Anna Burgess Yang is a former product manager turned freelance content marketer, journalist, and workflow consultant from Chicago. She is passionate about educating and equipping people to take control of their remote work lives and their careers. Anna has been working from home for 16 years now and currently works from home full-time, which for her is about 25 hours per week. She's worked in different settings in the past and appreciated the results oriented workflow and prioritizes working efficiently now to get a lot done in a short time rather than feeling a need to sit at her desk 40 hours a week. In the past, she was at one time the only remote employee, then she was with a company that transitioned to fully remote, and she's worked for a company with global remote employees. She's experienced different work flows and worked synchronously and asynchronously and even hired new remote employees. This all helped Anna build foundational knowledge about "what works and what doesn't work" for her. In this episode, Anna tells a few stories including one about a cat who likes to get into the ceiling and another about how she first started working from home which involved quitting her job to take a new job, with her boss letting her work from home to keep her with the company. Awhile back, she wrote a LinkedIn post about remote work and her husband quitting his job when his employer ordered him back into the office, and he decided to get a different job instead, one that allowed him to continue to work remotely as they both like to be able to share in the kid-related stuff that comes up during the day. They've noticed some differences in expectations from remote employers with some being more flexible (small companies) and others requiring people to be on camera and in meetings all day. Anna now works for herself and prefers to embrace flexibility which allows her to maintain a good balance, even when she goes to pick up her children in the middle of the day or go grocery shopping on a Friday morning. She doesn't think about working early or late as an inconvenience, because she knows she is taking control over her own life. In her work as a workflow consultant, Anna helps solopreneurs and small businesses automate workflow with tools like Zapier. She writes about working remotely in her Substack as well. Anna's goal is to educate others about remote work, the future of work, and how work can be better. She typically focuses on writing about fintech and product-led content. She's found many collaboration tools to make remote work easier now, including project management tools, video tools for asynchronous communication, etc, that didn't exist when she first started working from home.