By Don Hall

Willpower is a finite resource and a buildable muscle but self-discipline is the key

As the pandemic ramped up, more and more low-wage workers decided that making $2.13 an hour, relying on tips that were drying up, and dealing with an increasingly pissy customer-base was the last straw. So they quit.

The report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics builds out a portrait of August’s labor market with historic levels of people leaving jobs and a near-record number of job openings.

What s being branded as The Great Resignation is being driven in part by workers who are no longer willing to endure inconvenient hours and poor compensation, and are quitting to find better opportunities. There were 10.4 million job openings in the country at the end of August.

Both Indeed and LinkedIn are now offering exclusive access to remote job openings as businesses are scrambling to find ways to get shit done.

After eighteen months in the casino industry, I did much the same thing. I moved on. I was lucky enough to land one of those work-from-home gigs, writing web copy, video scripts, client outbound emails, and marketing collateral from the comfort of my one-bedroom apartment. I've been on that track for almost ten months now and, for those out there jumping into remote work, there are a few adjustments required or you'll lose your mind.

Around year 40, I realized I was a giant fatass. Not funny enough to be considered the resident Funny Fat Guy, I decided it was time to hit the gym. In a year and a half, I dropped eighty pounds and have been a low-level gym rat ever since. I had the will to lose the weight, so I did. Willpower is a miraculous thing.

It's fifteen years later. My older man body seems to want to gain back that weight. Granted, I'm still only twenty pounds heavier than when I graduated high school but keeping it there is a challenge. More of that willpower is necessary.

Except willpower is a finite commodity. Research demonstrates that resisting repeated temptations takes a mental toll. Experts compare willpower to a muscle that can get fatigued from overuse.

When I was working forty–fifty hour weeks at the casino, I had no trouble motivating myself to eat appropriately and go to the gym seven days a week. A healthy mixture of cardio and weight training every morning seemed easy to do. As soon as I started working from home, the pounds started creeping up and I found myself procrastinating that gym time.

Turns out that going from a job that has a scheduled start time, end time, and a specific list of things to accomplish in between requires no willpower whatsoever. It also included walking for hours—sometimes I'd find that I had walked fifteen miles in my workday.

All of a sudden, I'm strapped to a desk with a schedule entirely of my own making. Getting things done without a set schedule, daily goals to achieve, and no over-the-shoulder management to keep things moving requires willpower. Discipline.

Thus, my discipline to get up offa my slowly widening ass became fatigued. I was walking less, had my own schedule to keep, and less motivation to go to the gym. Of course, I gained a few pounds.

The warning is that as you go from the job you just quit to a remote gig, you need to be aware that you will now get fat. Not that conveniently labeled Pandemic 15 but weight gain with no excuse but a lack of willpower to keep that growing dad bod from becoming a Boss Hogg Bod. Too easy to snack when your daily grind is less time sensitive, too easy to blow off any sort of exercise.

Your journey is yours and if you want to embrace having to spend extra cash for bigger pants the choice is all yours. Here's how I decided to adapt to this new work life.

The choice is yours. Either learn to work remotely efficiently and prioritize your finite willpower or go back to dealing with angry, stupid, entitled people looking for you to placate their rage at someone else. For peanuts.

Get rid of social media

Aside from the fact that social media is clearly the mental opioid addiction epidemic, making us meaner and increasingly stupid, it saps your willpower to get things accomplished. Chances are, if you're suddenly working from home, you're on a computer for your day. Social media is so fucking easy and those rabbit holes of TikTok, Twitter, Faceborg, Clubhouse, SnapChat, and Instagram suck time away from your work, your workouts, your sleep, and pretty much everything else.

If you can't go cold-turkey, at least eliminate Faceborg and Instagram. Both are almost pathologically designed to make you hate other people you don't know (and hate takes up a lot of energy) and envy those blithely constant shots of people you don't know in shorts and bikinis in Spain, Hawaii, and Australia. You aren't them, you aren't going to be them, so avoid this stuff like you avoid that maskhole in Target screaming about his Constitutional Rights.

Set a schedule of some kind

For the first couple of months, I actually gave myself office hours. That worked for a bit but I realized I wasn't truly enjoying the ability to set my own time to benefit me. Today, I have a checklist of things I need to accomplish each day and a time frame to do each thing:

Three Go-to-Market PDFs—1 hour
Literate Ape article on Willpower—1 hour
Copy Edit Outbound Sales Emails—2 hours
Add gambling quotes to "Casino at the End of the World 3rd Draft—1 hour
Research Competitor Analysis for Upcoming Comparative Sales Collateral—2 hours
Edit Marketing Videos for Future eBook inclusion—1 hour
Brainstorm Article Cold Pitch Ideas—1 hour

Out of sixteen hours, this is more work than I would get done at any 9-to-5 gig and I end up accomplishing these things by breaking them up by hitting the gym in between one or two of them, grabbing some lunch, taking a cat nap, using my 35-pound dumbbells in between, smoking my pipe on the porch, and taking a solid hour-long walk in the beautiful Nevada weather.

Some days require more Zoom meetings and those get placed in the schedule as work time accomplished.

Remember, unless you agree to use one of those apps that tracks how long you are on-task for your boss to see, you are evaluated on what you do, not when you do it.

Fast

I make fasting a part of my days as well. To me, it becomes one of those highly masculine Fuck You! I Can Take It! things. How long can I go before I feel like I'm going to belly-up at my desk. I mean, Gandhi fasted for weeks, right? I'm pretty sure I can go sixteen hours without eating anything.

Relax about this. You got it

Only the impossible is ever worth doing. It may seem impossible to balance this on your own—it's much easier to punch a time card, do the minimal amount of work you can get away with while still spending a ridiculous amount of time on your smartphone.

Work is work. You trade time for money. It doesn’t have to feel like a grind.

The choice is yours. Either learn to work remotely efficiently and prioritize your finite willpower or go back to dealing with angry, stupid, entitled people looking for you to placate their rage at someone else. For peanuts.

I've discovered that I'd rather work from home doing multiple jobs than work in an office elsewhere or perform almost any kind of customer service imaginable. In fact, if I couldn’t work from home, I’d rather do manual labor because at least there aren’t any meetings.

Looks like 4.3 million in August felt the same.