Remote work is the best decision I ever made. I’m a huge fan of Tim Ferris’ The 4-Hour Workweek. When I first read the book, a magic portal opened inside my mind. I saw the path to financial freedom open before me. By avoiding the prying eyes of management and coworkers, I knew my lazy and creative mind would find the most efficient method of doing the work in the shortest amount of time possible. Turning eight hours of work into two. This leaves me six hours to tackle side hustle projects at home. I knew I wanted to remote work but I had no idea how to get there. As a nurse, how the hell am I supposed to get away from patient care?
I was putting in full-time hours at the emergency room and was going through a mid-life crisis and nervous breakdown. My health demanded a change of pace. As covid spread fear and panic throughout the world, it brought with it a great opportunity. Contact tracing. The covid relief funds poured into the coffers of organizations country-wide and no one knew how to spend it. Emergency measures caused them to hire any and every nurse willing to take the job and everything was learned and being built on the fly. It was an exciting time to be in this field. I took that skill and ran as far as I could with it. Now that it appears covid is coming to a close, I’ve transitioned to the next stage of my career. You may think you have missed the train, but don’t worry, there’s hope.
I discovered that triage skills are extremely valuable. Why are triage skills so valuable? It’s being able to tell if someone is having a true medical emergency within a thirty seconds of talking to them. I learned this skill in the ER. The ER is a system that attempts to see as many patients as possible in the shortest time possible. How many patients are we talking about? I decided to do some quick numbers in my head. Let’s say on an average 12 hour shift, I work in triage perhaps once a week. I’d get one triage done every 10-15 minutes. That averages about 4-6 patients an hour. Subtract one hour for lunch and that’s 11 hours of triaging, times 5 patients, and that’s about 55 patients a day. 55 patients times 50 weeks a year is 2,750 patients triages a year. I was there about 8 years so that totals 22,000 patients! Imagine that, there is no other discipline or specialty where those numbers are even possible. That’s a lifetime of practical face-to-face experience with just about every kind of character you can imagine. That automatically develops people skills to the extent I can talk to anyone, crazy or not, and decipher what’s going on off of minimal information.
When looking for remote work, keep in mind that places are looking for ANY registered nurse. Your skillset will come as a bonus. Even if you don’t have insane triage skills, you can skill tweak your resume in ways that fit their requirements. Another word of advice is to look for smaller to mid-sized health centers preferably in remote areas that not many people live. This creates an ideal situation where the team is large enough to not keep constant supervision on remote workers, but small enough where they haven’t bought all the expensive monitoring software to keep tabs on employee work. It’s a cost benefit analysis that only seems to ring true in ultra large companies. You know, I tried going for the case management gig and it failed because I had no practical experience. But this one was right up my alley. So figure out what skills you can offer to get a remote job. I can guarantee you that your life will improve in so many ways. I decided to use my extra time on various side hustles that net me over three-thousand dollars a month. I’m on my way to living off my side hustle income and free my time to live the life I always wanted. You can too.