Shortly after I started my business as a real estate broker in New York City, I realized that I could better serve my clients if I had the ability to access their documents and necessary information from wherever we were.
Before any developers created dedicated apps, and “paperless” was a standard practice, and long before “remote work” became a trend, I developed techniques and systems that would allow me to work from anywhere.
Eventually, I started teaching my systems and tips to other real estate agents, offering them freedom from being chained to their desks and helping them serve their clients better.
Liberation vs Confinement
The ability to work from anywhere is, in many ways, a liberating force: it allows many people with disabilities or chronic illness to continue working even if they can’t commute to an office.
But it also creates a sense of confinement: when we can work from anywhere, we often end up working from everywhere.
We lose the boundaries between work and other parts of our lives.
We take calls in the car and on the beach, we respond to emails from the sidelines of kids’ soccer games and from cramped airplane seats. There’s no place where we’re not reachable and plugged in.
The result is not greater productivity. It’s a constant low-level exhaustion, frequent burnout, and a confused nervous system.
How Work From Anywhere Confuses Our Nervous Systems
During the pandemic, I worked with clients who discovered what I had realized a long time ago: when you work from home, you lose your home as a sanctuary — as the respite from your work space.
Environment is more potent than willpower.
When we associate a certain environment with a certain task, it’s much easier to initiate the task. This is why, for example, working out at the gym is more effective than transforming a corner of your living room to your “gym.”
Our brains rely on the cues of our environment for the clues about where to focus. And when we turn every place into a partial office our brains get confused.
When you sit at your kitchen table, your nervous system doesn’t know whether to send you hunger signals or focus signals.
When you sit on your couch, your brain doesn’t know whether to zone out or zone in.
The attempt to combine work and rest might feel efficient, but it’s rarely effective.
When you spend your time at the beach focused on your emails, you leave the beach feeling like you never got a chance to rest.
Balance Requires Separation
One of the lessons of Libra season is that balance requires separation. If you want to balance work and rest, then they need to be on opposite sides of the scale. Work on one side, rest on the other.
This principle is reflected in the archetypes of the seasons.
The Virgo archetype, developed at the late summer harvest, is about separating the good crops from the bad crops.
The Libra archetype builds on this separation. The scales symbolize judgment and discernment, two qualities necessary for separation. When in integrity, Libra is a model of how to set boundaries: it puts each thing in its own container to weigh them on the scales and see how they balance out.
Libra teaches us that if we want balance, we must first separate the things we want to balance.
Only when the scales hold distinct weights can they show us what’s in alignment.
[…] to the concept of weighing one thing against another on a balance scale is that to bring two things into balance we must subtract from one in order to add to […]