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It’s incredibly hard to get meaningful work done when your workday has been shredded into work moments.
The ability to be alone with your thoughts is, in fact, one of the key advantages of working remotely.
long commutes make you fat, stressed, and miserable.
commuting is associated with an increased risk of obesity, insomnia, stress, neck and back pain, high blood pressure, and other stress-related ills
The big transition with a distributed workforce is going from synchronous to asynchronous collaboration.
The new luxury is the luxury of freedom and time. Once you’ve had a taste of that life, no corner office or fancy chef will be able to drag you back.
Letting people work remotely is about promoting quality of life, about getting access to the best people wherever they are, and all the other benefits we’ll enumerate. That it may also end up reducing costs spent on offices and result in fewer-but-more-productive workers is the gravy, not the turkey.
if you can’t let your employees work from home out of fear they’ll slack off without your supervision, you’re a babysitter, not a manager.
Sometimes, distractions can actually serve a purpose. Like the proverbial canary in the coal mine, they warn us—when we feel ourselves regularly succumbing to them—that our work is not well defined, or our tasks are menial, or the whole project we’re engaged in is fundamentally pointless.
Working remotely isn’t without complication or occasional sacrifice. It’s about making things better for more people more of the time.
Many big businesses get away with staggering amounts of inefficiency and bureaucracy and seem fine for years. Once a corporate behemoth has built a big fat moat around a herd of cash cows, who cares how many cow herders they have or how little they get done?
The best cultures derive from actions people actually take, not the ones they write about in a mission statement.
We’ve all sat on a conference call and spent minutes describing something that would take seconds to show.
Meetings should be like salt—sprinkled carefully to enhance a dish, not poured recklessly over every forkful.
Too many meetings can destroy morale and motivation.
If you’re calling a meeting, you better be sure pulling seven people away from their work for an hour is worth seven hours of lost productivity.
Cabin fever is real, and remote workers are more susceptible to it than those forced into an office.
What a manager needs to establish is a culture of reasonable expectations.
You need solid writers to make remote work work, and a solid command of your home language is key.
Keeping a solid team together for a long time is a key to peak performance.
Remember, doing great work with great people is one of the most durable sources of happiness we humans can tap into.
That’s one of the key challenges of remote work: keeping everyone’s outlook healthy and happy.
There’s simply no getting around it: in hiring for remote-working positions, managers should be ruthless in filtering out poor writers.
The job of a manager is not to herd cats, but to lead and verify the work.
You can’t effectively manage a team if you don’t know the intricacies of what they’re working on.
What is the case is that people are often scared to make a decision because they work in an environment of retribution and blame.
mistakes are the price of learning and self-sufficiency.
If you let them, humans have an amazing power to live up to your high expectations of reasonableness and responsibility.
In reality, it’s overwork, not underwork, that’s the real enemy in a successful remote-working environment.
The fact is, it’s easy to turn work into your predominant hobby.
The best workers over the long term are people who put in sustainable hours.
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.
If a worker’s motivation is slumping, it’s probably because the work is weakly defined or appears pointless, or because others on the team are acting like tools.
It’s so hard to predict tipping points that most people find it easier to pretend they’ll never happen. But a tipping point for remote work is coming.
