You don't get to close the office door

A reflection on remote work, boundaries, and the slow art of keeping your evenings yours

I’ve been working remotely, on and off, for the better part of ten years. And in that time, the shape of the problem has changed completely — but the problem itself has stayed the same: how do you stop work from eating the rest of your life when there’s no door to walk out of?

The early days were different

In 2013, I was running a web design agency with a partner. He lived in the Maldives, I was in Sri Lanka. We had a handful of collaborators scattered across places, all remote. Communication was simple, almost primitive by today’s standards. We emailed a lot. Google Hangout was the main line. In 2014 we picked up Slack, and that stuck.

But the nature of the work itself had a rhythm. Projects came and went. Deadlines were clear. When a project was done, it was done. There was no always-on culture because the tools hadn’t created one yet, and the work didn’t demand it.

In 2019, I moved to the UK for grad school and managed a team of seven back in the Maldives. Slack and Jira were the backbone. But here’s the thing, the time zone was fixed. Everyone was in one place. I could plan my day, do my calls, close the laptop, and walk through London knowing nothing was going to explode before morning. It worked.

Then in 2021, I joined a scaleup. And everything I thought I knew about remote work stopped being enough.

When scale breaks everything you relied on

It was a different beast. Multiple time zones. A product that moves fast. Urgency is the default setting. Meetings land in the morning, the evening, and sometimes close to midnight. There is no neat start and end to the day. There is no moment where Slack collectively exhales and goes quiet.

In the dev agency days, remote work was a logistical arrangement. At a scaleup, remote work is the entire operating system, and it demands something I didn’t have before: real systems.

I’ll be honest. I’m still failing at this. After four and a half years, I still let a frustrating meeting at 3pm ruin my 7pm. I still let a rude message on Slack follow me to dinner. I still catch myself mentally drafting replies even when I’m supposed to be present.

And the worst part? It’s not that I don’t know better. It’s that knowing better doesn’t automatically translate into doing better.

The myth of “switching off”

Here’s what nobody tells you about remote work across time zones: the advice to “switch off after work” is useless. There is no “after work.” There’s a meeting at 9am and another at 11pm and a Slack thread that needed your input two hours ago. The laptop never really closes.

So I stopped trying to find a clean off-switch. It doesn’t exist in this setup. What I’m learning to do instead is think in blocks, not days.

A day is too big. If I try to categorise an entire day as “work” or “not work,” work wins every time — because there’s always something. But a block? A block I can protect.

Two hours of meetings in the morning, that’s a work block. The three hours after that? Mine. Another call at 4pm? Fine, work block. The evening until my late call? Mine again.

The shift is subtle but it changes everything. Instead of feeling like work owns the entire day with a few breaks sprinkled in, you start to see personal time as its own territory — small, maybe, but real. And the rule becomes simple: when you’re in a personal block, you’re fully in it. Slack closed. Notifications off. Not “mostly off but checking.” Actually off.

The midnight meeting doesn’t erase the three hours before it. Unless you let the anticipation of it steal those hours from you. And that’s exactly what I’ve been letting happen.

The thing about people who get to you

The other part of this, the part that’s harder to systematise, is the people.

Remote work concentrates communication into text and calls. There’s no hallway buffer. No reading body language across a room to soften the tone. When someone is rude on Slack, it hits different than someone being rude across a desk. It sits there on your screen, black on white, and you reread it, and you reread it again, and before you know it you’ve constructed an entire narrative about what they meant and what you should have said.

I’ve watched people handle this effortlessly. The same message that would ruin my evening barely registers for them. For a long time I thought they were just thicker-skinned. But I don’t think that’s it.

What I’ve started to realise is this: the irritation I feel at a difficult coworker is never just about them. It’s amplified by something underneath. A feeling of being disrespected, or not being in control, or, if I’m really honest, a resentment that I’m even in this situation. That background frustration acts like a multiplier. Every small annoyance hits harder than it should because part of me is already running the calculation of I shouldn’t have to deal with this.

But I do. Right now, I do. And accepting that — fully, without resentment — is the only way to stop other people from setting the emotional temperature of my evening.

A rude coworker deserves the same emotional energy I’d give a rude stranger at a coffee shop. Notice it. Maybe be annoyed for thirty seconds. Move on. The reason I don’t lose sleep over a rude stranger is because I have zero identity wrapped up in that interaction. The goal is to get work interactions closer to that register.

Building the transition when there’s no commute

One thing I genuinely miss about office work, even though I’ve barely done it, is the commute. Not the traffic. The transition. The physical act of moving from one place to another that tells your brain: that chapter is done, a new one is starting.

Remote work kills this. You finish a tense call and you’re still sitting in the same chair, in the same room, staring at the same screen. Nothing in your environment has changed. So nothing in your head changes either.

What I’m trying to build, imperfectly, inconsistently, is an artificial version of that transition. It doesn’t need to be long. Two minutes. Close the laptop. Step out to the balcony. Make coffee. Something physical, something tactile, that draws a line between “that was work” and “this is mine.”

It sounds almost embarrassingly simple. But the simplicity is the point. What you’re training is the mental muscle of compartmentalisation. And like any muscle, it gets stronger with repetition, and atrophies when you skip it.

Protecting your best energy

This is the one I’m still wrestling with, and maybe it’s the most important.

Remote workers with demanding schedules tend to give work their sharpest hours by default. You wake up, you’re fresh, you check Slack. You respond to the urgent thing. You prep for the morning meeting. By the time you have a personal block, you’re running on fumes.

I’m trying to flip this. If my morning is free before meetings start, that time is mine first. For a walk. To learn a new skill. Listening to a vinyl while having a slow coffee. Work will take whatever I give it. It will never say “that’s enough.” So I have to be the one who decides.

The honest truth

I don’t have this figured out. After a decade of remote work, I still let a bad Slack interaction bleed into my evening more often than I’d like. I still catch myself doomscrolling through channels during personal blocks. I still give work my best energy and wonder why I’m drained by 8pm.

But I’m starting to see the shape of the solution, even if I haven’t fully built it yet. It looks like blocks, not days. It looks like tiny physical rituals that draw lines my brain can recognise. It looks like lowering my emotional investment in people who don’t deserve it. It looks like protecting my best hours for the things that actually matter.

Boundaries in remote work aren’t found. They’re enforced. And every time I let a notification invade a personal block, or spend a free evening mentally rehearsing tomorrow’s meeting, I’m training myself that work owns all my time.

It doesn’t. But I have to act like it doesn’t — consistently, repeatedly — until my nervous system believes it too.

Written somewhere between a Slack notification and a midnight meeting.