Chapter 8: Take Control of Your Schedule: Work Remotely

A conventional 9-5 job takes up a lot of time. If you want more free time—and you’ll need free time to start your “muse” business in step A (Automate)—you’re going to have to reduce the hours you spend on your rat race job.

If you’re an employee, you’ll do this by transitioning to remote work. When you’re working remotely, no one knows how long you actually spend working; they only know if you finish all your work. Now that you know how to eliminate, you’ll be able to do your job in far less than eight hours a day.

If you’re an entrepreneur and you control your own schedule, no one’s holding you to 40 hours a week except yourself. However, entrepreneurs can still benefit from learning how to work remotely so that they can travel while working.

This tends to be the hardest part of the process for employees. You take control and have potentially uncomfortable conversations.

To transition to remote work, first you’re going to figure out how to do it, and then you’re going to convince your boss to let you.

How to Succeed at Remote Work

There are some logistics to iron out when transitioning to remote work:

• Figure out how to do all aspects of your job remotely. When you come to a task that you don’t think you can do from outside the office, ask yourself if it’s really necessary that you do it. If it is, consider alternate ways you could do it, such as video chats, screen sharing, and so on.
• Practice working in new environments. This will help you figure out how to be productive in a remote environment.
  • For example, try working at a library.
• Create a workstation. Don’t work in the same space you sleep or relax. Don’t do anything except work in your workspace.
• Get more comfortable hearing no. Practice activities that push you outside your comfort zone such as talking to strangers and haggling. If anyone refuses to give you something, ask what you’d need to do to get the answer you want. Also, ask if they’ve ever made exceptions and why or why not.
• Plan for resistance. If you think your boss will resist you working remotely, consider why. If remote work is going to cause some sort of problem, figure out how to mitigate or avoid it.
  • Example #1: If you need to access software that’s licensed to your work computer, try remote desktop software.
  • Example #2: If you don’t think your boss will trust you to work remotely, review the earlier chapters of step E (Eliminate) to make yourself more productive. Or go remote first and ask for permission later (recall the ten rules to breaking the rules, and see the hourglass method below).

Two Methods

There are two methods employees can use to get out of the office: the five-step method and the hourglass method.

Five-Step Method

There is a five-step method to convincing your boss to let you work remotely.

1. Make yourself more valuable. You can do this by asking your company to pay to train you, so that if you quit, they lose that investment.

• Shortform Example: Chidi is a blog writer. He asks his boss to send him to a blogging conference.

2. Prove that you’re more productive outside the office. Call in sick for two days and work from home. (Choose Tuesday and Wednesday so it doesn’t look like you’re pretending to be ill to get a long weekend.) Be twice as productive as you are in the office and keep a record of what you get done. Additionally, use this time to solve any potential remote work logistical problems such as technical issues.

• Shortform Example: Chidi calls in sick on a Tuesday and works from home. In the office, he normally writes four blog articles a day. At home, he writes eight. He starts out working at his kitchen table but it’s too loud so he finds a quieter space in his house.

3. Spin remote work to be a benefit for your company. Note what and how much you got done while you were remote and why.

• Shortform Example: Chidi will tell his boss that he was able to write twice as many articles from home because he wasn’t constantly being interrupted like he is in the office.

4. Ask for a trial period of one day per week for two weeks. Plan what you’re going to say, but ensure you don’t come off as too formal, or your boss might worry that you want a permanent change. Tell your boss how much more productive you were when you were “sick,” answer any of their questions about logistics, and ask for two remote days a week so if they say no you can counter with one. Start with this small ask because asking to go fully remote is such a big change your boss might refuse. Additionally, a trial also gives you a chance to practice working remotely, so that when you do make the changeover, it’s seamless.

• Shortform Example: Chidi requests to work remotely for two days each week. Chidi’s boss asks him about how he would work on anything that required software on work computers, and Chidi tells him about a remote access program he used on his days away that worked perfectly.

5. Increase your trial period until it becomes the norm. Be exceptionally productive on your remote days. You can even be less productive on your in-house days to make the difference more obvious. Every time you ask for an incremental increase in remote work, stress the benefits to the company of you working remotely. Address any concerns and reassure your boss that the move is reversible. Keep requesting trials until you get to full-time remote. Ideally, this will be at a time when your company is in the middle of something they need you for.

• Shortform Example: After Chidi’s two-day-per-week trial, he asks to move to four remote days a week. Chidi’s boss has some concerns—chiefly, he’s worried that Chidi wants to work remotely because he’s about to quit. Chidi reassures him that this is not the case—since he’s started working remotely, he’s much happier. Reassured, his boss approves the new trial.

Hourglass Method

Instead of working up to full-time remote like the five-step method, in the hourglass method, you start by going fully remote, have a brief trial period of combo remote/in-house, and then go back to remote. Here are the steps:

1. Come up with a reason that you need to leave the office for two weeks, for example, a family issue.
2. Tell your company that you’d like to keep working during this time.
3. Suggest that you work remotely. You can offer to take a pay cut for the remote period after it’s over if people weren’t happy with your work. However, never offer to take a pay cut again.
4. Get your boss to help you figure out the logistics so she feels involved.
5. Be more productive over the two remote weeks than you’ve ever been before.
6. Like the five-step method, show your boss numbers that demonstrate how you were so productive and explain why. Suggest a trial where you work a few days remotely per week for two weeks.
7. Be extra productive on the remote days and extra unproductive on the in-house days.
8. Suggest you move to full-time remote work.

What If It Doesn’t Work?

If you’re an employee and can’t swing remote work, you’ll have to quit or get yourself fired, or else you’ll never be able to work fewer than 40 hours a week. (Getting fired is sometimes better—then you might end up with severance or unemployment benefits.) See Chapter 12 for some advice on how to leave your job.

(Shortform note: Chapter 8 of this summary corresponds to the book’s Chapter 12.)