Remote leadership is often sold as a lifestyle upgrade.
You’ve seen the pictures and read the blogs:
- Flexible hours
- No commute
- Homemade lunches
- A midday walk where you stop to smell the metaphorical roses
What you don’t see in the stock photo: the manager hunched over their laptop at 10:42 p.m., Slack still pinging, eating a handful of dry cereal because dinner evaporated somewhere between “just one more email” and “how is it already tomorrow?”
Remote leadership isn’t self-correcting. It doesn’t come bundled with balance. It’s a system you have to design — and redesign — or it will quietly hollow you out. Not with drama, but with the slow, polite erosion that makes burnout feel normal.
Why It’s Trickier Than It Looks
For all their dysfunction, offices came with built-in guardrails. The commute. The physical cues of “this is work” versus “this is home.” Even the lousy breakroom coffee was a boundary marker.
Remote strips all of that away. Your kitchen table is a conference room. Your bed doubles as a meeting booth. Your couch is both a place you collapse and a place you answer Jira tickets.
If you’re neurodivergent, those blurred edges can get amplified. Executive dysfunction doesn’t respect “home” and “work” labels. Hyperfocus will happily carry you three hours past dinner. Task-switching tax leaves you exhausted, even on days when you can’t point to a single finished thing.
And this isn’t just about you. As a manager, you set the cultural weather.
- If you ping people at midnight, they’ll feel the pressure to answer.
- If you never unplug, they’ll assume that’s the job.
- If you normalize burnout, they’ll burn out right along with you.
Anchors in the Drift
Remote leadership has no default balance. You have to build anchors into the drift.
Over time I’ve found a few that keep me functional enough to lead without hollowing myself or my team out:
1 — Create a Real Boundary (Physical or Digital)
You don’t need an Instagram-worthy office to draw the line between work and life — you just need a boundary your brain can recognize.
For some people, it’s physical: no working from bed, no calls from the couch. Desk = work. Anywhere else = off-duty.
For others (myself included), digital walls do the heavy lifting. I run separate Chrome profiles and VM sessions — one for work, one for personal. Same laptop, completely different contexts. The act of switching isn’t just technical, it’s psychological: it tells my brain, we’re done here, now we’re in another mode.
The medium doesn’t matter. What matters is that you create a clear signal that tells your brain when work starts and when it stops.
2 — Build a Rhythm You Can Actually Keep
Forget the 5 a.m. green-juice influencer routine (unless that does it for you – you do you!). What you need is a repeatable sequence that fits your energy, your responsibilities, and your life as it really exists.
Mine often looks like: wake up → get dressed → let the dogs out → eat → work → real lunch → wrap up → do literally anything else. It works about 80% of the time, which is plenty.
Sometimes “rhythm” is even more granular — like blocking certain types of meetings only in the afternoon because I know my brain is sharper for deep work in the mornings. The point isn’t to be rigid. It’s to create a pattern reliable enough that your brain can stop negotiating every tiny decision.
3 — Step Outside Your Bubble (Physically or Socially)
I cannot overstate this: if your world shrinks down to just your laptop and four walls, your mental health will tank. Cabin fever is subtle, but it wrecks momentum faster than a broken deploy pipeline.
For some people, the fix is literally leaving the house — a walk, a coffee shop, a library table. For me, it’s a mix: grocery runs, taking my kid somewhere, or just making sure I’ve crossed a different threshold than my office door.
But “outside” doesn’t have to mean outside. Sometimes my reset comes from online gaming with friends, or disappearing into a book that yanks my brain into another world. Those are escapes, too — ways of reminding myself the universe is larger than Jira tickets and Slack threads.
The point isn’t how you do it. The point is to break the loop. Step into a space — physical, digital, or mental — that reminds you you’re not just a engineering-shaped machine.
4 — Learn What Actually Counts as Rest
Scrolling isn’t rest (unless you somehow close the app feeling nourished — in which case, please share your secret).
For me, “real rest” shows up in tinkering with LEGO builds, noodling at the piano, or getting lost in a sci-fi book. Those refill the tank. If I burn a Saturday doom scrolling instead, I start the week feeling like I never stopped working.
Pay attention to your post-activity energy. Rest is defined by recovery, not just the absence of tasks.
5 — Treat It Like an Experiment, Not a Religion
Remote leadership is one long experiment. You are both the scientist and the subject.
I keep a loose journal — not a curated spread for Instagram, just a few quick notes: when I was exhausted, what gave me a lift, what I avoided. Over time, patterns emerge. “Why do I always hit a wall on Thursdays?” or “Why do I never eat lunch unless I schedule it?”
That loop is the closest thing you’ll get to a manager for yourself. It’s not about perfect discipline — it’s about running small iterations until you land on something that works for your brain.
The Neurodivergent Twist
Most productivity advice is written for neurotypical brains with clean edges. For us, it’s like being handed a speedboat manual when what we’re paddling is a kayak in choppy water.
We need systems that:
- Reduce context-switching
- Make starting and stopping easier
- Turn “rest” into something tangible
- Protect us from our own “just one more thing” spirals
That’s why I tell my teams — and remind myself — that balance isn’t just personal. It’s cultural. We have to make it visible, talk about it, and normalize designing work around human brains instead of the other way around.
Your Next Step
Audit your boundaries this week the way you’d debug a production incident:
- Where’s the leak? (Time, focus, energy?)
- What’s the root cause? (Lack of cues, poor rhythms, overcommitment?)
- What’s the smallest fix you can deploy tomorrow?
And then — tell your team what you’re doing and why.
Because this isn’t just about you.
You’re not just protecting your energy — you’re giving everyone else permission to stop treating burnout as the job description.
