☕️ (R)emote Expresso #78

☕️ (R)emote Expresso is global. Remote. Slightly feral. Weekly.

Week two of the body arc. Last week was the couch. This week it's the clock - the one in your body that's been arguing with the one on the wall your whole life.

Mine started the argument early.

When I was a kid, my dad had a routine. Somewhere around midnight he'd open my bedroom door, find me reading - under the covers, or not even bothering to hide it - and tell me to turn off the light. Every night. The light was always on. I was always awake.

I wasn't being defiant. I just wasn't tired when the house decided it was bedtime. The insomnia was already there too, even then - those long dark hours where everyone else was asleep and my brain was wide open and busy. The light stayed on because I was still in the room behind my eyes, and nobody had told that one to close.

By college I'd stopped pretending. Senior year I ran on two, maybe three hours of sleep - up half the night with my friends, then dragging myself to an early class or a shift in the cafeteria. My entire morning strategy fit on a bumper sticker: a smoke and a Diet Coke. (I'd picked up the smoking in England the year before. It hung around for the next twenty years. The Diet Coke never left at all.)

Terrible way to treat a body. Also, if I'm honest, some of the most alive I've ever felt. The owl was running on fumes and having the time of her life.

Then real life showed up and wanted me on a schedule.

After graduation I couldn't find a job, so I moved back in with my parents and took a temp gig at a utility company fifty miles away. Fifty. Which meant getting up at an hour that felt like a personal insult, and my dad - still in the house, still on duty - back in the doorway. Except now he wasn't telling me to turn the light off. He was making sure I got up. Same man, opposite job.

When I finally moved out, I had to become my own dad, and I was worse at it. I built an alarm system like I was defusing myself. At one point the alarm lived on my computer across the room, far enough that I had to physically stand up to kill it, set to "Bodies" by Drowning Pool. If you don't know it: it opens with this low, creeping whisper, almost nothing, and then it detonates into full screaming. That's what it took to move me. A man roaring me out of bed from across the room.

And the whole time, corporate me kept training. Less sleep. Earlier mornings. Shower, makeup, hair, the drive, and then a full day of work waiting at the end of all that, with nothing left over for me. I got good at it. I hated every minute.

I didn't know it then, but I wasn't failing at mornings. I was an owl being run on a lark's clock, and that has a cost nobody around me was measuring.

The research has since caught up to what my body already knew. People whose rhythm runs late, forced onto rigid early schedules, are about twice as likely to rate their own work as poor by the time they hit midlife. A 2026 study pinned a big part of the so-called early-bird edge on something plainer than talent: night owls worn down from being run on the wrong schedule. There's a name for the alternative now too. Chronoworking - building your work around when your body actually shows up.

But get this: when researchers looked at fully remote workers, people finally free to sleep how they're built, a lot of them didn't realign at all. Their whole clock just drifted later. Bedtimes at midnight, mornings shoved back to match. The distance between body-time and world-time shrank - but in the wrong direction. Freedom didn't fix the rhythm. It let it wander.

So the cage opening isn't the same as walking out of it.

I left corporate. I'd started working from home back in 2006, the second it was possible, because I could not face one more round of the shower-makeup-drive-resent loop. Working from home handed me the hours back. But it took leaving the office behind completely before I stopped running someone else's clock and started asking what mine actually wanted.

Leaving isn't on the table for everyone, and I know it. Plenty of you have a standup you can't move, a client eight hours ahead, a school run at 7:40 that does not care what your body wants. You can't torch a schedule like that, so don't try. But you almost certainly have one window in the day that's actually yours, and most of us give it away without a fight. Claim that one. Defend the hour you've got and spend it the way you're actually built.

Turns out mine wants what it wanted when I was nine. To be awake when the house is quiet. My real thinking happens at hours most people are asleep, brain lit and busy, no screaming alarm required. And in the middle of the afternoon, when the tank's empty, I lie down. Full stop.

The light still stays on. Later than most people's. But now I'm the only one in the doorway, and I've stopped telling myself to turn it off.

Science gives you two options: morning person or night person. Lark or owl. As if those are the only two ways a body has ever kept time. A few field notes on the ones that didn't make the textbook.

The Hummingbird. Three genuinely brilliant hours a day, scattered at random, never once landing during a scheduled meeting. Cannot predict them. Cannot bank them. Lives on alert, waiting for the window to open.

The Phoenix. Clinically useless until mid-afternoon. Then, right as everyone else winds down, ignites and works until 1am. Dies every night. Returns around 3pm. Do not schedule anything before lunch.

The Vampire. Sharpest at 2am and fully aware of it. Keeps a convincing daytime presence for video calls, runs on a carefully built alibi, and does the real work after dark when no one's watching the coffin.

The Goldfish. Peak window moves every single day with no detectable pattern. Monday it's 9am. Tuesday it's 4pm. Wednesday it forgot to come. Cannot plan around itself. Has made peace with this.

The Two-Peak. Lights up at 10am, again at 10pm, and spends the whole valley between them being asked why they look tired. The workday is built directly on top of the valley.

You're probably one of these. Maybe two, on a bad week. None of them are wrong. They just never asked the textbook's permission.

Every so often someone in the Circle reaches out into the room, and the whole point of this community is that somebody reaches back. This week it's Sydney Bell, joining us from Canada:

"I'm curious if there are other folks who work in the non-profit / human services field? I'm a social worker and I have two remote work spaces: hosting a provincial network where my role is providing learning opportunities and knowledge translation. I also have a remote therapy practice. I've been to a few R Generation workshops and have appreciated them - and now am glad to connect with the Remote community in this space."

So - non-profit and human services folks, remote therapists, knowledge-translation people, anyone whose work lives in this world: Sydney's looking for you. Find her in the community and say hello.

This week, find the one hour you actually control - not the whole calendar, just one honest hour - and give it to the work that needs your real brain. The hard thinking. The thing you keep shoving to "later." Put it where you're actually sharp, not where the schedule thinks you should be. Best at 10pm? The work goes at 10pm. Best in the 20 minutes after lunch before the calls start? Defend those 20 minutes like a meeting nobody's allowed to book over. One window. Yours. Quit handing your peak hours to email you could answer half asleep.

Not sure where your window is? Let AI interview you and help you build a case for protecting it. Paste this in:

Here's the part that's almost funny. I just spent a whole issue making the case for working with your own clock - and I'm currently up before I'd like to be every morning this week and half of next, running a manual report I took on to cover for a coworker. The client's on Eastern. I'm on Mountain. So "early" gets an extra hour stapled to it.

Nobody made me do this. I said yes. The owl signed a contract that requires her to behave like a lark before the sun's fully committed, and the owl will honor it, because that's the deal and the deal pays.

Five hours of sleep and I'm fine, honestly - menopause and ADHD and whatever my circadian rhythm is doing these days sorted that out for me years ago. The clock and I have an understanding. This week I'm just choosing, eyes open, to ignore it.

My dad would've understood that without me explaining it. The same man who stood in my doorway telling me to turn off the light got laid off at 62 after a lifetime of loyalty, and stayed loyal anyway. He'd expect me to do what the job needed. So this week I will. Then I'll sleep when the owl gets her turn.

— The (R) Generation Team 💻 🧡 🫶

PS: I forgot I had to write this until 9:47 tonight. So I wrote a whole issue about honoring your body's clock and then kept mine up past midnight to make a deadline. The light stays on. The irony does not escape me. The 5am alarm won't either.

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☕️ (R)emote Expresso is published weekly for R Generation - a global community of remote professionals, designers, product people, facilitators, consultants, and freelancers who believe remote work should fit the human, not the other way around.