Hot take: if your remote job needs you always online, it is not flexible, it is just untracked overtime

I keep seeing people treat remote work like the main perk is pajamas and no commute. For me the real benefit is control over your attention, but too many employers have quietly redefined “remote” as “always available.”

Hot take: if you are expected to respond instantly all day, keep your status green, and jump into meetings that could have been an email, that is not flexibility. That is overtime disguised as a constant stream of tiny interruptions that never get counted.

I do creative work (writing, planning, some visual stuff), and the always-on culture wrecks deep work. If my day is chopped into five minute pings I can technically say I was online for eight hours, but I do not get eight hours of real thinking. I end up making up the lost time at night, which is the opposite of what remote work should allow.

My line in the sand is boring but effective: blocks on my calendar for focus, notification windows instead of constant alerts, and a clear end-of-day message. If something is truly urgent it deserves a call, not a slow drip of DMs.

Where do you land: is being always reachable just the cost of remote work, or are we normalizing a broken version of it? I would love to hear what boundaries you use.