More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
The office during the day has become the last place people want to be when they really want to get work done.
That’s because offices have become interruption factories.
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.
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.
The big transition with a distributed workforce is going from synchronous to asynchronous collaboration.
The new luxury is the luxury of freedom and time.
Letting people work remotely is about promoting quality of life, about getting access to the best people wherever they are,
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. Squeezing slightly more words per hour out of a copywriter is not going to make anyone rich. Writing the best ad just very well might.
Worth counting too is the number of days you spend at the office emailing someone who sits only three desks away. People go to the office all the time and act as though they’re working remotely: emailing, instant messaging, secluding themselves to get work done. At the end of the day, was it really worth coming to the office for it?
Most fears that have to do with people working remotely stem from a lack of trust.
coming into the office just means that people have to put on pants. There’s no guarantee of productivity.
“If we’re struggling with trust issues, it means we made a poor hiring decision. If a team member isn’t producing good results or can’t manage their own schedule and workload, we aren’t going to continue to work with that person.
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.
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.
Most people want to work, as long as it’s stimulating and fulfilling.
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.
not every question needs an answer immediately
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.
There’s something primal about being able to see your army, about having them close enough that you can shout “Now!!” like Mel Gibson did in Braveheart, and watch them pick up their spears in unison.
So if you’re fighting against someone’s fear of losing control, you have to start small and show that the world doesn’t fall apart if you start working from home on Wednesdays.
Thou shalt overlap
Working remotely, if it is to be successful, usually requires some overlap with the hours your coworkers are putting in.
At 37signals, we’ve found that we need a good four hours of overlap to avoid collaboration delays and feel like a team.
At 37signals we’ve institutionalized this through a weekly discussion thread with the subject “What have you been working on?” Everyone chimes in with a few lines about what they’ve done over the past week and what’s intended for the next week. It’s not a precise, rigorous estimation process, and it doesn’t attempt to deal with coordination. It simply aims to make everyone feel like they’re in the same galley and not their own little rowboat.
We all have a natural instinct to avoid letting our team down, so when that commitment becomes visual, it gets reinforced.
progress is a joy best shared with coworkers.
As a manager, you can directly evaluate the work—the thing you’re paying this person for—and ignore all the stuff that doesn’t actually matter.
When it’s all about the work, it’s clear who in the company is pulling their weight and who isn’t.
Try it for at least three months. There’s going to be an adjustment period, so let everyone settle into their new rhythm.
the further away you are from meetings and managers, the more work gets done.
Managers are good. They’re essential. But management, like meetings, should be used sparingly. Constantly asking people what they’re working on prevents them from actually doing the work they’re describing. And since managers are often the people who call the meetings, their very presence leads to less productive workdays.
when management is forced to manage remotely using email, Basecamp, IM, and chat, its intervention is much more purposeful and compressed, and we can just get on with the actual work.
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.
What a manager needs to establish is a culture of reasonable expectations.
we expect and encourage people to work forty hours per week on average. There are no hero awards for putting in more than that.
every now and then there’s the need for a short sprint, but, most of the time, the company is viewin...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
To give it a proper try, you need to set free at least an entire team—including project management and key stakeholders! And then you need to give it longer than it takes to break in a new pair of shoes.
Stay on top of communications and you’ll reap the benefits.
When the bulk of your communication happens via email and the like, it doesn’t take much for bad blood to develop unless everyone is making their best effort to the contrary.
a manager of remote workers needs to make an example of even the small stuff—things like snippy comments or passive-aggressive responses.
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.
don’t look at remote work as a way to skimp on salaries;
“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.
It’s easy to be a manager when all you have to do is manage the chairs.
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.
Intrinsic motivation: Programmers working on open source code usually do it for love, not money.
If you treat remote workers like second-class citizens, you’re all going to have a bad time.
As a company owner or manager, you need to create and maintain a level playing field—one on which those in and out of the office stand as equals.
