Remote Working, Ten Years On: Lessons From Inverness

Remember when working from home was something you had to justify?

I do, vividly. For a long stretch of running Madhatter Creative Co., choosing to be based near Inverness rather than in a city was treated as a charming eccentricity at best and a professional handicap at worst. Clients would ask, with genuine concern, whether the distance would be a problem, as though ideas travelled by post and might get lost on the way down the A9. Then the world changed, more or less overnight, and suddenly everyone was remote and everyone had opinions. Now the dust has settled, it is worth asking what the last decade actually taught us, as opposed to what we told ourselves at the height of the enthusiasm.

Remote working is a discipline

The first lesson is the least surprising and the most ignored. Remote working is not a location, it is a discipline. Being far from an office does not make you good at it, any more than owning a piano makes you a musician. The people and businesses that flourished built deliberate structure, protected their focus, and communicated clearly precisely because they could not rely on a corridor conversation to patch over the gaps. The ones who struggled tended to assume that remote meant the absence of rules, when in fact it demands more of them.

The second lesson took me longer to accept. Distance is not the enemy of good client relationships. Vagueness is. In the early years I worried that being far away would weaken the bond, so I overcompensated, always reaching, always available. What I learned is that clients do not want you hovering. They want you to understand them, to be clear about what is happening and when, and to deliver work that shows you were genuinely paying attention. Do those things and it does not matter whether you are in the next room or the next glen. Trust is built on reliability, not proximity, and I wish I had believed that sooner.

Overcoming the isolation of remote work

The third lesson is about isolation, and here I want to be honest rather than glib. Remote working can be lonely, and the version that gets sold, all peaceful focus and lunchtime walks, quietly omits this. The freedom to work from anywhere can shade into never quite being anywhere, into days where you speak to no one and the boundary between work and life dissolves. The answer is not to move back to a city. The answer is to build community on purpose, because it will not assemble itself around you the way it does in an office. The freelancers, the local network, the deliberate coffee, the wild swim with actual humans present, these are not luxuries. They are the infrastructure that makes the rest sustainable.

The fourth lesson surprised me most. Place matters more when you are remote, not less. When your office was in a city, the city did the work of making your days feel varied and alive, and you barely noticed. Take that away and you discover how much you rely on your immediate surroundings to hold you steady. This is why I am so unfashionably attached to where I live and work. The secret beach nearby, my allotment, the quality of the light, these are not a backdrop to the job. Over time they have become part of how the job gets done well, part of what keeps the thinking clear and the perspective honest.

The real debate about working location

The final lesson is the simplest. The debate we spent years having, office versus remote, was largely the wrong debate. The real question was never where the work happens. It was whether the work is good, whether the people doing it are well, and whether the arrangement is honest about its costs as well as its freedoms. Answer those, and the map stops mattering quite so much.

So if you are weighing up a life and a career somewhere off the beaten track, wondering whether it can really work, I can only tell you what a decade near Inverness has shown me. It can, magnificently, but not by accident. Build the structure. Protect the focus. Make the community on purpose. Let the place in. Do that, and remote stops being something you justify and starts being simply where the good work happens.