More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
What they’re trying to tell you is that they can’t get work done at work. The office during the day has become the last place people want to be when they really want to get work done.
The ability to be alone with your thoughts is, in fact, one of the key advantages of working remotely.
Where do you go when you really have to get work done? Your answer won’t be “the office in the afternoon.”
The luxury privilege of the next twenty years will be to leave the city. Not as its leashed servant in a suburb, but to wherever one wants.
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.
the key intellectual pursuits that are the primary fit for remote working—writing, programming, designing, advising, and customer support, to mention just a few—have little to do with the cutthroat margin wars of, say, manufacturing.
mis lecturas de julio
Legal, accounting, payroll, advertising—all essential business activities. Without outside people to perform these key functions you might not even be in business.
Only about three times a year does the whole company get together in the Chicago office.
Second, you’d be amazed how much quality collective thought can be captured using two simple tools: a voice connection and a shared screen.
So, coming into the office just means that people have to put on pants. There’s no guarantee of productivity.
We may as well admit that, yes, the home may contain more distractions and temptations than the average office cubicle. But having recognized the problem, we can work to do something about it. Keep
Just because you’re working remotely doesn’t mean that it always has to be from your house. You can work from a coffee shop or the library or even the park.
take advantage of remote work: • Accounting • Advertising • Consulting • Customer service • Design • Film production • Finance • Government • Hardware • Insurance • Legal • Marketing • Recruiting • Software
we’ve found that we need a good four hours of overlap to avoid collaboration delays and feel like a team.
We did it with Copenhagen working from 11am to 7pm (local time) and Chicago working from 8am to 5pm—just enough for the key four hours of intersection.
Before you know it, you’ll be so used to sharing a screen that starting a call without one will feel pointless. 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.
The work is what matters One of the secret benefits of hiring remote workers is that the work itself becomes the yardstick to judge someone’s performance.
We believe that these staples of work life—meetings and managers—are actually the greatest causes of work not getting done at the office.
meetings are major distractions. They require multiple people to drop whatever it is they’re doing and instead do something else.
have your coworkers on instant messenger or in Campfire, you receive a constant deluge of emails, and you enjoy letting the trolls rile you up on Reddit. But as good as all that is, it’s not a complete substitute for real, live human interaction.
even more satisfying interaction comes from spending time with your spouse, your children, your family, your friends, your neighbors:
At 37signals, we expect and encourage people to work forty hours per week on average.
That means getting a proper desk (height adjustable?), a proper chair (Humanscale Liberty?), and a proper screen (27 inches in high resolution!). All
office workers on average take between two and four thousand steps per day.)
So show them what they’re paying for. When they see the results of your efforts, they’ll feel a lot better about the relationship.
Fourth, 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.
Lastly, get the client involved and let them follow along. Make sure they feel that this is their project too.
Once you’ve formed good remote working habits, the lack of proximity between coworkers will start mattering so little that you’ll forget exactly where people are.
On writing well Being a good writer is an essential part of being a good remote worker.
Test project It doesn’t matter if someone is local or remote—we still want to judge their work, not their résumé. A lot of companies base their judgments
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.
if you do have a company that’s well established, you can always introduce remote workers to the mix. It won’t be as easy, but lots of things that are worth doing aren’t easy. It just takes commitment, discipline, and, most important, faith that it’s all going to work out. A
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.
Managers
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.
Would-be remote workers and managers have a lot to learn from how the open source software movement has conquered the commercial giants over the past decades. It’s a triumph of asynchronous collaboration and communication like few the world has ever seen.
Face-to-face conversations, and their first cousin, the meeting, can be great. When there’s a complicated matter to discuss, one requiring a lot of interaction to sort through, few things beat a face-to-face meeting.
Questions that could have been answered in a few minutes via email or the phone turn into forty-five minute in-person conversations. Once in a while these gabfests are fine, but when they become the norm—when they’re abundant—you’ve got a problem.
Getting away from the office is great for your productivity because nobody can disturb you in person. A boss or coworker might send you an email (which you can ignore for an hour) or they can try you on instant messenger (and find you “Away”), but they can’t just barge in on your flow. They need your permission.
your hangout doesn’t have to be a coffee shop. Try the library or a park or a co-working facility
you are not the problem; it’s the world you’re working in.
Motivation is pivotal to healthy lives and healthy companies. Make sure you’re minding it.
We mean working from home some days, a coffee shop another day, a different coffee shop another day, the library another day, etc.
look at the remote option as an opportunity to be influenced by more things and to take in more perspectives than you normally might if you had to be in the same place at the same time every day.
Gandhi’s model for change: “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”
the beginning of 2013:† “I’ve always said, telecommuting is one of the dumber ideas I’ve ever heard. Yes, there are some things you can do at home. But having a chat line is not the same thing as standing at the watercooler.”
drop us a line at remote@37signals.com. We read every email, and respond to most—promise.
