I've been working remotely for a while, and most of what I picked up in the first six months turned out to be wrong, or wildly overrated. Not bad advice exactly. Most of it sounds reasonable when you read it. It just isn't doing the work it claimed to. The "wake up at 5am, dedicate a workspace, use the Pomodoro technique, journal every morning" stack is a kind of theater. Some of it helps a little. Most of it is energy you spend trying to feel productive instead of being productive.
What actually helped was less visible. Almost all of it was about removing small frictions, not adding discipline. The good weeks came from making fewer parts of the day cost mental energy. Not from squeezing more output out of willpower.
Here's what's stuck.
Your setup matters, but most of it doesn't
The setup advice you find online tends to confuse two different things: gear that looks good on your desk and gear that actually changes how you work. The list that genuinely helped me is short and boring.
A second monitor. This is the only piece of "setup" I'd call non-negotiable. Doing most knowledge work on a single laptop screen is the equivalent of writing in a notebook with the previous page glued shut.
A chair you can sit in for six hours without your back giving notice. You don't need the $1,500 ergonomic one. You need one that doesn't make you fidget by 3pm.
A decent headset. Not for the audio quality, though that helps. For the "I'm wearing headphones" signal that lets you ignore the world without feeling rude. The mic built into most laptops is fine.
Enough light. Especially in winter, especially for video calls. A cheap overhead light plus something at face level is the floor.
Things that didn't change anything for me: a mechanical keyboard, a fancy webcam, a standing desk, a third monitor, cable management trays, a "cozy" lamp, a houseplant. Some of those are nice. None of them changed how much I got done. If you're spending more than a weekend setting up your workspace, you're probably procrastinating with extra steps.
Routines beat motivation, but lighter than you'd think
The hardcore routine content (wake at 5am, cold shower, journal, gym, deep work block before email) is impressive on Instagram and unsustainable in real life. I tried versions of it. The version that survived was much smaller.
Two rituals, one rule.
The first ritual is a fixed start. Same first action every morning, regardless of what's on the calendar. For me it's coffee plus ten minutes reviewing what I want to get done before lunch. Not the whole day. Just the morning. The point isn't planning. It's the transition from "not working" to "working," so you don't burn the first hour ramping up.
The second is a fixed end. Before closing the laptop, write down the first task you'll start tomorrow. One sentence, on paper or in a note. This sounds stupid until you realize how much energy you waste at the start of every day re-deriving where you left off.
The rule is: don't open Slack first thing. Anything genuinely urgent will still be urgent in 90 minutes. The first block of the day is the only one where you reliably have full focus, and burning it on reactive replies is the single biggest productivity leak I had to fix.
What I gave up: time-blocking the whole day, color-coded calendars, hourly check-ins with myself, gratitude journals. Not because they're bad, but because for me they were maintenance overhead disguised as productivity.
Communication is half the job
The thing nobody really warns you about is how much of remote knowledge work is writing. Slack messages, PR comments, design docs, status updates, weekly summaries. If you can't write reasonably clearly, remote work is going to be harder than it was in the office, where tone and presence covered a lot of gaps.
A few things I've changed:
I default to written updates over meetings. The standing weekly check-in I used to do is now a five-bullet update I write on Friday afternoons. Read in two minutes, no scheduling cost, searchable for later. The meetings I keep are the ones that need actual discussion. Not status, not "alignment," not "syncing."
I'm slow to reply on purpose. If you answer every Slack within ten minutes, you've trained the team to use you as a synchronous resource, which is the opposite of remote. An informal four-hour SLA on non-urgent threads is usually enough to let people figure things out themselves before pinging.
I write outcomes, not activities. "Shipped the new auth flow" is useful. "Worked on auth all afternoon" isn't. Everyone's calendar is full of work; what people actually want to know is what came out of it.
I avoid the 15-minute "quick sync." It's never quick. Either it's a question that could be answered in writing in three minutes, or it's a real conversation that deserves 30 minutes and a doc. The middle case mostly doesn't exist, and treating it like it does is how a calendar gets eaten.
Protect deep work like it's a billable hour
Two hours of uninterrupted focus is more valuable than eight hours of fragments. This is the most-repeated and most-ignored piece of remote-work advice. It's true, and most people (me included, until recently) treat it as aspirational rather than enforceable.
Here's what actually works:
Two-hour blocks on the calendar, marked busy, treated as real meetings. Not "focus time." That's too vague to defend against your own future self. Specific: "Architecture review draft: do not book over."
Notifications off during those blocks. Slack quit, email closed, phone in another room. The phone-in-another-room thing sounds dramatic; it's the single change that made the biggest difference for me. Reaching for the phone to "check something" was costing me twenty minutes per occurrence and I wasn't tracking it.
One context switch (a non-urgent message, a notification, a quick check of something) costs around twenty minutes of lost focus on hard work. Not because the switch is long, but because the climb back is. If you understand that and still switch, fine. Most of us don't, and the cost compounds across the day.
The hardest part is letting things sit. Replies waiting, threads moving, a question someone just asked. All of it can wait until your block is done. That's the muscle.
When you add travel to the mix
I've been working remotely while traveling for stretches, and the honest version is that travel makes most of the above harder, not easier. The Instagram pitch (laptop on a beach, perfect productivity) is selectively true on a small number of days, and it costs you on most of the others.
The things that get harder, in rough order of how much they hurt. Time zones first. You're either disconnected from your team for half the day, or answering Slack at midnight. Then internet. A hotspot stops being optional and becomes the actual connection in most places. Then environment. A different desk, different chair, different noise floor every week or two. The compounding effect of "decent enough" beats the effect of "novel" within about a month.
What helps, if you do it anyway: pick places with infrastructure first and aesthetics second. Carry a backup hotspot on a different carrier. Don't try to start work the day you arrive somewhere new. The first 24 hours is logistics, not output. Protect at least four hours of overlap with your team, wherever you are.
What you give up is real: deeper rest, a stable rhythm, a setup that gets a little better every month. Travel is fun. It's also a tax on output. If the location is the point, you'll love it. If the work is the point, you'll find that traveling less makes the work easier, which is worth knowing before you sign a six-month lease somewhere far away.
What I've stopped believing
A few things I dropped along the way.
That gear matters much beyond the basics. It doesn't.
That every hour of the day needs to be productive. Most of mine aren't, even on good days, and trying to force them just adds anxiety to the unproductive ones.
That working from "cool" places makes you happier. It makes the photos better. The day-to-day feels about the same.
That async means everything has to be in writing. Some conversations need to be conversations. Trying to write your way through every disagreement, every nuanced design call, every piece of feedback is its own kind of overhead.
That discipline is the answer. Most days, removing one source of friction beats adding one new habit. The version of remote work that lasted, for me, has fewer rules than the version I started with, and the ones that remain are mostly about what I don't do.
