Welcome back! 👋 And if you’re new around here — hi, hello, so glad you made it. You picked a great time to join the journey.
Today, let’s talk about a challenge many of us working remotely face: working from your couch sounds like the ultimate tech dream until you realize your laptop is slowly consuming your evenings.
Remote work gave me total freedom to design my day (besides the 9–6 of course), but without the physical guardrails of an office, I had to build my own systems to protect my time, my health, and my peace of mind.
Here are the five systems I’ve mapped out that actually keep me sane every day 👇
Design a “fake commute” to trick your brain 🚶🏽♀️
➡️ I am serious — this one sounds stupid simple, but actually works.
When your bed is five feet from your desk, your brain never naturally shifts gears.
Create a 20-minute buffer ritual to boot up your mind before you ever look at a notification. It should be so simple that it feels super natural to do it. Wake up, look outside your window. Listen to a 5–10 minute news podcast, or make a slow pour-over coffee.
This routine can either be repeated when you finish work, or you can have a separate one which gets you in the zone for you-time.
I like to just change out of my clothes after the workday (like I would if I was coming home from work), go into my living room and water my plants, for example. I also recently added a 10-minute calisthenics workout to my end-of-workday routine, which has been feeling great. Do 15 minutes of what feels natural to you at the end of the work day without overthinking it.
Kill the “ping and wait” culture 💬
“Hey, do you have a sec?” is a productivity killer.
Respect your team’s focus blocks by sending complete payloads asynchronously.
State the exact problem and clarify what you need from them in one message. You will get unstuck much faster and earn a reputation as one who values other people’s time.
Go a step further and read how to ask for help in the right way. Briefly documenting what you have tried makes it much easier for someone to help you quickly. It shows you’re not just dumping the problem on them and are willing to share the effort you put into trying to resolve the problem on your own.
Keep a running ledger of your impact 📈
In a remote environment, you are effectively invisible. Your manager doesn’t see you staring at logs for three hours to find a memory leak.
Keep a private document detailing every bug you fix, feature you ship, and code review you lead. So, when compensation reviews roll around, you aren’t hoping they noticed your hard work. You should know what you’ve accomplished and have that raw data to justify your raise.
“Great work speaks for itself” is the worst career advice in tech so here’s my mind map on how to navigate the visibility game in your tech job and excel at it.
Automate your ghost expenses 💰
You aren’t paying for daily gas, commuter train tickets, or overpriced downtown lunches anymore.
Calculate exactly how much remote work saves you each month and auto-route those dollars into an index fund or the seed money for that SaaS product you want to build.
Treat those savings like a secondary income stream, and don’t let that hidden raise disappear into lifestyle creep.
If you’d like to dive into options for investing that money, check out this guide to investing your tech salary.
Defend your offline hours ruthlessly 🛑
Unless you are actively on call and the pager is going off, close the laptop at a set time.
Remote tech jobs will happily consume your evenings if you let them. A sustainable, long-term career requires knowing when to walk away from the keyboard and actually live your life.
In tech, I’ve realized that work is never “done.” You just have to find a good stopping point. There is always another bug to fix, a customer to respond to, a feature to plan, or a Slack thread popping off in another time zone.
If you allow it, Parkinson’s Law — the adage that work expands to fill the time allotted for its completion — will take over. If you give a tech job 8 hours, it will take 8. If you give it 14 hours, it will happily take 14, and you still won’t feel caught up. The company will not regulate your hours for you; the system is designed to consume whatever bandwidth you offer.
📝 HQ Tip: Create a Shutdown Ritual. Establish a hard routine to signal the end of the workday. Close all work tabs, write down your starting task for tomorrow, and physically shut the laptop.
Working remotely is the ultimate leverage, but only if you actively control the boundaries. If you don’t manage your systems, your tech job will manage you.
Protect your peace 😌,
make your impact visible 📈,
and don’t let your laptop swallow your evenings 🧑💻.
For those of you who are already in the Onboarded community, I am so glad to have you on board!
If this hit home, share it with a friend who just started working remotely 🙏
I write about career, money, and growth during your first five years in tech at onboardedhq.substack.com.
I wish you a great week!
Until next time,
Sonika
