Biggest Remote Work Challenges & How To Overcome Them

9 min readOct 30, 2020

No soul-crushing commute. No managers or co-workers hanging over your shoulder. No one stealing your lunch from the office fridge. Remote work is wonderful. But it’s not without its challenges.

Ask anyone who works remotely as a telecommuter or from home running their own business: It’s not all rainbows and unicorns. A report from the United Nations International Labour Organization found that while employees are more productive when they work outside of the conventional office, they’re also more vulnerable to working longer hours, a more intense work pace, work-home interference, and, in some cases, greater stress.

I asked over four dozen remote workers to share their biggest challenges and how to overcome them. Whether you’re thinking about working remotely or are currently a remote worker, you’ll be happier and more productive when you meet these challenges head on.

Working too much

One of the reasons many managers don’t approve of remote work is they fear employees will slack off without that physical, in-person oversight. But, in fact, the opposite tends to be the reality: remote workers are more likely to overwork. When your personal life and your work are both under the same roof, it’s harder to switch off.

“When does the workday start? End? Creating a hard line between work/home is tough,” says author and coach Jeff Gothelf. And if you work for yourself, he adds that you might be in never-ending sales mode, which can be exhausting.

Several members of any home working team confess they have a hard time remembering to take breaks, stopping work at a reasonable time, and even knowing when is a reasonable time to stop.

“Work is infinite,” Conrado Lamas, head of marketing at Signaturit, says. “There is always something to be solved-and when you have an office routine, it’s easier to leave what you do at the workplace. When you work from home, your office is where you live. So I’m constantly closing small pending tasks late at night before I go to bed or early in the morning when I really wanted to be reading the news.”

How to avoid overworking

You might need to trick yourself to take breaks and set a clear start and end times. Otherwise, you risk burnout. A few things that can help:

Set appointments on your calendar for the end of the day to get yourself out of your home office. Maybe it’s an “appointment” to go to the gym or go grocery shopping or just take a walk around the block. Maybe it’s an appointment to read the next chapter of the book you’re currently into.
Similarly, set up reminders to take breaks. One member of our team has a recurring daily to-do list item to take a walk. I use the clock settings in macOS to announce the time every hour, which helps remind me to stretch and refill my water glass. In Windows, you can use Task Scheduler to set up a similar hourly reminder. Timing your day can help as well.
Be clear with your team on when you’re leaving- for example, by making a quick announcement in Slack-and then actually shut down your computer. (I have a bad habit of saying “bye” and then sticking around for another hour.)
Create physical boundaries between you and your workspace. The best thing is if you have a dedicated office space so you can shut the office door-or even lock it, as Cody Jones, Director of Partnerships at Zapier, does. Sorry, we’re closed. If you don’t have a dedicated office, even something as simple as putting your laptop out of sight when work has ended can help you avoid the temptation to log back on. Or you can try sectioning off part of a room for work so it feels like a separate space.
Turn off notifications on your phone and computer so you’re not pulled back into work after hours.

Prioritizing work

Remote workers need to be self-motivated experts at time management because we don’t have others constantly overlooking our work or managing our time for us. While every worker might find it difficult to stick to a schedule and manage their to-dos, it’s especially challenging for remote workers who have more flexible, free-form days as well as managers in a different part of the world.

Managing your own work is hard enough. Then there’s the constant temptation to watch one episode of your favorite show during your work break, tidy up the kitchen when you’re procrastinating on a project, or take your dog for a walk because of their pleading look. All of a sudden, it’s evening and you have nothing to show for the day.

How to make sure you get the most important work done

Eat the frog. Business consultant and coach Brian Tracy explains: “Mark Twain once said that if the first thing you do each morning is to eat a live frog, you can go through the day with the satisfaction of knowing that that is probably the worse things that is going to happen to you all day long. Your ‘frog’ is your biggest, most important task, the one you are most likely to procrastinate on if you don’t do something about it.” First thing when you start-up work, eat that frog.
Limit the number of tasks you plan to do each day. Use the Eisenhower matrix to avoid unnecessary time-wasting tasks and know which tasks to do next. Or plan to do just 1 big thing, 3 medium things, and 5 small things per day, the 1–3–5 rule.
Install distraction-limiting tools. Try one of these tools to help you stay focused at work.
Manage your energy, not your time. As Gregory Ciotti explains on the I Done This Blog, “you improve by pushing your practice, not yourself during low energy.” Your energy waxes and wanes during the day, so tackle tasks according to how much of your bandwidth they’ll take and how much you’ll be able to focus at different times during the day.

Interruptions: you gave a family, pets, and/or a doorbell

The good news is, when you work from home, you avoid co-workers dropping by your desk and other office interruptions (it’s someone’s birthday! Let’s have cake in the breakroom!). The bad news is you’ll likely have to deal with other kinds of interruptions and distractions, whether it’s the UPS delivery person needing your signature or in-laws dropping by unannounced.

It’s especially hard if you have very young kids, who don’t understand that they can see you but you’re not available to play. Repeatedly saying, “no, I don’t have time now” is painful. “Finding a good place to take conference calls so that family doesn’t interrupt and so that I don’t wake a napping baby” can also be an issue.

How to deal with interruptions at home

There’s no way to avoid all interruptions from your family, pets, delivery people, and neighbors. And sometimes they should interrupt you-like if your dog really needs to be let outside or your kid just got hurt. It’s important to be clear, though, about the kinds of interruptions that are okay and which ones can wait. Additionally:

Set up a kind of signal that lets others know when you’re in focus mode. Maybe it’s a do not disturb sign on your door or when you put on your headphones. (Or maybe you have to actually lock the door and pretend you’re not home.)
Explain why it’s important for you to avoid interruptions-that they break your concentration and make your work ten times harder.
For young kids, getting childcare is a must, unless you plan on working only when they’re asleep.
Train your kids and significant other to be self-sufficient and occupy themselves. It’s frustrating to be interrupted because you’re the only person who knows where the scotch tape is.
Keep consistent work hours. Simply don’t answer calls during work and perhaps even invent meetings if you have to.
Escape. If all else fails, try working out of a co-working space, the library, or a coffee shop.

Loneliness and lack of human interaction

If you don’t have family members home with you when you’re working, you might have the opposite problem: isolation. Even with internet access and tools like Slack, you might still develop “cabin fever” from being in the same place for too long all by yourself. “It is too easy to get the habit of working from home all day, and then remain in your home for the remainder of that day and sometimes for subsequent days.”

Perhaps remote work jobs should come with a Warning: you might become a hermit label. “Finding the courage to go out into an unforgiving world and talk to potentially scary human beings” can become a new challenge.

People who work in shared offices experience impromptu “watercooler” moments of interaction and maybe even share meals together or after-work drinks. Remote workers? We often work asynchronously with our teammates and perhaps have only our houseplants to talk to.

How to not feel isolated when working from home

This one’s going to take effort, especially if one of the reasons you enjoy working remotely is to get away from being around too many people. It’s about striking a balance.

Include social breaks in your schedule, if you can, by working a few hours then spending an hour or two doing something social outside of your home, such as lunch with friends, then going back to work, Kean advises. Just going out and grabbing a snack while chatting with the counter person can be rejuvenating.
Try working at co-working spaces or coffee shops so you’ll at least feel like you’re still a part of society. You might just find, as Conrado Lamas has, that you’ll make friends with the people who work at and from the coffee shop. Think of it as your second office.
Be more intentional about joining local groups or organizations. Attend networking conferences, or take some classes at your town’s recreation center.

Technology hiccups

Nothing makes a remote worker shake in fear as much as an internet outage. Or, perhaps, when your computer breaks. Both are your problems to solve.

Many public Wi-Fi hotspots can also be spotty. And even with a decent internet connection, video conferencing apps aren’t always reliable, so virtual meetings can be an exercise in frustration.

For peace of mind to avoid delays in your work- have a backup plan. A mobile hotspot device or a cell phone plan that allows tethering can save you when your internet goes out. A backup computer-or maybe even a tablet-can get you through the day until you can get your computer fixed.

Bad health habits

Knowledge work tends to be a sedentary work-no matter where your office is. However, when you’re at home, it’s easier to slip into bad habits.

For one thing, there’s the fridge. With the refrigerator only steps away from the home office, you can easily eat too much. Or you might have the opposite problem: without common lunch breaks, forget to eat.

Exercise might also fall by the wayside when you’re overworking, and you might forget to go outside enough. (Fellow remote workers: are you getting enough vitamin D?)

There’s no magic pill for this one either. You just have to be more mindful when working from home about your health habits. You can set reminders for yourself in your calendar or to-do app to eat a salad or do some yoga.

Conclusion

Despite the challenges above, remote work is very rewarding as long as you know what you’re getting into and can handle these common issues. If you persevere, you’ll enjoy flexibility, autonomy, the chance to work in your best environment, higher productivity-and perhaps also more time for a life outside of work as well.

Originally published at https://www.bluekeyworld.com on October 30, 2020.