Career energy budgets for remote senior ICs
Mid-level remote folks are figuring out the balance; senior individual contributors still look exhausted. They’re expected to ship deep work, advise junior teammates, and pop into exec syncs with zero warning. The only way I’ve seen them stay sane is to manage energy like engineers manage compute—budgeted, observable, and logged.
Monday mornings start with an “energy standup.” It’s not therapy. It’s a five-minute check where you rate mental battery, physical health, and focus breakers for the week (kids home, travel, appointments). You share the snapshot inside your squad channel so colleagues can see when you’re operating at 60 percent and stop spamming “quick asks.”
Next, carve out “trust windows.” Pick two blocks of time when you promise to be responsive and two where you’re deliberately offline for thinking. Put them in your calendar description and Slack status. The magic isn’t the schedule; it’s the transparency. Execs calm down when they know they’ll hear from you at 1 p.m., even if you ghost them at 10 a.m.
The last trick is “context escrow.” Senior ICs carry historical context nobody else remembers, so they get dragged into every decision. To protect your weekends, keep a lightweight Loom or memo archive that answers recurring questions. When someone pings you Saturday about “that 2022 migration,” drop the Loom link instead of reliving the project. Eventually, folks search the archive first.
Remote work is supposed to buy freedom. Without deliberate energy budgets, it just buys longer to-do lists. Track the signals, communicate them plainly, and you’ll still have enough fuel for deep work by Thursday.
