Do you want to thrive in a remote working position? What steps can you take to ensure you remain productive?
If you’re working remotely, you’ll need intentional practices to maintain productivity, well-being, and connection. Fried and Hansson offer guidance in three key areas: creating boundaries, optimizing your environment, and preventing isolation.
Continue reading for three helpful remote working tips.
1. Create Boundaries Between Work and Personal Life
Fried and Hansson’s first remote working tip is to set strict boundaries. Without the physical separation of an office, you need to create your own frameworks:
- Designate a workspace. Set up a specific area used exclusively for work to create mental boundaries. Avoid regularly working from places associated with relaxation like your couch or bed, as this blurs important distinctions between work and rest.
- Find your personal schedule. Develop regular working hours that align with when you naturally do your best work. The beauty of remote work is that you’re not forced into a one-size-fits-all 9-to-5 schedule if that doesn’t match when you’re most effective.
- Create start and end rituals. Develop practices that signal the beginning and end of your workday—whether it’s getting dressed in work clothes, taking a morning walk, or shutting down your computer and physically leaving your workspace. These rituals replace the transitions that commuting once provided.
2. Optimize Your Physical Environment
Your surroundings significantly impact your remote work experience:
- Make comfort a priority. Invest in a quality chair, proper monitor positioning, and good lighting. These ergonomic basics prevent physical strain and support long-term health—investments that pay off through better focus and fewer health issues.
- Change your scenery. Occasionally work from different locations—a coffee shop, library, coworking space, or outdoor setting—to maintain energy and stimulate creativity. Fresh environments often spark fresh thinking.
- Personalize your space. Add elements that boost your motivation and focus, whether that’s natural light, plants, inspiring photos, or meaningful objects. Unlike standardized offices, remote work lets you create a space perfectly suited to your preferences.
| How Astronauts—the Ultimate Remote Workers—Manage Space and Boundaries When it comes to mastering remote work, no one has more expertise than astronauts—people who literally work thousands of miles from their home office. One lesson astronauts exemplify is the importance of routines in environments where traditional work/home separations don’t exist. Astronauts follow strict schedules on weekdays with greater flexibility on weekends, creating structure within the confined spaces where they simultaneously live and work. Astronaut Chris Hadfield explains that during his 144 consecutive days aboard the International Space Station—a space no larger than a modest home—clear routines prevented work from bleeding into all aspects of daily life. NASA has learned that maintaining clear routines requires creating “zeitgebers” (German for “time givers”): environmental cues that regulate biological rhythms and signal transitions between activities. On Earth, these include sunlight, commutes, and office environments. In space—where astronauts witness 16 sunrises every 24 hours—they manufacture replacement cues through shared meals, celebrating milestones, and scheduling recreational activities together. Remote workers can adopt this practice by establishing morning routines that replace commutes, creating deliberate “shutdown rituals” at day’s end, and scheduling regular social activities that mark the passage of time. Most importantly, astronauts understand that connection remains vital despite physical isolation. NASA builds communication schedules that include regular check-ins while still allowing flexibility, recognizing that remote personnel often feel left out without deliberate communication. Hadfield notes how transformative it was when the International Space Station gained internet access, which dramatically reduced his sense of isolation. As Fried and Hansson suggest, creating boundaries, optimizing your environment, and maintaining human connection aren’t just productivity hacks—they’re essential practices for maintaining well-being in remote settings (in space and here on Earth). |
3. Stay Connected to People
Preventing isolation is perhaps the biggest challenge of remote work:
- Build community beyond your screen. Balance virtual work connections with in-person social interactions. Join local groups, use community spaces, or prioritize time with friends and family to maintain a rich social life outside of work.
- Make video calls count. Schedule regular video chats with colleagues that include personal updates alongside work discussions. These face-to-face interactions help maintain relationships and reduce isolation.
- Communicate proactively. Take the initiative to share your progress, ask questions, and make your work visible. In remote settings, the responsibility for staying connected falls more heavily on you than in traditional offices.
- Join team social activities. Participate in virtual coffee breaks, online games, or other non-work activities with your team. These experiences build the camaraderie that naturally develops when working side-by-side.
| The Covid-19 Experiment: Creating Structure in a Boundless Environment The Covid-19 pandemic created the largest remote work experiment in history, forcing millions to adapt to working from home overnight. This shift offered lessons about what humans need to thrive when working remotely, underscoring the three principles Fried and Hansson outline. First, creating boundaries between work and personal life became an urgent necessity when home and office suddenly occupied the same physical space. As behavioral researchers have documented, the lack of separation between work and personal life negatively impacts people’s mental health. Without the natural transition of a commute, remote workers discovered they needed to deliberately establish this separation through intentional rituals. Many found success by physically putting away work materials at day’s end, changing clothes to signal a shift in mindset, or even creating “fake commutes” with short outdoor activities to mentally separate work from home time. Second, optimizing physical environments became a visible class marker when pandemic videoconferencing exposed our private spaces to public scrutiny. The phenomenon of curated domestic backgrounds revealed differences in how people showcased their homes. Most notably, bookshelves became symbols of cultural cachet, but the trend also exposed uncomfortable class divides. The idealized image of extensive home libraries contrasted with the reality in many homes, and both workers and students tuning in to video calls from shared spaces (or in less photogenic homes) opted to blur their video backgrounds. Third, maintaining human connection despite physical separation emerged as perhaps the most challenging aspect of remote work. During the pandemic, many noted the paradox that we couldn’t help one another through physical presence. Instead, we had to show our care for others (and for public health) by staying apart. Remote workers had to deliberately create new ways to stay connected, and many bonded over the technical difficulties they encountered along the way. Research across 61 industries shows that the most successful remote teams found ways to maintain strong human bonds—which resulted in improved productivity overall. Now, as the pandemic recedes, new tensions have built between employers pushing for a return to offices and employees who have embraced the flexibility of remote work. Major companies have implemented strict return-to-office mandates, citing collaboration and culture as justifications. Yet employees are pushing back: Surveys show 60% of remote-capable workers prefer hybrid arrangements, with only 10% wanting full-time office work. The debate might reflect what Rebecca Solnit observed during the pandemic: Crises often prompt people to band together and build new systems that better serve human needs. Researchers say the resistance to returning to the office reflects how strongly people value the flexibility of remote work—and how reluctant they feel to give up its benefits. |
3 Remote Working Tips for Staying Productive & Happy
