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If you ask people where they go when they really need to get work done, very few will respond “the office.”
offices have become interruption factories.
The ability to be alone with your thoughts is, in fact, one of the key advantages of working remotely.
According to the research,* commuting is associated with an increased risk of obesity, insomnia, stress, neck and back pain, high blood pressure, and other stress-related ills such as heart attacks and depression, and even divorce.
2019 I recorded 199 hours of commute from mid-April through the end of the year. Meaning that I spent about 300 hours total.
The big transition with a distributed workforce is going from synchronous to asynchronous collaboration.
The new luxury is to shed the shackles of deferred living—to pursue your passions now, while you’re still working. What’s the point in wasting time daydreaming about how great it’ll be when you finally quit?
A stuffed backlog is a stale backlog.
you view those who work under you as capable adults who will push themselves to excel even when you’re not breathing down their necks, they’ll delight you in return.
“If we’re struggling with trust issues, it means we made a poor hiring decision.
The bottom line is that you shouldn’t hire people you don’t trust, or work for bosses who don’t trust you.
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.
Just because you’re working remotely doesn’t mean that it always has to be from your house.
Many big businesses get away with staggering amounts of inefficiency and bureaucracy and seem fine for years.
The whole point of innovation and disruption is doing things differently from those who came before you.
When everyone is sitting in the same office, it’s easy to fall into the habit of bothering anyone for anything at any time, with no regard for personal productivity. This is a key reason so many people get so little done in traditional office setups—too many interruptions.
First, it takes recognizing that not every question needs an answer immediately—there’s nothing more arrogant than taking up someone else’s time with a question you don’t need an answer to right now.
Questions you can wait hours to learn the answers to are fine to put in an email. Questions that require answers in the next few minutes can go into an instant message. For crises that truly merit a sky-is-falling designation, you can use that old-fashioned invention called the telephone.
In systems design there’s the notion of a Single Point of Failure, or SPoF. Much of the work required to achieve high reliability goes into finding and removing SPoFs.
We believe that these staples of work life—meetings and managers—are actually the greatest causes of work not getting done at the office. That, in fact, the further away you are from meetings and managers, the more work gets done.
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?”
the calendar week starting on Sunday in the United States, but on Monday in much of the rest of the world.
The job of a manager is not to herd cats, but to lead and verify the work. The trouble with that job description is that it requires knowledge of the work itself. You can’t effectively manage a team if you don’t know the intricacies of what they’re working on.
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.
As a manager, you have to accept the fact that people will make mistakes, but not intentionally, and that mistakes are the price of learning and self-sufficiency.
you must make sure that people have access, by default, to everything they need.
When something’s scarce, we tend to conserve, appreciate, respect, and value it. When something is abundant, we rarely think twice about how we use or spend it. Abundance and value are often opposites.
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.
Routine has a tendency to numb your creativity.
In thirty years’ time, as technology moves forward even further, people are going to look back and wonder why offices ever existed. —RICHARD BRANSON, FOUNDER OF VIRGIN GROUP*
