What the mainstream media gets wrong about remote work
An update
Hey reader,
This week’s essay is an update to an article I published early last year called “2020 introduced the world to remote work, but not to its real perks.” I’ve added thoughts on why the mainstream media gets so many things wrong about the remote work movement, and dove deeper into the topic of the “internet country.”
The decarb process essay has been delayed until next week because I want to get better photos to include in that one.
Community Shoutous
This week’s resource is For What It’s Worth, an excellent weekly newsletter about investing in accordance with your values. I’ve recommended this newsletter before, and I can’t say enough about the depth of value provided by it’s team of finance writers. If you’re interested in ESG or index fund investing, or staying on top of trends during a tough market, this is a must-read.
Welcome to the 4 new subscribers since the last dispatch! And to all who have joined since the top part of this article first published in January of last year.
Now, let’s break down the misconceptions of remote work.
WFH is not remote work. At least, not all of it.
Remote work means the ability to actually be remote — whether that be in your home or on the other side of the world. With travel restrictions and lockdowns in place, those who experienced the WFH life over the past two years have, in most cases, missed out on the best part of the lifestyle — location independence.
Statista, the statistics tracking site that in my reporting experience publishes the most reliable statistic-based data on the web, found that just 17 percent of Americans worked from home full-time before Covid. This number shot up to 44 percent during the height of the pandemic.
With around 157 million employed workers in the country, that’s a lot of people — some 69 million — who worked remotely for the first time over the past two years.
Thing is, many experienced only the confining aspect of being stuck at home, often with kids, roommates, partners, or other family members locked in the same predicament.
Gorging on empanadas is a prerequisite when coworking in Medellin.
The real perk of remote work is the ability to run your workday how it best works for you
There are the obvious perks to remote work. The ability to live where one wants. No rush-hour commute. No office politics (though, Slack enables its own forms of digital drama, as The Atlantic noted and as any of us who deal with the platform on the daily can confirm.
And of course, there’s the ability to don a “Zoom shirt” and sweatpants even when facing a big client call.
But the real perk of remote work is its efficiency. When there’s no need to be “present” from 9 to 5, there’s no need to do anything other than actually work when you sit down to do so.
(For more on this, I recommend the book Deep Work by Cal Newport)
This frees up loads of time over the course of a year.
Take your average workday. Not the busiest day, nor the laziest. Just, the average day. How much time do you spend actually being productive?
Five? Seven? Two?
This depends on your job and your level of commitment to it, of course. But what I’m getting at here is that no matter how much lagtime you have in an average workday, remote work either removes it entirely or pushes it to the beginning or end of the shift.
In my typical day writing and editing content for digital publication, I might have two stories I need to turn around for publish, each taking about two hours. There are 30 minutes or so of emailing, an hour spent on a call, and perhaps 20 minutes of back and forth over Slack with colleagues, hammering out loose ends.
That’s six hours, give or take, of actual work.
If I were to be stuck in an office for eight hours, the inefficiency of the added time spent scrolling social media, attending unnecessary meetings, or gossiping with coworkers would add up real quick. Not to mention the commute to and from.
Ten hours per week quickly becomes 520 hours per year, or about 80 half-days of snowboarding and a solid two afternoon hikes or bike rides per week, which I affectionately refer to as “after-workers.” (told you it was coming)
This is why remote work is awesome — you can add after-workers to your routine without having to ask for permission. Without having to “duck out early” or worry about your absence being noticed.
When the work is done, the laptop closes — and I move on with my day.
The future of work is defined by metrics, not time spent.
A colleague of mine, who works full-time on a contract basis, recently told me, “If I want to take a call while I’m on the bike at the gym in the afternoon, I’m going to do it. And if my most productive writing period is in the evenings while I sit in bed with TV in the background, there’s no one to tell me I can’t be working then.”
Is he or I cheating the company, the client, or the employer? Absolutely not. A properly negotiated salary — particularly a contracted one — ensures deliverables, not a set amount of time spent on them.
Any good client or boss knows this. And remember, we’re talking average days. There will be busier ones.
How much time do you save by having control of your own schedule?
Outpost Coworking in Ubud, Bali — the greatest place on Earth. Mine is second motorbike from top left.
Location independence has been severely restricted these past two years
Location independence means the ability to base oneself where one wants, and to be able to earn a living here, there, or anywhere. With this perk, there’s no need to live in an expensive metro area simply because your employer is located there.
This is the second biggest remote work perk that has been restricted by the Covid-19 pandemic. Those who experienced remote work for the first time in 2020 likely have yet to cash in here.
The colleague I mentioned above very well may be taking that call at a gym in Vancouver or a gym in Vail or in Austin, Texas. Why does it matter?
It doesn’t.
We’re fortunate in the 21st Century to have the technology to enable remote work and location independence. Those of us fortunate to be entrepreneurs, self-employed, or remote employees — “knowledge workers” — who spend their days staring at a laptop, can take advantage of this technology.
Gen Xers and younger generations are set to have higher levels of autonomy in their careers than previous generations. Autonomy at work has been linked to everything from better coronary health to higher levels of engagement and reduced burnout.
Being able to live where you want to live allows one to pursue their passions both professionally and personally. This is particularly important when raising kids.
The simple fact that you’re reading this newsletter signals that you agree with the sentiment that getting out for an afternoon hike or bike ride (the aforementioned “after-worker”) or being able to take a few morning laps on a Tuesday powder day (ahem, “before-worker?”) makes you happier.
This in turn makes you more motivated to succeed in your career, if for no other reason than you don’t want to give up that perk.
Many have enjoyed the slower pace of life
Restrictions aside, even those who WFH for the first time during the pandemic have found some repose.
High-authority publications including The Guardian and The Wall Street Journal have reported on how people found the slower pace of life induced by the Covid-19 pandemic to actually be good for them.
When you don’t have to wake up three hours before work starts just to prepare for, and then commute to, the workday, you have a lot more time to prioritize mental health and mindfulness (as evidenced, for example, by the boom in subscriptions to meditation apps).
This also makes it easier to raise kids. And take care of family members. Maybe take that trip to Moab on Tues-Thurs instead of Fri-Sun in order to avoid the weekend warriors.
Many studies claiming to track the remote work movement are incomplete
Since 2020, mainstream newspapers and publishers have constantly reported on the “new” trend of remote work. It began with offices shuttering at the start of the pandemic, sending employees home to work from their pajamas on the couch. As the world began to “reopen,” some companies wanted employees back in the office, others embraced hybrid work, and a few even ditched the office altogether.
Then came all the studies on whether or not workers wanted to return, whether they would be willing to return if forced, and how those who went back felt about it.
But most of these studies are wholly incomplete. To understand why, look no further than the word “employee.”
According to Great Work Life, 58 percent of remote workers work for one company. That means 42 percent are self-employed or hold multiple gigs. That’s 42 percent of the 27.6 million Americans working remotely in 2021 — more than 11,000,000 people — whose situation isn’t directly addressed by most articles about remote work.
In short, many of these articles solely discuss workers for mid- to large-sized companies and the policies these companies do or do not enact on their staff. When in reality, a significant percentage of those working remotely are self-employed, independent contractors who tend to hold multiple contracts at a time to make ends meet.
Most of these workers do this by choice — despite the perception of someone with a side hustle being a starving artist driving for Uber on the side and struggling to make ends meet. They could get office jobs if they wanted to, but the fact is that they don’t want to, at least not right now.
Furthermore, a notable percentage of those under 40 wouldn’t consider working for a company if the job weren’t remote. This is evidenced by the surging popularity of remote-first job boards and social media groups sharing job postings for remote workers. In essence, there is a burgeoning but still underground movement of Millenials and Gen Zers who won’t take an in-office job, no matter who the company is.
I discussed this specific topic in-depth in the article, “2020 introduced the world to remote work, but not to it’s real perks.”
Most digital nomads are not anti-tax, anti-nation-state schemers
Plumia, a digital nation concept run by Lauren Razavi under the umbrella of digital nomad health insurance provider Safety Wing, aims to create the world’s first “country on the internet.” Upon legitimacy, citizens who opt-in as a citizen to Plumia would receive a digital passport and receive benefits such as potential funding for startup projects, access to an as-yet-determined social safety net, and other perks.
One significant issue with the current nation-state, according to Plumia’s founders and community members, is that individuals are born into citizenship rather than being able to opt-in to the one that best suits them. If and when Plumia is realized, citizens will “buy into” their citizenship either through a flat-rate fee or through paying a percentage of their income (effectively, a tax).
Anthropologist Dave Cook writes in this piece for The Conversation about this movement, noting how many of today’s self-employed class fancy a world without borders. But while varying visions of that dream are true, the article over-emphasizes the focus on ending the nation-state as we know it.
Most of us just want to travel and engage more completely with the world, while making a living along the way.
However, the “elected citizenship” aspect of the Plumia project fascinates me. As I’ve noted before on Mountain Remote, I’ve grown into a worldview that is not inherently anti-government. I’m certainly not anti-tax, within reason — the segment of society that schemes against paying income tax willfully and selfishly ignores study after study that shows the benefits of such tax rates imposed upon upper-level-income earners, including that the societies reaping the benefits of ample government funding for social services, such as those in the Nordic countries, are happier.
Rather, what piques my interest is the innovative approach to finding a system of regulatory organization that suits the need of the modern — and future — worker. The digital nomad movement has exposed numerous outdated policies in place in the United States, the European Union, and elsewhere. This is true regarding visa schemes, offshoring income, and the cost of living differences between developed and developing nations (and therefore, why it’s so attractive for young Americans/western Europeans to move to somewhere like Thailand or Mexico and live for very cheap while earning US dollars or Euros).
For knowledge workers, this is also true regarding working set schedules and many aspects of the traditional boss-subordinate relationship.
Location arbitrage, this practice of moving to a location with a lower cost of living while earning income commensurate with major metropolitan areas in developed nations, is very common in the remote work world. It’s true that a small percentage of remote workers enact this practice to lower their tax burden, but doing that requires incorporating their business and/or citizenship in such a locale, so as to be taxed at the local rate. Some, such as Andrew Henderson, go so far as to redact their American citizenship entirely, specifically to avoid its tax system.
Most remote workers and even most digital nomads, on the other hand, retain the citizenship of their home country and those with businesses or who are self-employed continue to pay taxes in their home country. The reason for their relocation is for lifestyle and cost-of-living perks, such as lower prices on rent, dining out, and transportation. Or simply the ability to travel frequently and live where they want, even if it requires obtaining a second passport to do so.
The evolution of a digital passport that allows one to bypass systems like outdated visa restrictions will, in my view, not lead to the end of the nation-state as we know it but rather will help governments modernize their approach to remote work and digital nomadism, effectively allowing holders to “jump over” bureaucratic walls that aren’t relevant to their situation without compromising the wall’s necessity in other aspects of society.
Mountain Remote news and further reading
Free and fast WiFi is soon coming to Delta Airlines. That’s great news — though I’m a Mileage Plus member, hopefully United catches up.
Is remote work only accessible to those who live in cities? Forbes dove into the topic and found that by and large, rural areas lack sufficient resources to train tech workers.
We close this week with a report from NYT on how workers in Kyiv are staying online during the war. Toast to Epicentr.
That’s all for now. See you next week!