Why Flexible Work Feels Harder Than It Should
It’s often because of how organizations design (and distribute) boundaries.
This post represents an extension of one that was published on Psychology Today.
You can also hear AI Matt’s summary of the piece below.
Hybrid and remote work are often framed as a test of individual discipline. When things go poorly, the explanation comes quickly: some people just don’t manage flexibility well. They blur boundaries, overwork, under-prioritize, or stay perpetually “on” when they shouldn’t. This pattern is often described as the autonomy paradox, where increased discretion over work coincides with greater self-imposed demands (Vassiley et al., 2025).
Flexible work arrangements do demand skills—self-regulation, prioritization, and boundary setting—that vary across workers, and not everyone has them in equal measure. But that explanation is incomplete. What’s harder to explain is why these problems show up so reliably—across roles, organizations, and even among experienced, high-performing employees who otherwise manage their work effectively. If hybrid work failures were mostly about individual shortcomings, we’d expect them to be sporadic. Instead, they’re patterned across contexts and roles (Pendell, 2025).
Rather than focusing on whether workers manage flexibility well, a more useful lens is how organizational approaches to strategic boundary control shape the conditions under which workers allocate their time, attention, and availability. Choices about which boundaries to formalize, which to relax, and which to leave ambiguous don’t just affect coordination—they determine how much interpretive and self-regulatory work employees must carry on their own.
Strategic Boundary Control and the Distribution of Decision Making
According to Perrigino and Raveendhran (2025), strategic boundary control refers to how organizations structure and regulate the boundaries that govern work participation under conditions of limited direct oversight—especially salient for remote and hybrid work arrangements. Rather than relying on constant supervision or fully specified rules, organizations shape behavior by deciding which boundaries are explicitly defined and which are left to situational judgment.
These boundaries commonly involve where work (or which type of work) is performed, when work participation is expected, how coordination and responsiveness are triggered, and how effort gets noticed and judged. Importantly, strategic boundary control doesn’t require full specification. Some boundaries are left partially open, allowing organizations to accommodate variation across roles or contexts while still exerting control indirectly.
Seen this way, boundary ambiguity isn’t necessarily a failure to design or clarify expectations. It’s one way organizations maintain discretion and adaptability when traditional control mechanisms no longer function reliably. But those same boundary strategies also have downstream consequences: they determine where interpretive and self-regulatory work is performed—and how much of that work is carried by employees themselves. And most importantly for this piece, they affect how workers allocate their personal resources.
Implications of Boundary Strategies for Personal Resource Allocation
When organizations exercise strategic boundary control, they don’t eliminate the need for personal resource allocation—they shape the conditions under which it occurs. Decisions about which boundaries are specified and which are left open determine where, when, and by whom time, attention, and availability must be managed.
In more traditional on-site settings, many personal resource allocation decisions are resolved implicitly by shared structure. Physical co-location, fixed schedules, and observable routines reduce the need for ongoing interpretation about availability, responsiveness, and engagement. Workers may have less discretion over where and when work occurs, but they also face fewer moments where they must decide how their resource allocation choices will be interpreted. Expectations about participation and responsiveness are embedded in the environment itself, limiting the need for constant calibration.
Remote and hybrid work come with less built-in structure, and as a result, decisions about boundary management cannot be fully pre-resolved by the environment. Consider a hypothetical case: a remote worker with complete autonomy over when, where, and how work is performed. In principle, that sounds maximally flexible. But unless the work is entirely independent—requiring no coordination with others and imposing no interdependencies—some degree of strategic boundary control is unavoidable.
Without it, the worker is left to their own judgment about when to be available, how quickly to respond, how to coordinate with others operating on different schedules, and which patterns of engagement will be interpreted as reliable or committed. Those judgments woudn’t be made once. They’d be revisited repeatedly, across situations and audiences, because their consequences depend on how others interpret them. In this sense, autonomy without shared boundary rules would relocate all resource allocation decisions to the worker, where they would have to be managed through ongoing inference rather than clearly defined expectations.
The implications of strategic boundary control for personal resource allocation are therefore not one-directional. Specifying boundaries does reduce how much is left to individual judgment, but it also limits how much workers can rely on their own preferred self-regulatory strategies. In other words, when boundaries are defined, fewer decisions must be improvised—but fewer can be tailored to individual rhythms, preferences, or working styles.
From this perspective, difficulties don’t arise only when boundaries are underspecified. They can also emerge when boundary specifications are misaligned with how individuals would otherwise manage their time, attention, and energy. A worker who self-regulates effectively under flexible conditions may find rigid participation or responsiveness rules disruptive rather than supportive. In such cases, the issue is a mismatch between organizational boundary control strategies and individual self-regulatory tendencies.
How Strategic Boundary Control Shapes Personal Resource Allocation
Strategic boundary control shapes personal resource allocation not by dictating how employees should manage their time and attention, but by structuring the decision space in which that management takes place. Organizations exercise boundary control along several dimensions—where work is performed, when participation is expected, how coordination and responsiveness are initiated, and how effort and commitment are evaluated. Each of these boundaries can be tightly specified, loosely guided, or left to situational judgment, and those choices determine which allocation decisions are resolved collectively and which are deferred to individual discretion.
From a PRA perspective, the significance of these boundary strategies lies in where they locate judgment. When boundaries are specified, fewer allocation decisions are left open to interpretation, but individual self-regulatory strategies are also constrained. When boundaries are left open, workers retain greater discretion, but they must rely more heavily on their own judgment to determine what counts as appropriate participation, responsiveness, or effort. In either case, strategic boundary control distributes the work of allocating time, attention, and availability.
Location boundaries govern where work is expected to occur and whether particular tasks are tied to particular settings. When these boundaries are clearly specified, workers face fewer decisions about signaling presence or participation. For example, if certain tasks are explicitly designated as “in-office work,” simply being present during those periods communicates engagement without further effort. When location boundaries are relaxed, workers gain flexibility but must decide for themselves when physical or virtual presence matters and how absence will be interpreted. This shifts effort toward managing visibility and participation cues—deciding when to be seen, logged in, or responsive—alongside task completion.
Time boundaries shape when participation is expected and how availability and disengagement are understood. Specified schedules and responsiveness norms resolve many allocation decisions in advance, reducing the need to continually decide when it is acceptable to be unavailable. For instance, clearly defined working hours or response-time expectations limit uncertainty about when replies are required. More open time boundaries preserve discretion, but they also require workers to make repeated judgments about responsiveness, pacing, and recovery—such as whether responding late at night signals commitment or simply creates future expectations. These decisions influence how attention and energy are distributed over time, even when formal workloads remain unchanged.
Coordination boundaries determine how and when workers are expected to interact with others. In tightly structured systems, coordination is initiated through formal channels—scheduled meetings, predefined workflows, or explicit handoffs. A standing weekly meeting or a fixed handoff process resolves many questions about when interaction is required. When coordination boundaries are looser, workers must decide when to reach out, when to wait, and when to interrupt (or allow themselves to be interrupted). This adds a layer of PRA demand focused on monitoring and anticipation, as attention must be allocated not only to one’s own tasks but also to managing interdependencies in real time.
Evaluation boundaries govern how effort, contribution, and commitment are assessed. When evaluation criteria are explicit, workers have clearer guidance about which forms of effort or output matter—such as clearly weighted performance metrics or well-defined deliverables. When evaluation is more implicit, workers must infer what will be noticed or valued, often allocating additional time and attention toward behaviors that are visible rather than those that are necessarily more effective. This shifts allocation toward signaling and impression management, particularly under conditions where the basis for evaluation remains uncertain.
Taken together, these boundary dimensions illustrate how strategic boundary control shapes the terrain on which personal resource allocation occurs. In on-site settings, much of that terrain is shaped by imposed structure; in remote and hybrid settings, less of that structure is built in, leaving more boundary decisions to be worked out explicitly. More organizationally constrained boundaries create greater certainty for workers, but they also limit the extent to which individuals can capitalize on their own self-regulatory idiosyncrasies—one of the commonly cited benefits of flexible work. Less constrained boundaries preserve that potential benefit, but they also introduce new challenges around interpretation and impression management1.
Defensive Allocation as a Rational Response to Boundary Ambiguity
When strategic boundary control leaves key participation boundaries open or loosely specified, workers don’t respond haphazardly. They adapt in ways that make sense given the decision environment they’re operating in. Those adaptations tend to be defensive—not necessarily because workers are trying to game the system, but because they’re managing uncertainty about how their choices will be interpreted.
The defining feature of these environments isn’t flexibility per se, but interpretive risk. When boundaries around responsiveness, coordination, or evaluation are only partially specified, workers must allocate time and attention while anticipating how others might interpret their choices. Under those conditions, allocation decisions are shaped less by what is most effective in the moment and more by what is least likely to be questioned or penalized.
This helps explain why availability, visibility, and responsiveness often dominate allocation strategies in remote and hybrid work. Staying reachable reduces ambiguity around engagement. Responding quickly reduces the risk of appearing disengaged. Making effort visible compensates for uncertainty about how work is evaluated. Each of these behaviors aligns with specific boundary dimensions, and each functions as a hedge against misinterpretation rather than a direct investment in performance.
Importantly, these strategies don’t require explicit pressure from managers. They emerge even in the absence of stated expectations because workers are responding to gaps in boundary specification, not to direct demands. When it’s unclear which behaviors matter most, people allocate resources toward those that are safest across audiences and contexts. Over time, those defensive allocations become routine heuristics, shaping how work gets done even when no one has asked for them explicitly.
From a PRA standpoint, the problem is the cumulative effect of repeatedly allocating attention and energy toward managing interpretation rather than toward task execution, focus, or recovery. Defensive strategies protect against short-term risk, but they do so by drawing steadily on limited personal resources. Because the costs accrue gradually, they’re easy to miss until strain or dissatisfaction becomes salient.
Seen this way, behaviors often labeled as poor self-management are sometimes better understood as rational responses to boundary conditions that shift interpretive burden onto workers. Defensive allocation isn’t necessarily a failure of discipline or motivation. It can be an expected outcome of decision environments where the cost of being misread is asymmetric and the rules governing participation remain partially unspecified.
Boundary Design Is Decision Design
It would be a mistake to conclude that the solution to these challenges is tighter boundary specification across the board. Overly constraining boundaries can undermine the very flexibility that makes remote and hybrid work valuable in the first place. What counts as reasonable availability, coordination, or responsiveness varies across roles, tasks, and interdependencies, and rigid rules are unlikely to fit all of them well.
Strategic boundary control is therefore not a problem to be solved once, but a set of trade-offs to be managed (Grawitch et al., 2023). Leaving some boundaries open preserves adaptability and allows individuals to apply self-regulatory strategies suited to their work. At the same time, those open boundaries shift interpretive burden onto workers unless they are supported by shared norms and mutual understanding.
This is where managers and teams matter. When formal boundaries are loose, informal norms take on greater significance. Teams must be deliberate about which expectations they clarify collectively and which they intentionally leave to individual judgment. Without that shared work, ambiguity is likely to result in defensive allocation strategies that protect against misinterpretation rather than support sustained performance.
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Not to mention that less constrained boundaries assume individuals possess the needed self-regulatory skills necessary for organizations to realize that benefit.