At my last full-time job, I was an anomaly. With my manager’s approval, I split my time between the office and a library on the Upper East Side of New York, an arrangement that was as much a personal boon as it was a professional concession. I knew I’d never be promoted over someone who came to the office five days a week, no matter how responsible, committed and accountable I proved to be. For all the predictions that digital technology would power a new remote workforce, the general perception of out-of-office employees—that they’re not ambitious—hadn’t changed all that much.
That was before a pandemic displaced us all from the office, and employers came to realize that engaged employees will continue to be diligent wherever they work. Some tech giants—Google, Twitter and Facebook among them—have already introduced more-flexible work-from-home policies. “It’s not the location that turns a highflier into a delinquent,” Laura Vanderkam writes in her latest time-management guide, “The New Corner Office: How the Most Successful People Work From Home.” But that isn’t to say that high performers are working from home optimally, or nurturing the professional relationships that are the cornerstone of in-office life. For Ms. Vanderkam, who studies the productivity habits of go-getters, the secret to getting ahead, whether you’re working at home or in an office, is to prioritize what’s really important.
In April, about a month after the Covid-19 infection rate began to spike in the U.S., Gallup found that more than half of those working from home during the pandemic wanted to continue doing so afterward. Ms. Vanderkam intends her brief manual to be helpful in a post-Covid reality, when childcare is available and some companies allow for a mix of face-to-face and virtual schedules. (To be fair, prioritizing won’t save working parents from the juggernaut of looking after young children while holding down a full-time job.)
The New Corner Office
By Laura Vanderkam
Portfolio, e-book, $7.99
For those who’d like to stay remote after the lockdown, Ms. Vanderkam recommends a tactical approach to the workweek, figuring out what you want to accomplish, then assigning tasks to daily schedules, stacking the projects that need the most-focused attention during the time of day when you’re at your sharpest. “By making my daily list short,” writes Ms. Vanderkam, who works from home, “I force myself to prioritize.” Checking off all the boxes also leads to that ever-important feeling of progress, which fuels further productivity—contributing to what researchers Teresa Amabile and Steven J. Kramer call “the power of small wins.” When your home doubles as your office, work can easily bleed into what should be personal time. Organizing your days in terms of tasks, instead of an eight-hour quota, lets you know when you can call it a day, instead of doomscrolling until you think everyone else has logged off.
Just as critical as identifying what’s important is defining what’s unimportant. As Ms. Vanderkam puts it, “time spent on one thing is time not spent on something else.” The 15 minutes wasted on an unnecessary Zoom call or scanning clickbait headlines is 15 minutes you don’t spend taking a walk outside, catching up with a friend or reading an edifying book. And although it’s tempting to cut back on what might seem like extravagances—a house cleaner, extra childcare or even a dog walker—the author makes the case that outsourcing allows you to spend more time on career-advancing projects. “Having a team—personally and professionally—reminds you that your time is valuable,” she writes. “You do something very well, and it is in many people’s best interests for you to spend your time doing that thing on as big a stage as possible.” And yes, this predicates a level of financial privilege and self-confidence not everyone has.
So should you devote yourself exclusively to heads-down work, forsaking all else? Not at all. One of the primary objections to remote work is that it doesn’t support the relationship- and culture-building that can happen while chit-chatting around the proverbial water cooler. To compensate for that loss of spontaneous social interaction, Ms. Vanderkam suggests starting video calls with some scheduled small talk. She also shines a light on a drawback of traditional office life: the tendency to overinvest in your co-workers at the expense of the rest of your network. Ms. Vanderkam recommends forcing yourself to plan a lunch or coffee once a week with someone you don’t work with. It’s an uncomfortable truth that “if your organization goes through mass layoffs, your laid-off colleagues are going to be less helpful than your fellow Cub Scout leader whose spouse is the CFO of another major employer in town.”
Written quickly in response to the new coronavirus, “The New Corner Office” is a primer for establishing effective routines, not a work-from-home productivity bible or an inspirational collection of the daily routines of business luminaries. Instead, Ms. Vanderkam weaves in the experiences and strategies of those who lead all-remote teams, including the CEO of a company that helps couples find wedding venues, the founder of a podcast and website, and the head of a PR agency. These entrepreneurs are successful in their own rights, but they don’t manage household brands.
It remains to be seen whether the shift toward remote work will hold once more offices reopen, or if virtual employees will continue to make professional trade-offs for a healthy work-life balance. Because unless a company mandates that everyone work from home at least part of the time, the visible workaholics will likely still be in the catbird seat.
Ms. Lanks is a New York-based editor and writer.
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