

"Always overcommunicate when you're working remotely."

That's the first piece of advice you'll hear. Managers can't read your body language through a screen, so you need to be explicit about what you're doing, when you're doing it, and when you'll be done. Sound solid? It does on paper. The problem is this advice was written by people who built their careers in offices where visibility was a form of currency. Their instinct, which they're passing on to you, comes from a world where being seen at your desk mattered.

Here's the thing though—overcommunicating when you're twenty-four and figuring out your second job doesn't actually solve the problem. It just creates a new one. You're not overcommunicating to your team. You're performing diligence for a framework that was designed for a different era. The real issue isn't that your manager can't see you working. It's that the systems around remote work were retrofitted onto workplaces that assumed you'd be in the room.

"Create a dedicated workspace. Designate it as your office and keep work there."

This one shows up in every list, every blog post, every Slack channel where someone asks how to stay productive. And it's not bad advice exactly—having a space that signals "work mode" helps. But the people giving this advice own their homes. They're thirty-eight with a spare bedroom they converted into an office during the pandemic, or they're forty-one and live alone. They're not factoring in that you're probably sharing a one-bedroom with a roommate, or you're working from your childhood bedroom, or your "dedicated space" is the left side of your bed because rent is what it is. The advice assumes a lifestyle infrastructure that doesn't match the reality of your first few years in the workforce.

That's not a judgment. It's just worth naming: most of what gets presented as universal remote work wisdom is deeply specific to a stage of career and life that you haven't reached yet.