How to free yourself from office politics and bureaucracy, and get back to work.

"You like your job. You're over everything else that comes with it.

For a while there, we scored a pause. Sequestered at home, it was often just us and the work, office politics and gossip fading into the background.

Now the volume has been turned back up. Companies are renewing calls to spend more time at headquarters, while job cuts and uncertainty in some industries raise the pressure on workers and bosses. There's chitchat, meetings, busywork -- stuff that feels outside our job descriptions, and beside the point.

"Everybody needs to leave me alone," says Ann Turi, a lawyer, summing up exasperation I've heard from all kinds of professionals recently. Heads down on a big project -- or trying to be -- she's felt the weight of hovering managers and constant interruptions.

We need to relearn to stay under the radar, without losing out on the work we actually like. It might just take subtle tweaks, like forming alliances with colleagues and shifting how we communicate with bosses. Or some of us might need to totally rethink what we do and where we do it, with autonomy in mind.

Rob Johnson switched to freelancing for startups to get what he wanted: the ability to get paid to actually produce something.

"I'm never gonna be like a super high-up in some company," says Johnson, a programmer based outside Austin, Texas. But "I have ultimate freedom."

In past jobs, Johnson says it often felt hard to carve out more than an hour or two to write code. He was called on to make random presentations to other departments, or would spend two weeks building a project that took three months to gain approval.

The switch helped.

"By all means, go work," higher-ups would tell him when he pointed out they were paying him $150 an hour to sit in a meeting.

Last year, he moved back to being a full-time employee, after a longtime freelance client asked him to come in-house. But he's still able to hold firm to his approach, skipping meetings to code and logging on from the mountains of Colorado or a park in England.

Not all of us can be living the fantasy remote worker life. But we can get close.

Start by picking the right size company, says Michael Solomon, co-founder of 10x Management, an agency that represents tech talent. He says somewhere between 25 and 500 employees is ideal -- enough people to get the work done, but not too many to cause bottlenecks.

On the job, send your boss a weekly one-pager with the status of your projects, says Michael Gardon, who runs an online community about how to change your relationship with work. How far along are you on the assignment, and is your progress on track? What work did you wrap last week, and what are the upcoming milestones, or roadblocks you foresee? At the bottom, link to past installments.

You're demonstrating that "you're handling your world," says Gardon, who's based near Madison, Wis. "You're managing your boss's anxiety."

He used the approach while working at an insurance company several years back and found it scored him both more freedom and the opportunity to lead a high-profile project.

Of course, stay too far out of the fray and you'll have no idea what's going on. You could be at risk of a layoff when company strategy or industry dynamics change, or last in mind when that cool new assignment pops up.

"How would you even get your name out there as someone that could do it?" asks Joe Labianca, a professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst who studies power and politics at work.

To build trust with colleagues, you have to chat and swap information, at least a bit, he says. Zero in on a couple key people. When there's some internal debate swirling, hold off on revealing where you stand until the end, Labianca suggests, both freeing yourself from the constant back-and-forth and making your eventual vote more powerful, Joe Manchin-style.

Kate Martin, who recently retired from a decadeslong financial-technology career, realized she needed a strong network of colleagues if she wanted less interference from her bosses.

"Managers don't want you to go to them whining. . .about your problems," says the Wellesley, Mass., resident. At the first sign of trouble with a client, she'd convene a group of co-workers from around the company who had the tech chops to head off the issue. Then she'd go confidently to her manager, giving a heads-up on the situation and outlining her plan.

There are limits. Martin and others I spoke to for this column learned there's one role where you simply can't score much autonomy: being the boss. Accept the fact that you'll be pulled in a million directions -- or think about a new gig.

"You're like, oh my God, I can't do my job until these people go home at 5 o'clock," Martin says of an earlier stint managing a team. She switched back to being an individual contributor.

Try helping your boss first, suggests Paul Dircks, who works in financial services at Cityside Capital. In a recent job, he'd begin each Monday morning by reviewing the contours of his manager's schedule for the week. When might he be in meetings, or prepping for presentations?

Dircks would offer him recommendations, for example, a question to lob to company leaders or a report to give a client. Then, with the manager ready to go and tied up in his own busyness, Dircks could finally lose himself in the financial research and modeling he loved."I could just be creative," he says. "I felt like I earned that freedom."" [1]

1. Work & Life: Leave Me Alone to Do My Job --- How to free yourself from office politics and bureaucracy, and get back to work. Feintzeig, Rachel.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 23 Oct 2023: A.11.