7 Powerful Ways To Boost Career Growth While Working Remotely

Last updated on August 14th, 2022 at 09:56 am

Today, I’m going to share my favorite tips and tools for working remotely. This list has been refined after:

• After 9 years of remote work
• In 7 different roles
• Across multiple industries

Only 16% of companies are fully-remote businesses¹. Companies will spend the next 20-30 years addressing working remotely challenges. This means it’s our responsibility to create a great remote work experience.

By optimizing how you work remotely, you’ll drive more impact, get promoted faster, and earn more money. Plus, life is just more enjoyable.

The problem is most people treat remote work as working at the office… but at home. It’s not. Instead, they need to rethink every aspect of their work processes, routines, and cadences from a remote-first mindset.

Note: if you’re looking to land your first remote job, check out my article here. And if you’re trying to break into tech, read this first.

7 Tips for Working Remotely (That No One Talks About)

Remote work is a skill. The better your skills, the more successful you’ll be in a remote-first career. Here are 7 tips to improve the skill of working remotely:

1/ Design a bespoke schedule

Once you start working remotely, the hours you clock and when you clock them, are irrelevant. What matters instead: your impact.

Meanwhile, gone are the accouterments of normal work.

• No scramble out the door to beat traffic
• No scrape of chairs as colleagues head to lunch
• No din of closing laptops at 5pm

All gone. Your schedule is now up to you.

So design your perfect workday. For some people, that’s getting up at 4 am, cranking out a full day by 1 pm, then having the rest of the afternoon to themselves.

For others, it’s a slow morning with reading, kids, and coffee. Then sitting down at the computer at 11 am (while squeezing in chores throughout the day).

Invest time in designing and iterating on your schedule. This is the best working remotely benefit, so take advantage. Build a schedule that maximizes productivity and your day-to-day happiness.

You’ll need to try different permutations to find what’s right. This will take time. It’ll also evolve. If it’s not evolving, you’re not experimenting enough. Some ideas:

• Optimize for sunshine. Work 6 am – 1 1am. Spend the middle of the day outside. Then work your back-half of the day from 3 pm – 8 pm.
• Frontload the week. Make Mondays and Tuesdays your heavy days, 10-12 hours each day. Wednesday is an 8-hour day, then Thursday and Friday are light, 4-6 hours.
• No meetings days. Carve out whole days where you don’t take any meetings and focus on deep work instead.
• Work weekends. Use weekends for deep work time (when there are fewer distractions). Take back the time from work days, e.g. Thursday and Friday.
• Work in seasons. Spring for 3 months. Then chill for a month. Recuperate, read, absorb new ideas, and get inspired again. Then repeat.

2/ Optimize for company, not title

When most people look for their next job, they optimize for jobs with the right title. This is normal because:

• Titles signal status. We’re wired to convey status, especially when it’s high
• Our titles are part of our identities. “I’m a front-end engineer; I’m a CFO.”
• Titles describe how you spend your time. Are you looking at spreadsheets? Talking to customers? Setting strategy?

For some people, title-fit is the most important thing to optimize for.

But in the case of remote work, it’s more important to optimize for the company over the title.

Why? Because when you work remotely, your career trajectory is correlated with your company’s remote work culture.

Does your company work to iterate and improve on the remote work experience? Are there best practices across meetings, work collaboration, and community events? Have they defined career ladders employees can track and follow, regardless of location?

Caroline Fairchild, editor-at-large at LinkedIn News calls this “proximity bias.” It’s the idea that “employees with closer proximity to their leaders are seen as better workers. That may affect how managers evaluate performance.”

“This will penalize women, people of color, and working parents the most, as these groups are spending less time in the office than their peers.”²

Creating career paths for remote workers requires planning. Getting this right is the great remote work challenge companies will need to solve. Prioritize companies that prioritize you. Your career trajectory (and happiness) can excel at the right company, even with the “wrong” title.

Optimize for the company first, then title.

3/ Defend deep work

When you’re working remotely, one lever drives most impact: autonomy to shape your schedule and environment to solve problems. We’ll call this deep work.³

Deep work is precious. Place it behind impregnable walls. Guard it well. The quality and quantity of your deep work time is the secret sauce.

In an ideal world, you’d carve out 4 hours a day for deep work. You’d align these times with your peak cognitive ability. Everyone would leave you alone. You’d fall immediately into the flow.

Unfortunately, life isn’t so neat. Meetings, interruptions, and fires (real and imagined) are a natural course of work, remote or otherwise. Some working remotely tips to help you protect this time:

Tip 1: Separate “maker” vs. “manager” responsibilities

Writing, creating, and building are maker responsibilities. Communicating via meetings, calls, and reports are manager responsibilities.

Create separation and never the twain shall meet.

For example, be a maker in the mornings and a manager in the evenings. Or front load maker work at the beginning of the week,  manager work at the end.

Tip 2: Block off deep work in your calendar

This is my favorite: at the start of the week, block off deep work sessions in your work calendar. Block as many as possible. A session is ideally at least 2 hours long. This prevents coworkers from throwing meeting time in there. Unsure what to name the event? Call it “DNS”, i.e. “Do Not Schedule.” Remember: just because you’re not on a call does not mean you’re available.

Tip 3: Kill distractions with DND

“Defend your deep work” sounds adversarial. That’s because it is. It’s a war, and the pings, notifications, and badges are the enemies at the gate. There’s a spectrum of tools to help you fight back. On the aggressive end, I recommend the Freedom app, which blocks access to sites. As a bare minimum, use DND (Do Not Disturb) on all devices and apps before starting your deep work.

4/ Invest in Your Remote Network

Building meaningful relationships with co-workers while working remotely is hard.

It’s a completely different skill than IRL. There are different norms, processes, and cadences. However, there are a few tricks to get reps in as fast as possible. Here are four of my favorite:

Tip 1: Use icebreakers to give coworkers permission to brag

Icebreakers get a bad rep. It’s not a cringe teambuilding activity. When done right, icebreakers can introduce the threads that bind a team together. The devil is in the details:

• Do 1 icebreaker per week with your team
• Introduce the icebreaker BEFORE the meeting (give people time to think)
• Share the order you’ll go in (so people are not surprised)
• Keep the group size reasonable, max 10 people (more than that? Use Zoom’s Breakout Rooms)
• Finally, ask good questions

For a deeper breakdown on each of these steps, check out this thread.

Tip 2: Weave multi-modal relationships

Follow colleagues on social media. Stick to some permutation of the big five:

• Twitter
• LinkedIn
• TikTok
• IG
• Facebook

Don’t be shy about engaging outside of your regular Slack and Zoom channels. I’ve found that 5 meaningful IG messages = 100 slack messages.

Caveat: don’t be creepy.

Tip 3: When you click, double-click 

Dale Carnegie said, “to be interesting, be interested.”

Through icebreakers and social media, you’ve found ways to surface interesting details about coworkers. Now, follow up. Be interested.

When in doubt, ask:

• Why did you do Y?
• What did you think about X?
• Would you do it differently knowing Z?
• (my favorite) You mentioned X. Tell me more about that.

This works on 1:1 calls or in spontaneous Slack messages.

Tip 4: Build long-term relationships

Coworkers come and go. To build long-term relationships, build a shared history beyond your mutual employer. My 3-step funnel to do this is simple:

1. Set reminders to follow up with a list of people. I aim for quarterly.
2. Set up a Calendly account. This makes scheduling calls easy regardless of time zones.
3. Email a brief “life update”. At the end, say, “would love to hear how you’re doing. Want to do a catch-up call? Happy to suggest times, or use this link to schedule a time.”

Cultivating long-term relationships take a lot of work. It’s worth it. Looking for more tips on how to build these long-term relationships? Click here.

5/ Master asynchronous communication

As mentioned above, remote work communication has its own set of norms, processes, and cadences. For example, no hello.

Clear asynchronous communication is one of those remote work tips that sounds easy, but are hard. How do you communicate working remotely? Key remote work guidelines I follow:

Tip 1: Be explicit, never assume

This is what the leadership team means when they say “overcommunicate.” Keeping an organization aligned is a gargantuan task. Explicit communication makes it easier. A few helper expressions to do this:

• “To clarify, what you’re saying is: [summarize their interpretation]
• “I’m hearing a few things. To summarize: [summary]. Here are my next action steps: [Step 1, step 2, etc.]”
• “Just to make the implicit explicit, we also need to: [do this thing you’re not unsure they are aware of]

Unless it’s urgent and important (e.g. a bug affecting hundreds of users in real-time) clarify in open communication channels vs. closed (Slack vs. a call). That way everyone has visibility on the situation.

Tip 2: Work in public

Most work should be publicly available and searchable. Show your work as often as possible.

Unless it’s sensitive material (e.g. personnel issues) communicate in public channels. Don’t spin up DMs with 6 people on it. Either use an existing channel or create a new one. Even if you keep it private, you can invite others and turn it public later.

When documenting processes, document in shared folders or wikis so they’re immediately accessible… and not when you remember to change the share settings.

Tip 3: Anticipate asks

Deliver important information before you’re asked for it.

How? Find out (1) what your manager owns and (2) when they report on it. Then add this to your calendar or as a recurring Slack reminder. Deliver this information before they need it. Now, your manager will never have to chase you down for updates or reports.

Your async communication skills are a lever in your long-term remote work success. By focusing on clarity, you’ll get more done and communicate that better to others.

6/ Build self-improvement loops

Deep work is a double-edge sword. When you’re working on the right things, you make progress fast.

What if you’re working on the wrong things?

The classic analogy here is the plane that sets off flying 2 degrees in the wrong direction. At takeoff, 2 degrees is negligible. But left unchecked, your sun holiday in the Maldives becomes a safari in Africa.

Misaligntment and inefficiencies compound over time. The best solve is to course correct along the way. This is why companies do performance reviews. It’s how they realign trajectories, for both individuals and teams. Most companies use quarterly reviews. For personal self-improvement, we can build tighter loops.

Here’s are the working remotely tips I recommend to build your self-improvement loops:

Tip 1: Weekly personal retrospectives.

Once a week (I do Friday mornings) schedule a 20-30 minute weekly retrospective. Review your week. Ask yourself what went well, and what you can improve.

I keep a running journal with timestamps in Roam which makes the review easy. Then I ask questions:

• What gave me energy this week?
• What took it away?
• Where are the bottlenecks I’m running into?
• How can I free up either time, money, or energy?
• How can I make next week better?

You don’t have to use all or any of these. Pick 2-3.

Tip 2: Get and give feedback. 

Both ideas here are important.

First, schedule regular outside feedback on your performance. Even with best intentions, it’s easy to get myopic about your performance. Find someone you trust: a manager, a skip-level, a colleague. Schedule a 30 minute session every 2 weeks. What’s going well? What could you do better?

Second, schedule time to give others regular feedback. This is especially critical with remote organizations. Leadership has little visibility into the challenges of hundreds of ICs scattered across the globe. It’s your job to have strong opinions, to course correct the organization. Like getting feedback, be deliberate. Schedule 30 minutes every two weeks. Invest the time to raise the bar of your organziation.

Tip 3: Monthly check-ins for everything else. 

If you’re working to improve something, you should be measuring it. If you’re measuring it, check-in at least monthly.

Give it the approrpiate amount of bandwidth depending on its priority in your life. For example:

• Fitness. Weigh yourself. Count number of gym sessions. Take progress photos.
• Finances. Track your expenses. Track your savings or investment accounts.
• Grow blog traffic. Track monthly sessions. Count number of new blog posts published.
• Grow social audience. Track follower growth. Count number of times you post per day.

Again, this can be as intense or lax as needed. It depends on your priorities. But if you’re looking to improve, check-in on your progress.

7/ Cultivate self-awareness

Self-improvement drives performance. Self-awareness (understanding who you are and what motives you) drives happiness. You need both to sustain working remotely.

For example, some people thrive in in-person environments. These same people will wilt on the vine after 5 straight hours on Zoom.

If this is you, you need self-awareness to:

• Recognize it. “Hey, doing 5 hours of Zoom calls puts me in shitty mood”
• Recognize the effect: “I lose my patience faster when I’m in a shitty mood”
• Course correct: “Let me try breaking up these calls. Or setting a limit on how many per day.”

Couple ways to work yourself-awareness muscle:

Tip 1: Track your mood. 

Glean insights by regularly journaling. Try it for a short period of time, like 2 weeks. You’ll be surprised what you learn. You can do this with an app, or if you prefer journaling the old fashioned way, I recommend The 5-Minute Journal. Anytime I’m feeling particularly out of sorts, I come back to this practice, then stop when I’m feeling “good” again.

Tip 2: Lock down the basics. 

Dan Hockemainer⁴ said:

“The only “productivity hacks” I’ve ever found to actually move the needle: (1)  sleep (2) exercise, and (3) don’t waste those 1-2 hours you get each morning where your brain is really firing.”

While I don’t 100% agree, Dan is directionally correct: sometimes you need to get back to basics. If you’re feeling stressed or burnt out, the first step is diagnosing the obvious:. How is your sleep? How is your diet? Are you exercising?

Sounds simple, but it’s amazing how fast you can get back on track by getting this right.

TL;DR 7 Tips For Working Remotely

1. Design a bespoke schedule
2. Optimize for company, not title
3. Defend deep work
4. Invest in Your Remote Network
5. Master asynchronous communication
6. Build self-improvement loops
7. Cultivate self-awareness

Notes:

1. https://www.apollotechnical.com/statistics-on-remote-workers/
2. https://builtin.com/remote-work/remote-work-career-growth
3. I don’t think he originated it, but Cal Newport has come to “own” the phrase.
4. https://www.linkedin.com/posts/dan-hock_the-only-productivity-hacks-ive-ever-found-activity-6891449968335437825-grBO