Working remotely a tremendous amount of self-motivation, carefully thought-out routines, and discipline. Sure, you can leave your bed just before your morning meeting starts, but doing so can set you up for unhealthy working practices.

I am a mum of three, two of whom are 2 and 5 years old. So, there is no chance for me to sleep up until my first meeting. Instead, I wake up around 6 in the morning after having short periods of broken sleep throughout the night, do the school run, and then log straight onto the laptop.

My online work from home activities as a business analyst include chairing meetings, facilitating workshops, and documenting the meeting outcomes. I do everything from my living room with a cat curled on my lap. Although my husband works from home, he has set himself up in the back garden (aka the garage), where he retreats for 8 to 9 hours a day, so I pretty much have the entire house to myself. Therefore, my face-to-face human interaction is limited to the postman and the Amazon delivery driver.

It goes without saying that working remotely can feel pretty lonely. Even if you manage to speak to people on Teams calls, learning how to navigate your work life with limited face-to-face contact can be a challenge. Even though I am naturally socially quiet and introverted, I recognise the basic human need to connect with people.

This leads me to your need to be clear on why you want to work remotely and whether it fits well with your personality, work ethic, and values. If any of these contradict one another, you need a strong enough reason to keep you on course.

My reasons why I want to work remotely.

1) I want to cherish my time with my kids.

My reasons are family-driven. My kids are young and won't be this small forever, so I don't want to commute when I could spend time with them instead. I also suffered a lot from mum guilt. I felt guilty for working full-time, dropping them off at the childminders because I had to catch the train to work, and not taking a day off because of a big on-site meeting I could not miss. I hated prioritising how I spent my time so that I could financially provide for my family. For me, the sacrifice felt too great, and it was causing me a lot of stress.

2) I want to work closer to home.

When I was still working as a permanent member of staff for a London-based company, earning £35,000, I wanted to find a way to be there for my family and still make a good enough living. I started to look for jobs in my local area. Unfortunately, before the pandemic, choosing to work closer to home meant compromising on pay. As I lived outside of London, this greatly reflected how much I could earn, and the pay cut was too much. There was no middle ground. How could I get city life pay and still work closer to home? I did not realise it at the time, but the answer was to become an independent contractor, and although the transition took a while, working 100% remotely became a reality.  

3) I want to be paid well for the work I do.

My first role as a contract systems administrator paid £350 per day, but I was still commuting to London. Then, my next role paid me £450 per day as I transitioned from a systems analyst to a business analyst. This was all within 1 year of me leaving my permanent job. I was now making just shy of £100,000 gross compared to £35,000 per year as a permanent staff member. I achieved the money part of my need to provide for my family. However, I still made those long commutes and felt guilty about working far away from home.

4) I was fed up with experiencing commuting anxiety.

As I was always anxious to finish work on time to pick up the kids, I'd constantly look at the train times and stare at the meeting room clock in anticipation of sprinting to the station. Sometimes, my rucksack would already be packed before I went to my last meeting, and my scarf would be slung around my neck so I could make a fast getaway. If my meeting overran, I'd feel a sense of dread and shame to announce I had to leave, which always made me feel judged that I did not work hard enough because I had to pick up the kids. I could sense the rolled eyes, passing of judgment, and sheer inconvenience burn holes into my back. In the corporate world, I had always found it uncomfortable when people judge working mothers who, yes, have a family to take care of straight after we finish work. 

5) I want to enjoy my time after work. 

Commuting from the office can be stressful, especially if you have to pick up the kids at a set time because your childcare services close at 6. Then, when you manage to get home with the children, you still need to sort out dinner, bathe them, spend quality time with them, and put them to bed. If your kids sleep at 7:30, you may feel rushed off your feet at best and irritable as hell at worst because time is slipping through your fingers. Trying to complete all your tasks before your sleepy toddler starts a tantrum would make even the calmest person anxious. Then, if you manage to get all the kids to sleep on time, you may have a moment to unwind after you clean the kitchen and walk the dog. 

This was my life before remote work. Of course, my husband and I shared the tasks, but it didn't stress us any less. The time we spent commuting limited our personal time, and life just became work, eat, and sleep. 

6) I want a healthier work-life balance. 

Reflecting on how stressful work had become, I realised that money had become less of a factor. Of course, it was still important—I don't live in la-la land—but it wasn't the dominating factor. I needed to find a better work-life balance. I wanted to improve my relationship with my family, how I felt within myself and how I would care for my home and kids without compromising my values. 

7) I value meaningful relationships more than small talk.

Pleasantries have their place in the workplace and in society. They help foster friendly, happy interactions and can be the catalyst for nurturing deeper, more meaningful relationships. I am now in my forties and less concerned about being popular and pleasing people than when I was in my teens and twenties. With this new level of maturity, I have a far greater appreciation for genuine connections with people who really care about me and I to them. Therefore, office banter has become less important in my life. I would happily choose a meaningful conversation with a close work colleague or friend than gossiping about matters that are none of my business or theirs. It is important to point out that even if you work from home, you can still meet them outside of office hours to strengthen your relationships. If the logistics work, your socialisation away from your laptop can be very valuable and reinforce your working relationships and develop strong friendships.   

Working remotely and conflicting values.

You may have noticed that I had an inner battle with how much money meant to me and my family. Before the pandemic and a short while after, pay differed tremendously the further away you worked from the city. Sometimes, the pay cut could even be 50% less, and I knew a mum who had to quit her London-based job to work closer to home to be closer to her one-year-old baby. Both of our babies were in nursery then, but I had chosen another route, working in London. 

Sacrificing pay for working closer to home.

After the COVID-19 pandemic and being furloughed, work slowly picked up for me. I got a zero-hours contract as an independent contractor with a consultancy firm that offered flexible working hours. During this time, flexible working only meant working from home one day a week, if any at all, because I was mostly commuting to the consultancy that hired me and their client's multiple sites. I did even more commuting than I had intended, but this allowed me to ethically bill for the time I was working and not for the time I was caring for my baby. So, it was an alternative to working part-time. However, I did work 5 days a week on most weeks, and sometimes I didn't work at all because there was no demand. This was a very unpredictable income stream, but I was incredibly thankful for the opportunity to keep my professional working life moving and earn good money. For context, my baby was only 3 months old when I returned to work, so my mum-guilt was off the charts as it broke my heart having to send him to nursery at such a young age. The facts were that we needed the money, and finding work closer to where I lived was impossible without completely changing careers or cutting my pay. 

I finally found a local high-paying role. 

I always kept an eye on local jobs and had been looking for one that paid city rates to crop up on the job boards for years. Then it finally happened. Amid the low-paying permanent jobs in my local area, one independent contractor job came out of the blue. It was a hybrid role that paid £450 per day. I could not believe my luck, so I applied immediately. I was ecstatic when they offered me an interview, but also nervous because this was the opportunity I had been waiting for. I did not want to mess it up. I had one video call interview, and they offered me a 3-month contract. I was over the moon. 

Are your reasons why strong enough to pass the test of working remotely? 

I will start this section by first stating that it is okay to make mistakes, to feel overwhelmed and lost, and to feel unsure about your decisions. Changing your work landscape from being in the office and chatting to colleagues in person whilst you take a coffee break is very different from sitting alone in your kitchen catching a bit of daytime TV before logging back into work again. It does get some getting used to and learning to feel comfortable in your own company. Humans are naturally social creatures, and we need each other to survive. Working from home does not mean you will never speak to another human being ever again, far from it. The interactions with people will be different but not eradicated from your life, and you always have the freedom to nurture those meaningful relationships outside of working hours. As I mentioned previously, I had landed my first hybrid local role. It was in cyber security, and they wanted me there for a very specific reason. This meant I did not need to go into the office every day, and as the weeks rolled on, I found that I did not need to go into the office at all. My hybrid role was, in essence, a 100% remote role. This changed my perspective on what I could achieve now that I didn't need to travel to the office. All of a sudden, I could catch up on all the chores I had not completed. I could drop my kids off much later than I used to, meaning I could have breakfast with them in the morning rather than rushing around. I could even squeeze in a brief chat with my husband before he started work. It was brilliant. I had so much time to live my life and work. There were times, however, when I felt disconnected from my team. When talking on a group call, I had to get used to odd audio glitches when multiple people wanted to talk simultaneously. Collaborating with different personalities and working styles was a struggle to get the most out of them remotely, as everyone, including myself, had been used to sharing ideas in a meeting room. Many of these challenges led to frustration and feeling deflated that we didn't progress as far as we hoped. Something needed to change, and I wanted to retain the freedoms I had working remotely. Many people would have given up on remote work, believing it was not the lifestyle for them, and return to commuting to the office only to yearn to have that time back so they can spend it with their families. If you find yourself in this predicament, this is when all your reasons why come into play as they hold your motivations to uphold your new remote working lifestyle. You may still want face-to-face interaction; therefore, take advantage of hybrid working opportunities and in-person networking meetings. It is important to achieve the right balance by working with your manager to find the right fit that meets your needs. Likewise, it is important to address some of the hurdles around group collaboration and working in silo to make your working hours more productive and meaningful. Over the years, I developed my skillset as a business analyst and Scrum Master, which allowed me to successfully bring teams together to achieve a common objective. I would use tools like DevOps, Miro, Figma and Microsoft Teams Whiteboard to achieve a common understanding among members of my team. The trick here is to apply them at the right time and foster their consistent use to complement remote working practices. 

How to find your reasons why you want to work remotely.

Deep down, you already know the answers to why you want to work remotely. They will be unique to you and your family, so what fits well with you may not suit your friends or colleagues. You will find lots of opinions about remote working online. Some people hate it, and others, like me, would do anything to protect it because it gives us the perfect "life-work balance". Be honest with yourself and delve deep into why this is a lifestyle worth pursuing. Here are some things you can think about:

What don't you like about your working life now?

• What can't you stand?
• What are you fed up of?
• What did you wish you didn't need to do?
• How does it make you feel?
• What would you rather do?

What would you gain from working remotely?

• How would you spend your time?
• What opportunities would remote working give you?
• How would it feel to achieve all of that?

What is your idea of a good work-life balance?

• Who is important to you?
• What is important to you?
• What is different between your work-life balance now and how you want it to be?
• If someone took your perfect work-life balance away from you, how would that make you feel? 
• How would you prefer to feel?

How do you work remotely?

Now that you know your whys, how do you make this a reality? Looking for remote IT work is probably the most straightforward avenue because of cloud technology's global reach.