In 2007, when I left my legal career to begin my next chapter as a residential real estate broker, I was excited to no longer be chained to a desk.
Over a decade before “remote work” became common, I created systems that allowed me to unchain myself from the office. Armed with my iPhone and iPad, every building lobby, client apartment, and coffee shop became my office.
I spent several years teaching other real estate agents how to run their businesses and serve their clients from their mobile devices.
A decade after I first started, I sold my apartment to step into my vision of becoming a digital nomad.
To this day, I do most of my work — including publishing a daily blog — from my mobile devices. I prefer the distraction-free context of the iPad over a laptop.
These days, the “remote work” bandwagon is full of people who would rather not go into the office. Advances in technology make it easier than ever to work remotely.
There’s just one problem:
If you can work from anywhere, it’s easy to work from everywhere, all the time.
This problem creates three consequences:
(1) We Don’t Leave Time for Rest
When we can work from everywhere, what stops us from working all the time?
Recently I overheard someone boasting about how he takes calls while on the treadmill, in the bathroom, or on the golf course.
It might sound great in theory, but eventually it catches up with you.When we don’t create time for rest, we are more at risk for burnout.
(2) We Lose Our Recovery Places
For every person who has embraced work-from-home and “remote work” culture, there are those who have discovered that when home becomes office, it looses some of its role as a sanctuary.
Our brains associate certain contexts with certain activities. When you walk into your kitchen, your brain tells you it’s time to prepare a meal and eat. When you sit on your couch, your brain wants to relax.
When we start working from everywhere, our brain can get confused, making both work and rest less effective.
(3) We’re Not Present to Our Experience
Working from a beach sounded like a dream until I actually did it. And then I found that when I was on a call from the beach, I wasn’t really present to the magic and beauty of the beach.
I was also missing out on the events happening around me.
When we can work from anywhere, we never fully turn off our brains to disengage.
The Sphere of Gevurah: Creating Freedom Through Boundaries
We can only realize the promise of freedom from the ability to work from anywhere if we establish strong boundaries to contain and constrain our work.
In the Kabbalah Tree of Life framework, this is the sphere of Gevurah.
Gevurah is often translated as “strength,” but that translation misses the nuance.
Gevurah is not pure, brute strength. Rather, it’s the strength of restraint, the ability to hold back from doing, or to remove what is interfering with our work.
The application of Gevurah sets the structure in which Chesed, love, openness, and presence, can flow.
Gevurah correlates to Saturn in astrology: it sets limits and constraints in order for us to find freedom and flow within the container.
In nature, the two life force elements — fire and water — both require containment to serve us. Without containment, fire and water can both be destructive. We can only make use of them when we contain them.
In the context of our work, Gevurah encourages us to set rules and limits on the spaces, places, and times when we engage in work. Doing so can give us back our sanctuaries for rest and the time to be off-the-clock and disengaged from work.
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