In our frenzy to over-index on remote work, I fear we’re missing a side-effect that can be incredibly toxic if not accounted for (and most places won’t account for it): when your workplace is your home, you never stop working.

People that have successfully been working remotely for years know that having boundaries and separate spaces for work and personal is an essential part of succeeding. But speaking for myself, that can take a LONG time to find that balance.

And if we’re being honest, that’s a balance that many employers don’t want their employees to find or have.

(It also requires having space at home to have that balance — and not every worker has a big house or wants to move to bumfuck Kansas to get that kind of space)

My fear is that this over-indexing on remote, which is being driven right now by perceived cost savings and not for any of the reasons you can argue that distributed work is “better”, just furthers the same insidious anti-worker goals for the perksapooloza we saw last decade

Which is: the goal is that you never stop working. I’ve long argued that the trade-off for all those over-the-top perks — three catered meals a day, on-site laundry, “unlimited” vacation (a total scam), on-site pet care, barber shops — is that these places never want you to leave

The perks are designed to promote “productivity” — which is a nice way of saying, “so people will work 12-14 hour days while we compensate based on a 40 hour work week” — the places with the most over the top perks don’t ever want you to go home.

And my fear is that this isn’t going to somehow stop just because those same places are now telling people they can work from home. On the contrary, they now get to completely obliterate that line because your home now is your office.

Some distributed companies already do a really good job of reinforcing and even forcing employees to create a real separation between work and home. I’m not hopeful this will be the norm. Instead, just as “bring your own device” was a sly way to keep workers glued to their

Inboxes and become essentially “on-call” every evening, this will become just another way to make 12-14 hour workdays the norm — but without those pesky office expenses.

There are real benefits to allowing people to work outside of the main headquarters and when done correctly, distributed work can be really powerful. But we need to have conversations about the downsides for workers and not just how much richer Mark Zuckerberg is going to get