Flex working can be challenging. Here’s how to make it work.

I love flexibility. It is one of the factors that led me to start my own consulting and coaching business. Everyone wants it now to make life+work more sustainable. Yet what I’ve learned over the last five years is that not managing one’s flexibility can turn it from a benefit into a detriment.

In an interview I conducted with Annie Auerbach, author of FLEX: reinventing work for a smarter, happier life, she shared how what people often get wrong about flexibility is that they think it is soft and pliable when it actually requires hard edges and setting boundaries. Working with flexibility demands self-discipline.

This has been my experience. What I know now is that we can get lost in having so much flexibility rather than be discerning about when to flex and when to not. We also can get frustrated thinking we can control all our time and expect the world around us to accommodate our flex when the reality is we need to take responsibility to make it work for ourselves and employers and clients, too. 

I offer three actions that have made a difference in overcoming these obstacles and making flex work for me.

1. Attune to your energy. Know when and where you work best.

Working with flexibility made me better attuned to when and where I do my best work. While working in corporate, I thought the reason I extended my day working early in the morning and in the evening was because I’m committed to my work. When I was able to control my schedule and still found myself working those hours, I realized that my body is aligned with working best at those times. Now instead of forcing myself to work during normal business hours, I accommodate and protect my natural working rhythms to best utilize my time and energy.

 I’ve also optimized where I work to support me in doing my best work. I worked from home my first year of running my business and failed to optimize my environment. It didn’t work. I felt stale and found it hard to focus. The next year pre-pandemic, I worked much better getting myself to a coworking space two days a week to vary my environment. I’m experiencing the same cabin fever now, and as we come out of the pandemic, I’m looking to get a space outside the home once again. Like others over the last two years, I also took the time to optimize and set my at-home environment and create triggers that tell me it’s time to work.

2. Set your boundaries. Put in place work and life structures that make it sustainable.

Over the last few years in my attempt to be flexible and accommodate my different work, I didn’t structure my calendar and found that I had allowed my schedule to become too porous. The result? I felt scattered and incurred too heavy a price in switching costs moving from task to task. What has worked better is putting structure to my time, identifying when in the week or month I’ll do certain work activities, and creating a calendaring system, such as Calendly, that supports this structure.

I’ve also found that creating rituals and building a rhythm to my days, weeks, months, and year help ground me. I don’t expect that I will have work-life balance all the time. That’s unrealistic in our dynamic, demanding modern world. It is rare that we are always in equilibrium across all aspects of our life and work. What I have found works better is to use rituals that build a base of resilience like a 10-minute daily meditation and walk in nature and identify times when I’m going to invest in sustaining activities like a creative sabbatical week to further fill up my resilience stores.

Finally, I proactively control interruptions. In a conversation with Dr. Sahar Yousef, a cognitive neuroscientist and faculty at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, she pleads for us to reset our default settings. Broadly it’s about taking control and turning off the technologies that distract us so we can do deep work. I’ve found closing my email, not having my phone with me during focused work sessions, and refusing to be on chat helps me get my work done in less time.

3. Get perspective. You need to be flexible with flex. 

When I was considering going out on my own seeking flexibility, I spoke with a friend who had already made the leap. She was struggling and frustrated with her schedule. Why? Because she expected to be able to completely control when she worked. She was frustrated that she had to do early morning client calls, while having flexibility that allowed her to drop off and pick up her child from daycare. 

When interviewing others on my podcast around this topic, what I often hear is that we need to shift our perspective on flexibility and to learn to be flexible with flex. Flexibility doesn’t mean we never have to work hard or never have to accommodate work emergencies. We’ll be less frustrated and more appreciative of flex the more we reframe our thinking towards accepting that we won’t always be able to maintain the hard edges we put in place.

To be sure, in today’s world with its ever-increasing demands, flexibility in how we live and work is one of the critical tools that can make life plus work manageable. Yet, flexibility alone without attuning to your work rhythms, putting in place structures to support yourself and your life, and having a realistic perspective on what flex is can leave you frustrated and disappointed wondering when the benefits are going to kick in. My hope is that with these tips you can experience the full benefits of flex by embracing the nuance around when to set hard edges and when to be flexible with flex to find more resilience and sustainability in whatever life and work throw at you.