When journalist Charlie Warzel began working from home for the first time, “it was kind of a disaster,” he recalled. “I envisioned wrongly that work-from-home was a perk, a privilege that had to be earned all the time.” In going above and beyond to show his bosses he was still productive, any semblance of a healthy work-life balance fell apart.

Warzel and Anne Helen Petersen are co-authors of the new book Out of Office: The Big Problem and Bigger Promise of Working From Home, in which they explore long-held assumptions about work and questions that should drive the evolution of remote work in a post-Covid world. The book is based on research, reporting, and their own experience living and working together from their Montana home.

As part of From Day One’s December virtual conference on the future of work, they joined Bryan Walsh, the editor of Future Perfect on Vox, for a conversation on how we can chart a new path forward without the burdens of commuting and the demands of jam-packed work schedules that no longer make sense.

Petersen kicked off the conversation off by stressing that remote work during the pandemic is not a reflection of what healthy work-from-home schedules can look like. “Most people I know had an experience of long pockets of time without childcare, or the inability to leave your home and work with anyone else, so you’re really lonely and you feel mired in the same routines,” she said. “In the future of flexible work, there are so many ways to arrange it.”

Warzel’s work-from-home schedule got better after “difficult conversations” about how to make use of his newly flexible working arrangement. A simple realization–that he enjoyed a midday workout–helped him arrange his workday in a way that felt healthier and left more room for priorities outside work.

“There’s no silver-bullet solution to any of this, and it’s actually really hard,” Warzel said of finding the right mix. “It’s a constant process of maintenance. I think of it like a personal inventory in asking myself who I am outside of work.”

As a way to create more structure for working at home, many HR experts have offered this prescription for workers: set more boundaries between life and work. Yet Warzel and Petersen are wary of asking workers to rely only on that idea, since it places the responsibility on each employee to set personal boundaries and push back against their managers. “Boundaries are easily breakable and when they do break, it’s the individual’s fault for not upholding them,” Petersen said. They instead use the term “guardrails” that should be maintained by the employer. “They’re part of the organization’s infrastructure to keep people from working all the time,” she said.

Guardrails must not only be woven into the structure of the organization, they should be respected by top leadership. And they should be practiced as a rule throughout the company. “If someone breaks that rule, it means a manager takes them aside and says it doesn’t make you a better worker, you’re intruding on a time of rest and recharge that your coworkers have,” Warzel said.

Their book details the history of office work and particularly of middle managers, who companies began downsizing in the 1970s and ’80s. People in middle management now receive little training, Petersen said. This is a problem, since “they’re actually the connective tissue between the executive layer and the workers,” Warzel pointed out. “And right now, there’s such distrust between those two groups.” That connective tissue is needed for such a major shift in how people work and begin arranging their work lives from home.

The move to out-of-office work has significant potential for progress in diversity and inclusion, the authors asserted, pointing out that the office has never been a culturally neutral space: “The dominant culture has been very white and very masculine,” Petersen said. Remote work offers a new environment for an increasingly diverse workforce. “The reason why we see so many bad managers drag people back into the office is that it’s the space where they’re most comfortable,” Warzel added.

The pair shared advice for companies hiring young workers into the work-from-home environment. Petersen encouraged empathy and intentional mentorship. She also stressed that these employees should have “a clear, tangible understanding of what they should be doing.”

Setting clear expectations, however, is good practice for all employees. The book highlights Twitter and Dropbox as employers for being upfront about making changes in the workplace, acknowledging they’ll make mistakes, and promising to address them. “This is a multi-year, if not multi-decade process of reinventing some of those traditional workflows,” Warzel said.

The conversation wrapped with Warzel and Petersen’s own tips for healthy work-life balance from their own home. “We’re thinking in terms of rhythms of the week and the year,” Petersen said. “Winter is a time of concentrated work, and summer is a time where our favorite things that aren’t work are happening.”

As workers look to find their own approaches, Warzel advised, “don’t beat oneself up about getting any of these right or wrong.” He continued, “Be very kind to yourself in this, and try to be mindful of it. Don’t say, ‘Screw it, I’ll work all the time and who cares.’”

Emily Nonko is a Brooklyn, NY-based reporter who writes about real estate, architecture, urbanism and design. Her work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, New York magazine, Curbed and other publications.