Routine maintenance
Structuring your days is important. So is leaving room for the unexpected.
My work from home experience began in the olden but not-so-golden days of 2004. I’d ditched returning to Sydney and shunned sunshine, professional respect, and possibly the world’s most lucrative property boom to, um, “make it” in New York City. I was broke, without a green card, and living in a studio apartment with no delineation between where I ate, slept, and worked. And I was supposed to be working, of course. But I was the world’s worst freelancer: full of interesting ideas without the network to make them real or the discipline to get them done. Thank goodness I had friends.
Fast forward a decade to my second crack at WFH. I’m at McKinsey, living in Connecticut, and coming into the New York City office maybe twice a week. I have actual work to do—and deadlines!—and that helps. But the distractions … days are filled with grabbing another coffee so I can fully concentrate on work, tidying up so I can fully concentrate on work, grabbing groceries so I can fully concentrate on work, getting the car washed so I can fully concentrate on work. I’m frittering days away and frantically catching up in the evening, pulling all-nighters to keep things on track.
The solution here was obvious: routine. And that’s where I am now, a decade into working from home pretty much all the time. Days are structured methodically and predictably around work and play, and I’m a firm subscriber to the notion that having set routines is critical to freeing you from work: get your work done, and your time becomes yours. Structuring work ruthlessly and militantly defending your personal time is especially important for those new to working from home who quickly find the line between the professional and personal erased. The problem? Once you’ve imposed routines on your work, it’s tempting to do the same in your personal life.
“Among my good friends, fully half now work from home,” Markham Heid wrote in the Weekend FT. “Few of them have been at it as long as I have, but I notice routine accreting on them like a second skin. When we talk or text, it’s usually about the same things and at the same times of day. Like me, they all seem to have a Truman Show-ish sense that something is off, that some essential aspect of life is missing or not sufficiently represented.
“I see them itching in their second skin, and I notice the ways they’re trying to slough it off. A couple have become exercise junkies. One has sworn off alcohol, another caffeine. One spent a week at an ayahuasca retreat in Peru, and one has started coaching his kids’ baseball and hockey teams, activities that get him out of the house six evenings a week. ‘If I didn’t have that,’ he told me, ‘I’d blow my brains out.’”
I’m landing right where Heid appears to be. Optimizing your time for work is one thing—you have to pay the bills. But applying the same rigor to personal time—to the same degree, especially—leads to a lot getting done but a nagging sense that “something’s missing.” You body is buff, your pantry stocked, your apartment clean. You have a decent balance of work and play time. It’s pleasant, in its way, but there’s just a nagging sense there has to be more, beyond the usual mid-life drift.
This is particularly playing on my mind as I think about moving back to the east coast later this year so my sons can be closer to their mum’s family. I was noodling with my wonderful coach
on my desire to build the life I really want—an acre or two of land, a house that’s just enough space for my family, room for my boys to get outdoors but still close to serious civilization—and he wisely noted I should focus on how I feel about my life, not what I have (or want). And, for me, this is why the intense focus on personal optimization falls short. You’re so busy following the schedule of what’s supposed to bring you “contentment and prosperity” that you don’t leave yourself the time and space to feel; to experience the unexpected.So, you have to switch things up. Turn off the TV, go to a coffee shop, and read a book. Get to work on the novel you’ve always had inside you. Go to a concert. Take a walk with the person you love. Do nothing for the sake of doing nothing, because it’s when your brain slows down that creativity blooms. It’s not possible to have a life filled with nonstop transcendent moments, but I sure as shit know nothing memorable’s going to happen camped on the sofa, watching Seinfeld re-runs for the fiftieth time (much as I love camping on the sofa, watching Seinfeld re-runs for the fiftieth time).
“I try to approach my work in new ways,” Heid wrote. “I meet friends in unfamiliar places. These are tepid acts of anarchy against my old regime. I’m not bungee jumping on acid. (Not yet anyway.) Still, I am invigorated. The colors of my world are brighter, the products of my mind less predictable. I feel a bit like a prisoner who jostles the door of his cell and finds it was never locked.”
Last century, Crowded House played its “Farewell to the World” concert on the steps of the Sydney Opera House. The band had announced several months earlier that it was splitting; this would be its final show. A friend asked me along; there was a gang of people from work planning to attend. And I, naturally, demurred. I can’t even tell you what I did that day, but I can tell you I wasn’t one of the 250,000 people at the concert. I simply wasn’t willing to do something outside of my routine and probably thought attending was all too hard. I’ve regretted it ever since, having to make do with grainy YouTube footage.
That’s not going to happen again. I’m buying the ticket, taking the ride, and seeing what happens when I loosen the structural reins a little. I’ve probably had more transcendent moments in the past six months than the past twenty years, and it’s entirely been a function of releasing my agenda, as the awful McKinsey jargon goes. Retain some structure? Sure. But leave enough breathing room for magic to find its way in.
A note about whatever this is …
After writing a few thousand articles for newspapers and magazines, I spent a long time trying a bunch of other stuff. I guess I figured what came (relatively) easily must by definition be less valuable, so I wandered in the corporate wilderness, becoming increasingly frustrated and doing work that felt increasingly lousy.
Sometimes with age comes wisdom, and I’ve realized finding something (relatively) easy ain’t a bad thing. So, this is a space where I’m resurrecting writing for myself, on topics weird and wild and wonderful.
Posts will appear when the mood takes me, but I do try to be consistently inconsistent—sometimes it’ll be a couple of days between drinks; sometimes a week. But if you subscribe, you’ll get a email letting you know I’m ranting. Again.