I was holding a lit birthday cake for my daughter on October 14th—it was exactly 6:15 PM—when my Apple Watch buzzed. It wasn’t a call. It wasn’t an emergency. It was a Jira notification about a CSS bug in a staging environment I hadn’t even touched in three weeks. My thumb twitched. I almost tilted the cake. In that split second, I wasn’t a dad at a party; I was a resource available for comment. I felt this sharp, hot spike of cortisol that had absolutely no business being at a four-year-old’s birthday party.
That’s when I realized the ‘always on’ thing isn’t just a productivity hurdle. It’s a psychological parasite. We talk about ‘flexibility’ like it’s this holy grail of the modern workplace, but for most of us, flexibility just means the office has successfully colonized our kitchens, our bedrooms, and our Saturday afternoons. It’s a trap.
The day the birthday cake almost died
I’ve been working remotely for six years now. Long before the world broke in 2020. I used to be the guy preaching about the freedom of it. I’d tell anyone who would listen that commuting was a relic of the industrial age. I still believe that, mostly. But what I didn’t see coming was the way the walls between ‘me’ and ‘work me’ would eventually just… dissolve. When your office is 10 feet from where you sleep, your brain never really hits the ‘off’ switch. It stays in this low-power standby mode, like a refrigerator humming in the corner of the room. You don’t notice the noise until it stops, but it’s sucking energy the whole time.
I remember sitting there after the party, after the kids were in bed, and I actually felt guilty for not checking that Jira ticket. That is insane. I knew it was insane, and yet I did it anyway. I opened my laptop at 9:45 PM. I didn’t even fix the bug. I just wanted to clear the notification so the ghost of work would stop haunting my living room. We’ve traded the 9-to-5 grind for a 24/7 low-grade anxiety, and we’re calling it a win because we get to wear sweatpants. It’s a bad trade.
The green dot is a surveillance tool, let’s be real
I have a visceral, almost irrational hatred for the ‘Active’ status on Slack and Microsoft Teams. Especially Microsoft Teams. I despise Teams. It feels like a spreadsheet trying to be a person, clunky and corporate and soul-sucking. But that little green dot? That’s the worst part. It’s a digital leash. I’ve caught myself—and I know you have too—wiggling my mouse just so the dot doesn’t turn yellow while I’m actually just taking a leak or grabbing a coffee.
The psychological weight of needing to prove you are working is actually more exhausting than the work itself.
We’ve created this culture where presence equals productivity. Since your boss can’t see you sitting at a desk, they (and you) rely on these tiny digital signals. It’s performative labor. I know people who stay ‘Active’ until 8 PM just to look dedicated, even if they spent the afternoon watching Netflix. It’s a game of chicken where the only prize is burnout. I might be wrong about this, but I think the ‘Active’ status has done more to destroy employee trust than any other piece of software in history. It turns colleagues into hall monitors.
I tracked my brain for 21 days and it was ugly
Last November, I decided to actually quantify this. I’m a bit of a data nerd when I’m bored. I kept a notebook next to me and tallied every single time I felt the urge to check a work app outside of ‘standard’ hours. I also tracked my heart rate on my Garmin.
- Total ‘micro-checks’ per day: 42 (average).
- Earliest check: 6:02 AM (before I even brushed my teeth).
- Latest check: 11:14 PM (in bed, light off).
- Average heart rate spike upon hearing the Slack ‘Knock-Brush’ sound: +15 BPM.
Forty-two times a day. That’s forty-two times I pulled myself out of my actual life to see if someone needed something that could almost certainly wait until Monday. What I mean is—actually, let me put it differently. It’s not that the work is hard. It’s that the work is constant. There is no finish line anymore. There’s just a series of pauses before the next notification. I used to think I was good at multitasking. I was completely wrong. I was just getting worse at being present for anything that actually mattered.
Why I’ve started lying to my boss (and you should too)
This is the part where a ‘professional’ writer would tell you to set boundaries and have a ‘courageous conversation’ with your manager. That’s cute. In the real world, if you’re the only one not responding to the 7 PM Slack message, you’re the one who gets passed over for the promotion or the interesting project. So, I started lying. Not about the work—I get my shit done—but about my availability.
I tell people I have ‘bad reception’ at my house in the evenings. I tell them I’m in a ‘dead zone’ for data. I’ve even set my Slack to ‘Away’ manually at 5 PM sharp every day, regardless of what I’m doing. It’s a defensive lie. It’s the only way to reclaim the space in my own head. I know people will disagree, and say you should just be ‘honest about your needs,’ but honesty in a corporate environment is often a luxury for people who don’t have a mortgage. For the rest of us, we have to build digital bunkers.
Anyway, I digress. The point is that we’ve normalized a level of accessibility that is fundamentally incompatible with how human brains work. We aren’t designed to be ‘on’ all the time. We need the silence. We need the periods where nobody can reach us. I’ve started going for walks without my phone—just 20 minutes around the block—and the first 5 minutes are always pure panic. What if the site goes down? What if the CEO pings me? By minute 15, I realize that the world is still turning and I am just a guy walking past a tree. It’s a weirdly religious experience.
The part nobody talks about
There’s a darker side to this too. I think remote work is actually making us less empathetic. When you only interact with people through a screen, they stop being humans and start being ‘requests.’ It’s easy to be a jerk to a profile picture. It’s easy to forget that the person on the other end of that 8 PM email also has a life, or a kid with a birthday cake, or a dog that needs a walk. We’ve optimized for efficiency and lost the humanity in the process.
I refuse to use the ‘Schedule Send’ feature to make it look like I’m working late. I know everyone loves it because it ‘doesn’t disturb others,’ but I think it’s a cowardly way to signal you’re a martyr. If I’m working at 10 PM because I took the afternoon off, I’ll send it at 10 PM. Or better yet, I’ll just wait until morning. We need to stop pretending that being ‘busy’ is a personality trait. It’s a chore. That’s it. That’s the whole trick.
I don’t have a neat way to wrap this up. I’m still struggling with it. Every time my wrist buzzes, I still feel that little jolt. But I’m trying to get better at ignoring it. I’m trying to remember that my job is the thing I do to pay for my life, not the life itself. Is it possible to be a high-performer in a remote world without losing your mind? I genuinely don’t know the answer to that yet. Maybe we’re all just part of a giant experiment that’s destined to fail.
But for now, I’m turning off my notifications for the rest of the night. You should probably do the same.