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show them work often. This is the best way to chip away at a client’s natural situational anxiety.
be very available. Since you can’t meet face-to-face, you better return phone calls, emails, instant messages, etc. This is basic business stuff, but it’s tenfold more important when you’re working remotely.
Stay on top of communications and you’ll reap the benefits.
Set up a space online where you can use a shared schedule, show them work in progress, ask them for feedback, listen to their suggestions, and assign them some tasks (or let them assign some to you).
You need solid writers to make remote work work,
Given how hard it is to find great people, you should be doing your utmost to keep them. That sounds self-evident, yet plenty of companies are willing to let their stars disappear when life forces them to move. That’s just plain dumb.
Keeping a solid team together for a long time is a key to peak performance. People grow closer and more comfortable with each other, and consequently do even better work. Meanwhile, rookie teams make rookie mistakes.
doing great work with great people is one of the most durable sources of happiness we humans can tap into. Stick with it.
Remember: sentiments are infectious, whether good or bad.
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.
consultants to show you reports or results, programmers to show you code, designers to show you designs, marketers to show you campaigns, and so on and so forth.
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
don’t look at remote work as a way to skimp on salaries; you’ll save on lots of other things.
as a remote worker, you shouldn’t let employers get away with paying you less just because you live in a cheaper city. “Equal pay for equal work”
It’s a lot harder to fake your way as a remote worker. As the opportunities to schmooze in the office decrease, the focus on the work itself increases.
Remote work pulls back the curtain and exposes what was always the case, but not always appreciated or apparent: great remote workers are simply great workers.
The mental shortcut usually goes: In the office from 9–5 + nice = must be a good worker.
Remote work speeds up the process of getting the wrong people off the bus and the right people on board.†
Focus on clarity first, style second. Here are a few books to start with if you’re serious about becoming a better writer:
never ask people to work for free. If we wouldn’t do it for free, why would we ask someone else to do it?
We don’t believe in asking people to solve puzzles. Solving real problems is a lot more interesting—and enlightening.
we often let the candidate go out with their potential team coworkers instead of their manager.
If there’s an ideal training regimen for remote workers, it’s being a contractor for a while.
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.
Part of the appeal of contract work is that if your client is a bozo, then at least you don’t have to work with them forever. Once the contract is up, you’re free to try another fish in the sea.
Someone who’s had a chance to taste the dysfunction of several companies as a contractor is more likely to appreciate a company that actually gets remote work.
a company cool with remote work is just cool in general.
If you treat remote work as a low-risk experiment, you’ll be able to iterate, adjust, and try a variety of things to see what works best.
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.
it means they should know what needs to be done, understand why delays might happen, be creative with solutions to sticky problems, divide the work into manageable chunks, and help put the right people on the right projects.
a clued-in manager does not need to manage the chairs. When or where someone is doing the work is irrelevant most of the time.
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.
If the company must make a mad dash to meet a deadline—with the unreasonable hours and pressure that implies—it can be nice to slave through the ordeal together.
Building complex software is difficult enough as it is.
working on exciting problems you’re personally interested in means you don’t need a manager breathing down your neck
So when in doubt or down about hitting a roadblock with remote work, just think, At least I’m not trying to corral and merge the work of 3,000 people across the globe on a single project. You’ll instantly feel better about the modest scope of your problem.
People with the power to change things need to feel the same hurt as those who merely have to deal with it.
it’s a good idea to check in a bit more frequently with remote workers
Getting stuff done while working remotely depends, first, on being able to make progress at all hours.
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.
people are often scared to make a decision because they work in an environment of retribution and blame.
If you let them, humans have an amazing power to live up to your high expectations of reasonableness and responsibility.
In the same way that you don’t want a gang of slackers, you also don’t want a band of supermen. The best workers over the long term are people who put in sustainable hours.
Forty hours a week on average usually does the trick.
If you don’t have to be anywhere at a certain time, you can easily end up lying in bed until close to noon, just casually working away on the laptop.
people need some sort of routine—something they can stick to at least most of the time.
it can also be helpful to separate the clothes you wear, depending whether you’re in work or play mode.
Simply looking presentable is usually enough.
Another hack is to divide the day into chunks like Catch-up, Collaboration, and Serious Work.
