Remote Work: Dealing with Flex Time

Working in an office makes it easy to tell how long you've worked: however long you've physically been at your work is how long you've been working. But when your office is in your home, it becomes less clear what exactly counts as being at work. I've found the concept of "flex time" - flexible work hours that help fit full-time work into the worker's schedule - helpful in making sure that I'm not too worried about when exactly I'm working.

So far in my remote work experience, I've found three strategies for staying aware of flex time to make sure that I'm maintaining a healthy work-life balance:

1. Accepting the small breaks.

I let myself stop worrying about any break that's less than 15 minutes. I often work extra minutes throughout the day, finishing up editing a sentence or writing to the end of a paragraph so that I don't forget the ideas I had in mind. I don't track these small extra moments of work, so I also don't track small extra moments of break. Such small amounts of time even out in the end, and, besides, they're a well-needed brain break from working closely with others' scholarly ideas.

2. Tracking my work time.

This spreadsheet took me a while to perfect, but it comes in handy! For any bit of work that takes 15 minutes or more, I make a note of the "Hours" when I was working. At the end of the day, I tally up this amount of "Time," which the spreadsheet then compares to a full 7-hour workday to see if I've worked an "Extra Time" beyond 7 hours. (N.B. that editors don't edit for 7 hours a day! My work includes other tasks like writing, networking, and doing administrative tasks like creating spreadsheets.) This spreadsheet gives me peace of mind that, whether I work more or less than I was hoping to on one day or even in one week, it all balances out.

(A screenshot of my spreadsheet to track work hours. The columns are "Date," "Hours," "Time," and "Extra Time," leading to a count of "Extra This Week" and "Total Extra." The first four columns are then repeated for archiving previous weeks' extra time.)

3. Recognizing the right times for types of work.

While flex time and remote work can appear to be all about working around an individual schedule, they have actually helped me attune to those around me. For example, I love starting my work day bright and early, but it's not very helpful to send networking messages when most other people are still asleep. Quieter tasks like reading and proofreading are better for the morning, especially if I want to surprise the author with an exciting email to wake up to saying that their manuscript is ready for them. Late morning and early afternoon are my new favourites for more social activities like hanging out on LinkedIn or scheduling coffee chats.

It can sometimes be difficult to accept that reading interesting academic texts from my comfortable home office is actual work. But small notions like flex time keep me accountable both to my work and to my need for pauses throughout the day.