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Release yourself from the 9am-to-5pm mentality. It might take a bit of time and practice to get the hang of working asynchronously with your team, but soon you’ll see that it’s the work—not the clock—that matters.
The new luxury is to shed the shackles of deferred living—to pursue your passions now, while you’re still working.
In this world very few leaps of progress arrive exclusively as benefits.
It requires a new level of personal commitment to come up with—and stick with—an alternative work frame. That’s more responsibility than may be apparent at first, especially for natural procrastinators—and who isn’t from time to time?
A stuffed backlog is a stale backlog.
we need a clean plate before going up for seconds.
Most fears that have to do with people working remotely stem from a lack of trust.
We’ll let you in on a secret: If people really want to play video games or surf the web all day, they’re perfectly capable of doing so from their desks at the office.
If you run your ship with the conviction that everyone’s a slacker, your employees will put all their ingenuity into proving you right.
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. Remote work is very likely the least of your problems.
you shouldn’t hire people you don’t trust, or work for bosses who don’t trust you. If you’re not trusted to work remotely, why are you trusted to do anything at all?
Either learn to trust the people you’re working with or find some other people to work with.
you’ve got a job to do and you’re a responsible adult.
distractions can actually serve a purpose.
Instead of reaching for the video game controller or turning on soap operas, is it perhaps time to raise your voice and state the obvious? If you’re feeling like this, chances are others are too.
if you’re sitting in a dedicated room intended for work with the door closed, you stand a far better chance of staying on task. If that’s not possible, or not enough, you can always try working outside the house entirely.
Most people want to work, as long as it’s stimulating and fulfilling. And if you’re stuck in a dead-end job that has no prospects of being either, then you don’t just need a remote position—you need a new job.
security checklist
False equality benefits nobody.
you should be happy if the 800-pound gorilla in your industry is still clinging to the old ways of working. It will just make it that much easier to beat them.
organization of people getting work done?
culture is the spoken and unspoken values and actions of the organization.
The best cultures derive from actions people actually take, not the ones they write about in a mission statement.
reptilian resistance is not rational but deeply emotional—even
Sunk cost means that the money spent on the office is already spent. Whoever paid for it is not getting it back whether it’s being used or not. So, rationally, the only thing that matters regarding where to work is whether the office is a more productive place or not.
At 37signals, we’ve found that we need a good four hours of overlap to avoid collaboration delays and feel like a team.
Ironically, you’ll probably get far more done when only half of your workday overlaps with the rest of your team.
Much of the magic that people ascribe to sitting together in a room is really just this: being able to see and interact with the same stuff.
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.
Here’s the key: you need everything available to everyone at all times.
Put all the important stuff out in the open, and no one will have to chase that wild goose to get their work done.
weekly discussion thread
It’s also a lot harder to bullshit your peers than your boss.
When you can’t see someone all day long, the only thing you have to evaluate is the work.
instead of asking a remote worker “what did you do today?” you can now just say “show me what you did today.”
letting local people work remotely is a great first step toward seeing if remote will work for you.
Try it for at least three months. There’s going to be an adjustment period, so let everyone settle into their new rhythm. You can even start with two days remote, three days in the office.
Meetings should be like salt—sprinkled carefully to enhance a dish, not poured recklessly over every forkful. Too much salt destroys a dish. Too many meetings can destroy morale and motivation.
pulling people into a conference room or walking to their desks leaves no evidence of interruption, and it’s all of the synchronous “drop what you’re doing right now to entertain me!” variety.
find a co-working facility and share desks with others in your situation.
A manager’s natural instinct is to worry about his workers not getting enough work done, but the real threat is that too much will likely get done.
Sure, every now and then there’s the need for a short sprint, but, most of the time, the company is viewing what it does as a marathon. It’s crucial for everyone to pace themselves.
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.”
explore the Five Whys* (asking why to a problem five times in a row to find the root cause).
It feels good to be productive. If yesterday was a good day’s work, chances are you’ll stay on a roll. And if you can stay on a roll, everything else will probably take care of itself—including not working fr...
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variation is often preferable to adopting a single style. Your body wasn’t built to stay in the same position for eight hours a day, but it’s hard to switch things around in most normal office settings.
how many steps do you think you get stumbling out of bed and into your home office in the next room?
Now that you’ve saved time by skipping the commute, there really is no excuse for not finding the minutes to exercise
To give it a proper try, you need to set free at least an entire team—including
Trust is going to be the toughest thing to build early on,
