecca are experiencing first-hand in today’s episode of Remote Works.

“The time you spend commuting is time that you’re giving away to nobody. I’m taking that time back to look after myself.”

Darragh Collins, PR Manager, Airbase, Canada

Darragh didn’t realize that having more time was the one thing he’d value the most when he started remote working. Up until the pandemic hit, he’d been fully immersed in the hustle and bustle of a busy PR and comms role. Between the daily commute —“often in the lashing rain,” he laughs — and the weekly rhythm of working in an office, there wasn’t much time for much else. 

But like most people, he made it work, because it was how work was. He used empty meeting rooms to get creative work done. He’d make himself go for a run after that rainy bus ride. 

“I was so accustomed to working squashed into an office with other people. Trying to bring your own creativity in that space, where people are talking over your head about last night’s football – that was challenging. Working remotely was the first time I’d had that level of calmness. My productivity went way up. I could prioritize things better. I was doing better.”

Working remotely brought a refuge for Darragh. He eliminated distractions, finding ways to optimize how he worked — like breaking up work into super-focused 25-minute blocks. And once he started getting things done more quickly, he found had more time. Time to spend with his family. Time to cook and look after his wellbeing. For Darragh, that was priceless.

“The time you spend commuting is time that you’re giving away to nobody. That chat with someone in the office — that’s on nobody’s time meter. It’s not time you can use to work or think or relax. I was waking up stressed, rushing through my morning routine and throwing a salad into a lunchbox to take to the office.

“But I realized I can make that time my own again — I could take it back.  And you can have the freedom to use it in any way to look after yourself a bit more. That’s always going to be more beneficial than sitting on a bus.

“Now I work remotely, I’m spending time creating proper meals, eating better, exercising. I don’t have an hour-long commute where I have to psych myself up to go to the gym at the end of the day. I’m taking that time back for myself to look after myself.”

“We need to start having a larger conversation about our wellbeing needs at work.”

Rebecca Churchill, CEO at Churchill Communications and Marketing, Virginia, US

Rebecca thinks we need to have a louder conversation about setting boundaries for wellbeing in a remote working context. 

She’s a small business owner based in Virginia, running her side hustle that turned into a full-time gig. She’s spent much of the last year running at a sprint, caught between the demands of growing her business remotely and being a busy single parent.

“I had this perception that I was going to need to hustle twice as hard because people can’t see me,” she says. “But that’s part of the problem — because when we work remotely, we’re looking for visibility in new forms instead. We have this perception that everyone is available because they’re online. We’re always expected to be on.

“But everyone’s wellbeing is less visible. So we need to learn to be mindful in new ways. We need to start having a larger conversation about our wellbeing needs at work.”

Rebecca believes that conversation starts with empathy and transparency — and for her, safeguarding her team’s wellbeing means safeguarding her own. She makes her boundaries visible. She asks her team questions, and she listens closely when they say they’re ‘fine’.

“I share my calendar very publicly, and I block out those little bits of time for myself, putting them out in the open. I’ll let people know what I’m doing, because I want people to know they can do the same. Carving out those little moments is important, because remote working is not a sprint, this is clearly a marathon, and we have to stop walking around on eggshells when we’re talking about our wellbeing.”

“I’ve stopped putting pressure on myself to look busy nine to five — that’s had the biggest impact on my mental health.”

Caitlyn Lewis, Managing Director, Supplier Day, Portugal

Caitlyn used to be a workaholic. Back when she lived in London, she became a self-described “hamster on a wheel”, locked in a relentless cycle of endless meetings and office chit chat for eight hours a day. She didn’t know how to get off — or if she even had the option to do so.

“We all seem to wear being busy as a badge,” she says. “It’s like we think we’re more important when we’re busy. But really, we’re just victims of a life we’ve been brought up believing we need to live.

“I’ve been that person sitting there at my desk, trying to look like I’m working until it’s an acceptable time to leave. But what’s productive about that — and what’s valuable about that?

“The pandemic has shifted a lot of us towards being a little bit more mindful between being productive and being busy. But we've got to have some really difficult conversations with ourselves for our own good. Yes — stuff does need to get done. That’s true for everyone — but that’s not the deeper issue. We need to be more realistic about what our priorities are, and what productivity means to us as individuals.”

Productivity for Caitlyn looks very different now. Along with her partner, she picked up her belongings and created a life somewhere new in Portugal’s Algarve, far away from the hamster wheel. She founded her own business — but unlike most founders, she only works until she’s done. Then, she goes to the beach.

“‘Busy’ isn’t a thing for me anymore. I’ve stopped putting pressure on myself to sit at my desk nine to five, just because that’s what someone told us constituted a workday decades ago. I refuse to feel guilty for leaving my desk early to go to the beach — and that’s had the biggest impact on my mental health. 

“And I can feel the benefits in myself — I feel more energized and motivated to come and work because honestly, the sooner I finish my work, the sooner I can go and enjoy my life. I used to design my life around work, but now I design work around my life.”

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Christelle believes that neighborhoods have the power to knit remote workers together. 

And she’s probably right. As we’ve redefined how we work over the last year or so, we’ve also taken a good long look at where we work.

Once we realized that work was no longer anchored by a location, our days were no longer bookended by running to catch a train or sitting in traffic. We enjoyed a new flexibility we’d never had, and we got time back to do more of what we wanted to do.

But just because we could work from anywhere, it didn’t mean that the somewhere where work took place had to be in our homes.

Because working from home isn’t remotely the same as remote working. We worked hunched over dining tables and perched on uncomfortable chairs. We missed the real, human social connections that made us more creative and gave our work meaning.

And we realized that if working from anywhere is going to work for everyone, we need to think bigger than WFH. That’s exactly why Christelle founded Codi.

Here’s her Remote Works story.

“Working remotely means your neighbors become your new coworkers. That fuels us as humans.”

Christelle Rohaut, CEO and co-founder of Codi, San Francisco

The first time Christelle ever worked out of someone else’s home, she was studying for her Masters. She was living and working out of her apartment in California, and kept finding herself distractedly pacing the few steps between her table and her fridge.

Seeking focus, she headed for the soft lighting, smooth jazz and plush seating of her local coffee shop, only to find scores of other remote workers warring over good seats and power outlets. Then, she tried a coworking space, but she found that it was just the office in miniature — rows and rows of copy and pasted desks and well-lit booths, bookended by a stressful commute. She hated it.

“I thought that there had to be a better way. So I called a friend, and I worked at her home instead. And then I realized we are just surrounded by houses or apartments that are just sitting empty all day long while people are at work. And these spaces could be great places to work.

That’s when she had the idea for Codi.

“I always say that the Codi story started as a network of neighbors working from each other’s homes. In every single community in every single neighborhood, there’s a bunch of remote workers, and they naturally form that community. We’re just helping them connect.”

“Working from home doesn’t work for everyone. If you assume that everyone has the right space to work, you can’t create an equitable workplace.”

Christelle heads to a hub in her own neighborhood a few times a week. It’s as much a mental commute as it is a mindset shift to make sure she’s doing everything she needs to thrive at work. That includes looking after her mental health, and understanding how it is impacted by her working environment.

“Lots of companies made the assumption that remote work is working from home,” she says. “But working from home doesn’t work for everyone — and if you just assume that everyone has the right space to work, you can’t create an equitable workplace.

“I thrive better when my home life and work life are separate — it’s a matter of mental health. Getting out of your home space, getting in that little walk or bike, being in a different environment even if it’s a different residential space — it all makes a difference. It makes you feel healthier and more focused.”

It also makes her more creative — because when she goes to her local Codi hub, she gets to spend more time working alongside people from her company that she wouldn’t usually work with.

“I have my digital coworkers and my in-person coworkers,” she says. “I tend to work more with the team in New York City, but I actually see more of my coworkers who are based in San Francisco. They’re typically engineers and designers. 

“And I think that actually steers innovation, because you get to talk with someone in a different department or team — and that helps us be more open-minded and step out of our bubbles.”

“By working in my neighborhood, I’m helping it thrive.”

Christelle’s walk home winds through her local neighborhood. On the way, she listens to podcasts (her favorites, she says, are Redefining HR and How I Built This). 

“I studied city planning, so I’m very attached to my neighborhood,” she says. “If I’m commuting somewhere to work, I’m spending that money outside of my community — I’m giving it to a big corporation downtown. But when my workspace is within walking distance, I know that the money stays in my community. If I’m living, working and buying lunch there, I’m helping it thrive. That makes me so happy — I’d never get this lifestyle if I worked in a big downtown office.

“We’re changing how we work — we’re shifting the notion around where we work, and who we work with each day. Your neighbors become your new coworkers, you get to share new ideas and talk to people in different fields. I think it fuels us as humans.”

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Revolutions start with people. And as we’ve witnessed work undergoing the largest shift since the Industrial Revolution, it’s been people that have been central to this change.

We’ve uncoupled work from its moorings of time and place, and redefined what work means to us as individuals. And as we’ve done so, we’ve collectively realized that these norms we based our entire lives on were no longer true.

This shift is helping us live better lives. We’re more productive, happier, and we’re reconstructing work around the lives we want to build. We can enjoy those important moments with family and friends a little more, see the world and take our jobs with us, and reconnect with the deeply individual ways of working that make us thrive and be more creative.

But as with all new beginnings, we’ve still got a lot to learn — and unlearn. We’ve experienced new challenges of remote work, like back-to-back meetings, loneliness and isolation and connection issues — both technical and human.

We wanted to help solve some of these new challenges, which is why we launched Claap — so that we could focus on solving the issue of back-to-back meetings. But there are still challenges we don’t know how to solve. As we look forward to a remote-first future, we know that it’s going to take all of us trading our knowledge, sharing our stories, and learning from one another to make remote work work for everyone.

That’s why we launched Remote Works. Remote Works is a series of conversations with people all over the world. From productivity and working better to mental health, creativity and everything in between, we’re uncovering remote work secrets and sharing stories of real people who are making remote work work for them. 

In our first post, we talk to Alexis, Bruno and Chris on how building their own routines and rituals around remote working is making them more productive, creative, and ultimately, live better lives.

“Life becomes more about living than working.”

Bruno de Guerra Cunha, Partnerships Lead at Oyster, Portugal

Bruno usually goes surfing on Fridays. In those lulling hours of the afternoon when the waves are at their best and the meetings have slowed down, he heads to the beach.

“It’s how I decompress,” he says. “I grew up less than three minutes from the sea. You just go there, and you take a beat. There’s no wifi, or messages or emails in the ocean. It’s like my meditation — it makes me more creative at work, because I’ll just be there, and a thought just pops into my head.”

For a few hours it’s just Bruno, the board, and the swell of the waves that break the shore of the small beachside town near Porto, where he lives. Sometimes his dog comes too. And after he’s hit five good waves or so, he packs up, heads home, and heads back to his computer to finish off the working day.

This isn’t Bruno’s life all the time. He typically has to attend ten calls each day — and he’s learned a few techniques to make space for deep work and work in a way that works best for him. Sometimes, that includes surfing.

“I tend to batch up my calls so I can get more work done around them,” he says. “But after that, there’s no way I can be creative. That’s when I tend to head out for a walk. I’ll take a pen and paper to write some notes, and then I’ll come back later to do some planning or send some emails.

"We also default to async communication in a lot of ways, and we tend to do fully async weeks every few weeks, where we have no internal meetings at all. We can work through all the updates at our own pace."

The last time Bruno worked in an office, it was 2018 — and, he says, he spent €300 on some noise-canceling headphones just to be able to focus. 

“It seems so ridiculous, right?” he notes. “I believe that the nine to five doesn't really exist any more. A lot of people are creative, and they don’t work for the entire eight hours like that — they have bursts of good work throughout the day. So why be stranded at the office for eight hours? Now, I have three hours that I’m super productive and focused. I can take a break when I need to. I can have the afternoon to myself.

“That’s such a freeing thought. Because I work remotely, I can travel more, I can read more. Those things make me more creative and productive — because then life becomes more about living than working.”

“Meetings are the least productive way of getting things done.”

Alexis Haselberger, Time Management and Productivity Coach at Alexis Haselberger Coaching and Consulting, San Francisco

Alexis believes that if there’s one thing we’re getting wrong about remote working, it’s the meetings.

“Meetings are the least productive way of getting things done a lot of the time. So many of them can be done in an email, or asynchronously.

“But there’s this one specific piece we haven’t been able to figure out yet — we have no idea how to hold spontaneous conversation. And so what happened was that every single conversation that anyone needed to have with anyone else became a 30-minute meeting, even though when you tap a coworker on the shoulder, you only need them for two minutes.”

Alexis has been working remotely for a few years, teaching over 50,000 people globally to — in her words — “do more of what they want, less of what they don’t, and use their time more intentionally.

“I really think it's about taking stock of our own selves and what we need and then saying, ‘okay, here’s the specific targeted thing I can do to fix that’ instead of just saying, ‘what's the best practice?’

Alexis applies that to her own life too. She defines the structures and boundaries she needs to be productive on her own terms. At the start of the day she never checks her email before brushing her teeth — and at the end, she closes her office door, and she might go for a run as a “transition ritual”. She snoozes notifications so she can focus on deep work, and has created work and personal profiles on her computer so she doesn’t find herself working after hours.

“I think I value the freedom and autonomy,” she says. “I used to do a lot of in-person workshops — I don’t know if I really want to do that again because this is working. These are the reasons that I work for myself — and that lends itself really well to remote working. There’s a reason I was working remotely before. There’s a reason I’ll do it after.”

“Offices are great places to look busy, but bad places to be productive.”

Chris Herd, CEO and co-founder of Firstbase, Scotland

Chris finds it hard to wrap his brain around the way he was working before going remote. Specifically, what a “pollution-emitting steel box hurtling towards some packed expensive city” — his words — was doing for his productivity, not to mention his quality of life.

So, he decided not to do that anymore. Instead, he founded Firstbase, a remote-first that helps other companies do remote better, from the grey-hued city of Aberdeen, Scotland, where he grew up. 

“It’s about having that time back to invest in myself, more than anything else,” he says. “The reason we became remote was because we saw it as a massive quality of life increase. Everyone who's ever worked in an open plan office knows that it's become this place where people sit with noise-canceling headphones on each day just so they can try and focus on doing work.

“And they come in early, because it's the only time they can get anything done, or they stay late because they haven't got any work done during the day. And they're great places to feel busy, but really bad places to be productive.

“In a knowledge-based economy, companies are only as good as the people they employ. And companies can only be as good as the work they produce. Now, it doesn’t really make sense for me to not put my employees in the position to do great work. For me, that’s getting up super early, taking an hour off to work out or reinvigorate myself, and then get back to it in the afternoon.

“The world where we all carry a laptop to a building to sit in a seat for eight hours — it doesn’t make sense anymore. It baffles me that this continuation of industrial revolution norms has persisted for so long. For me, the better question is — how can work empower the life you want to live?”

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We’ve uncoupled work from its moorings of time and place, and redefined what work means to us as individuals. And as we’ve done so, we’ve collectively realized that these norms we based our entire lives on were no longer true.

“The world where we all carry a laptop to a building to sit in a seat for eight hours — it doesn’t make sense any more,” said Chris Herd, when we asked him about his experiences of remote work. “For me, the better question is — how can work empower the life you want to live?” 

“We realized there’s no such thing as certainty,” added Alexis Haselberger. “But things were always uncertain — we just pretended they weren’t. And now that veil has been pulled away, and we don't get to pretend that anymore.”

This shift is helping us live better lives. We’re more productive, happier, and we’re reconstructing work around the lives we want to build. We can enjoy those important moments with family and friends a little more, see the world and take our jobs with us, and reconnect with the deeply individual ways of working that make us thrive and be more creative — “because then life becomes more about living than working,” said Bruno de Guerra Cunha.

But as with all new beginnings, we’ve still got a lot to learn — and unlearn. We’ve experienced new challenges of remote work, like back-to-back meetings, loneliness and isolation and connection issues — both technical and human.

We wanted to help solve some of these new challenges, and that was the reason we started Claap — so that we could focus on solving the issue of back-to-back meetings. But there are still challenges we don’t know how to solve. As we look forward to a remote-first future, we know that it’s going to take all of us trading our knowledge, sharing our stories, and learning from one another to make remote work work for everyone.

That’s why we launched Remote Works. Remote Works is a series of conversations with people all over the world. From productivity and working better to mental health, creativity and everything in between, we’re uncovering remote work secrets and sharing stories of real people who are making remote work work for them. 

Subscribe now

In the meantime, tell your friends!