Remote: Office Not Required

Perspective

By and large, this is a book about convincing companies to embrace remote work. If you’re already a true believer, there’s not a ton of new stuff here. Unfortunately, I was reading this to get ideas for being a more collaborative remote worker and I didn’t get a ton out of it. Probably the chief takeaway is that effective remote work means more deliberate communication, tacit information doesn’t flow effortlessly.

Takeaways

This book’s view on collaboration is that:
- It’s better in-person
- You don’t need to do it all that often
- It’s different than “Serious Work”
I’m stifling my creativity by falling into routines
I need to work on communicating intentionally and finding that “forward motion” of information
I need to look for ways to speed up figuring out the decision-making style of a team sooner so I can use my own agency.

Highlights

Highlight (Yellow) and Note | Location 152

Meaningful work, creative work, thoughtful work, important work—this type of effort takes stretches of uninterrupted time to get into the zone. But in the modern office such long stretches just can’t be found. Instead, it’s just one interruption after another. The ability to be alone with your thoughts is, in fact, one of the key advantages of working remotely.

Similar to Deep Work

Highlight (Yellow) | Location 196

The big transition with a distributed workforce is going from synchronous to asynchronous collaboration.

Highlight (Yellow) | Location 356

Let’s assume for a second that’s true: Breakthrough ideas only happen when people meet face-to-face. Still, the question remains: How many breakthrough ideas can a company actually digest? Far fewer than you imagine. Most work is not coming up with The Next Big Thing. Rather, it’s making better the thing you already thought of six months—or six years—ago. It’s the work of work.

The idea that companies can’t actually handle a lot of breakthrough ideas was one I hadn’t thought about much, but feels true. On the few teams I’ve been on that have done retros for years, they all fall into this place where all the low-hanging fruit has been picked and everything else is big so we’ll make action items and feel bad that we didn’t get anywhere. Unfortunately, this leaves me with the impression that, yes big ideas mostly happen when you’re co-located, so make that happen sometimes.

Highlight (Yellow) | Location 502

If anything, having people work remotely forces you to forgo the illusion that building a company culture is just about in-person social activities. Now you can get on with the actual work of defining and practicing it instead.

Culture is more than social activities. Agreed. Now what is it exactly?

Highlight (Yellow) | Location 607

Thou shalt overlap

Highlight (Yellow) | Location 633

Screen sharing doesn’t require a webcam—it’s more like sitting next to each other in front of a computer or a projector. It’s about collaborating on the work itself, not about reading facial expressions (although that too has a time and place). This works just as well for asynchronous collaboration in slow time. When someone wants to demonstrate a new feature they’re working on at 37signals, often the easiest way is to record a screencast and narrate the experience.

Screencasts keep coming up as a way to do effective async communication. I guess that’s true from a pure knowledge transfer POV, but doesn’t help with collaboration

Highlight (Yellow) | Location 648

Here’s the key: you need everything available to everyone at all times. If Pratik in London has to wait five hours for someone in Chicago to come online in order to know what he should work on next, that’s half a workday lost.

Highlight (Yellow) | Location 662

The virtual water cooler

Highlight (Yellow) | Location 678

Forward motion When you and your coworkers are sitting in the same place, it’s easy to feel that you’re up to speed on what’s going on in the company. You stop and chat with office mates while making coffee in the morning, and over lunch you discuss the latest progress. There’s just a constant, even tacit flow of information running through the office. Or at least it feels like that, and that feeling is comforting. Working remotely doesn’t automatically create that flow. Sure, there might be a project manager who checks in with everyone via email or chat, but that just gives her an idea what’s going on. To instill a sense of company cohesion and to share forward motion, everyone needs to feel that they’re in the loop.

YES. This. Moving from open office to working out of my basement was challenging because my brain was addicted to the buzz. I also kinda hate picking my own music.

Highlight (Yellow) | Location 696

When you can’t see someone all day long, the only thing you have to evaluate is the work.

This is interesting. The meritocracy appeals to me, but it feels kind of BS. Very very few people are good at evaulating programming work and it takes an enormous amount of time to do half-heartedly. So what we’re really measuring is that “stuff seems to get done”, which is only a small step from “stuff seems to happen over there” in my mind.

Highlight (Yellow) | Location 796

One way to help set a healthy boundary is to encourage employees to think of a “good day’s work.” Look at your progress toward the end of the day and ask yourself: “Have I done a good day’s work?” Answering that question is liberating. Often, if the answer is an easy “yes,” you can stop working feeling satisfied that something important got accomplished, if not entirely “done.” And should the answer be “no,” you can treat it as an off-day and explore the Five Whys

I really like this attitude. I have a hard time with it personally because I tracked hours worked per project for 15 years. And at some level, I know I’m really, really expensive and I want to deliver exceptional bang for your buck.

Highlight (Yellow) | Location 970

If anything, the human connection is even more important when hiring remote workers because it has to be stronger to survive the distance. When the bulk of your communication happens via email and the like, it doesn’t take much for bad blood to develop unless everyone is making their best effort to the contrary.

Highlight (Yellow) | Location 988

The old adage still applies: No assholes allowed. But for remote work, you need to extend it to no asshole-y behavior allowed, no drama allowed, no bad vibes allowed.

No bad days? I feel like this excludes a lot of people who are just snarky and cynical, too. Maybe it’s worded poorly

Highlight (Yellow) | Location 993

edgy design all happen at the intersection of professional skill and life experience.

Highlight (Yellow) | Location 1005

Magic and creativity thrive in diverse cultures. When you’re seeking remote workers, you have to do even more to encourage

Highlight (Yellow) | Location 1023

The main way you’ll communicate is through the work itself. If the quality just isn’t there, it’ll be apparent from the second the person starts—and you’ll have wasted everyone’s time by hiring on circumstantial evidence. Asking to see work product is pretty easy for positions with natural portfolios, such as designer, programmer, or writer. For positions that don’t lend themselves to portfolio accumulation, you can simply pose real-world problems and have the person answer them as part of the application.

Highlight (Yellow) | Location 1042

I can pay people from Kansas less than people from New York, you should think I can get amazing people from Kansas and make them feel valued and well-compensated if I pay them New York salaries.

Highlight (Yellow) | Location 1079

Being a good writer is an essential part of being a good remote worker.

Is there a talk-idea here?

Highlight (Yellow) | Location 1105

The best way we’ve found to accurately judge work is to hire the person to do a little work before we take the plunge and hire them to do a lot of work. Call it “pre-hiring.” Pre-hiring takes the form of a one- or two-week mini-project. We usually pay around $1,500 for the mini-project. We never ask people to work for free. If we wouldn’t do it for free, why would we ask someone else to do it?

Highlight (Yellow) | Location 1117

Even though they’ll be working remotely, it makes sense, before making the final hiring decision, to meet them in person. This allows you to get a feel for their character. Are they polite? Do they show up on time? Are they fundamentally decent? Do they treat people well? What does the rest of the team think? You can tell a lot from a quick face-to-face.

This feels hypocritical. I get it, but you can’t sit here and tell me “judge the work, judge the work” and then say this

Highlight (Yellow) | Location 1138

As a contractor, you have to be able to set a reasonable schedule, show good progress at regular intervals, and convert an often fuzzy definition of the work into a deliverable. All these are skills perfectly suited for remote work.

Highlight (Yellow) | Location 1191

The fact is, it’s just easier to work remotely with people you’ve met in so-called “real life”—folks you’ve shared laughs and meals with.

Highlight (Yellow) | Location 1223

To translate: working on exciting problems you’re personally interested in means you don’t need a manager breathing down your neck and constantly looking over your shoulder.

Drive

Highlight (Yellow) | Location 1225

Anyone who’s interested in helping out can because the information is all out in the open. You can self-select into participating,

Why doesn’t this work better at Test Double? I feel like all these things are true, but Todd and Justin still do too much. Are we too distracted with client work?

Highlight (Yellow) | Location 1237

There’s also the annoyance of having every debate end with “John and I talked about this in the office yesterday and decided that your idea isn’t going to work.” Fuck that.

Highlight (Yellow) | Location 1241

People with the power to change things need to feel the same hurt as those who merely have to deal with it.

It doesn’t feel realistic that we can coax our clients into embracing remote too.

Highlight (Yellow) | Location 1260

The goal here is really just to keep a consistent, open line of communication. These quick calls prevent issues and concerns from piling up without being addressed. Morale and motivation are fragile things,

Highlight (Yellow) | Location 1268

Getting stuff done while working remotely depends, first, on being able to make progress at all hours. It’s no good twiddling your thumbs for three hours

Highlight (Yellow) | Location 1273

Start by empowering everyone to make decisions on their own. If the company is full of people whom nobody trusts to make decisions without layers of managerial review, then the company is full of the wrong people.

I need to improve on this balance. My initial inclination is to avoid stepping on toes until the team knows me better. But it does involve a lot of wait loops while I seek out feedback

Highlight (Yellow) | Location 1282

Part of the problem is the occasional pride that managers take in being Mr. or Ms. Roadblock. Having to be asked—even courted—gives them a certain perverse satisfaction. Do not discount how powerful this syndrome can be.

Highlight (Yellow) | Location 1286

First, everyone gets a company credit card and is told to “spend wisely.” There’s no begging to spend money on needed equipment to get the work done, and there are no expense reports to fill out (just forward all receipts to an internal email address in case of an audit). Second, workers at 37signals needn’t ask permission to go on vacation or specify how much time they’ll take. We tell them: just be reasonable, put it on the calendar, and coordinate with your coworkers.

Highlight (Yellow) | Location 1301

The fact is, it’s easy to turn work into your predominant hobby.

Uh-oh

Highlight (Yellow) | Location 1304

This might sound like an employer’s dream: workers putting in a ton of extra hours for no additional pay! But it’s not. If work is all-consuming, the worker is far more likely to burn out. This is true even if the person loves what he does. Perhaps especially if he loves what he does, since it won’t seem like a problem until it’s too late.

For years I’ve heard this vibe of burnout is inevitable. Now I’m scared that it sneaks up on you.

Highlight (Yellow) | Location 1325

This is where remote working shines. When most conversations happen virtually—on the phone, via email, in Basecamp, over instant message, or in a Skype video chat—people actually look forward to these special opportunities for a face-to-face. The scarcity of such face time in remote working situations makes it seem that much more valuable. And as a result, something interesting happens: people don’t waste the time. An awareness of scarcity makes them use it wisely.

Highlight (Yellow) | Location 1340

Without clear boundaries and routines, things can get murky.

Highlight (Yellow) | Location 1353

Another hack is to divide the day into chunks like Catch-up, Collaboration, and Serious Work.

ACK. Why am I the only person that thinks Collaboration IS Serious Work???

Highlight (Yellow) | Location 1376

A more plausible, human strategy is to separate the two completely by using different devices: simply reserve one computer for work and another for fun.

Highlight (Yellow) | Location 1409

Rather, the only reliable way to muster motivation is by encouraging people to work on the stuff they like and care about, with people they like and care about. There are no shortcuts.

Highlight (Yellow) | Location 1416

If you’re working remotely and find yourself taking a week to do a day’s work, that’s a flashing red light and it should be heeded. The sooner you act on that message, the better. But that’s rarely how it goes. Most people suffering from a lack of motivation will blame themselves first. “Ah, it’s because I’m such a procrastinator!” “Why can’t I just get myself together?”

Highlight (Yellow) | Location 1455

Routine has a tendency to numb your creativity. Waking up at the same time, taking the same transportation, traveling the same route, plopping down in the same chair at the same desk in the same office over and over and over isn’t exactly a prescription for inspiration.

I need to get out more

Highlight (Yellow) | Location 1498

There are two fundamental ways not to be ignored at work. One is to make noise. The other is to make progress, to do exceptional work. Fortunately for remote workers, “the work” is the measure that matters.

I’m not sure this works. Anectdotally speaking, I’ve seen and experienced being the exceptional remote worker and if you’re in the minority, you’ll be ignored by default

Highlight (Yellow) | Location 1515

a tipping point for remote work is coming. It may not be that the office completely ceases to exist, but its importance has peaked.

On reflection: Is this whole book an argument against offices, instead of for distributed teams?