Remote Quotes

“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. A screencast is basically just a recording of your screen that others can play back later as a movie. It can be used in several ways, including for presenting the latest sales figures or elaborating on a new marketing strategy.”
― Jason Fried, Remote: Office Not Required

“Even short commutes stab at your happiness. 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. But let’s say we ignore the overwhelming evidence that commuting doesn’t do a body good. Pretend it isn’t bad for the environment either. Let”
― Jason Fried, Remote: Office Not Required

“That’s the great irony of letting passionate people work from home. 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. And because the manager isn’t sitting across from his worker anymore, he can’t look in the person’s eyes and see burnout.”
― Jason Fried, Remote: Office Not Required

“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.”
― Jason Fried, Remote: Office Not Required

“Meaningful work, creative work, thoughtful work, important work—this type of effort takes stretches of uninterrupted time to get into the zone. But in the modern office such long stretches just can’t be found. Instead, it’s just one interruption after another.”
― Jason Fried, Remote: Office Not Required

“Security is a big and serious deal, but it’s also largely a solved problem. That’s why the average person is quite willing to do their banking online and why nobody is afraid of entering their credit card number on Amazon. At 37signals, we’ve devised a simple security checklist all employees must follow: 1. All computers must use hard drive encryption, like the built-in FileVault feature in Apple’s OS X operating system. This ensures that a lost laptop is merely an inconvenience and an insurance claim, not a company-wide emergency and a scramble to change passwords and worry about what documents might be leaked. 2. Disable automatic login, require a password when waking from sleep, and set the computer to automatically lock after ten inactive minutes. 3. Turn on encryption for all sites you visit, especially critical services like Gmail. These days all sites use something called HTTPS or SSL. Look for the little lock icon in front of the Internet address. (We forced all 37signals products onto SSL a few years back to help with this.) 4. Make sure all smartphones and tablets use lock codes and can be wiped remotely. On the iPhone, you can do this through the “Find iPhone” application. This rule is easily forgotten as we tend to think of these tools as something for the home, but inevitably you’ll check your work email or log into Basecamp using your tablet. A smartphone or tablet needs to be treated with as much respect as your laptop. 5. Use a unique, generated, long-form password for each site you visit, kept by password-managing software, such as 1Password.§ We’re sorry to say, “secretmonkey” is not going to fool anyone. And even if you manage to remember UM6vDjwidQE9C28Z, it’s no good if it’s used on every site and one of them is hacked. (It happens all the time!) 6. Turn on two-factor authentication when using Gmail, so you can’t log in without having access to your cell phone for a login code (this means that someone who gets hold of your login and password also needs to get hold of your phone to login). And keep in mind: if your email security fails, all other online services will fail too, since an intruder can use the “password reset” from any other site to have a new password sent to the email account they now have access to. Creating security protocols and algorithms is the computer equivalent of rocket science, but taking advantage of them isn’t. Take the time to learn the basics and they’ll cease being scary voodoo that you can’t trust. These days, security for your devices is just simple good sense, like putting on your seat belt.”
― Jason Fried, Remote: Office Not Required

“Say you spend thirty minutes driving in rush hour every morning and another fifteen getting to your car and into the office. That’s 1.5 hours a day, 7.5 hours per week, or somewhere between 300 and 400 hours per year, give or take holidays and vacation. Four hundred hours is exactly the amount of programmer time we spent building Basecamp, our most popular product. Imagine what you could do with 400 extra hours a year. Commuting isn’t just bad for you, your relationships, and the environment—it’s bad for business.”
― Jason Fried, Remote: Office Not Required

“you’d be amazed how much quality collective thought can be captured using two simple tools: a voice connection and a shared screen.”
― Jason Fried, Remote: Office Not Required

“soon you’ll see that it’s the work—not the clock—that matters.”
― Jason Fried, Remote: Office Not Required

“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.”
― Jason Fried, Remote: Office Not Required

“Commuting isn’t just bad for you, your relationships, and the environment—it’s bad for business. And it doesn’t have to be that way.”
― Jason Fried, Remote: Office Not Required

“Forcing everyone into the office every day is an organizational SPoF.”
― Jason Fried, Remote: Office Not Required

“Meetings should be great—they’re opportunities for a group of people sitting together around a table to directly communicate. That should be a good thing. And it is, but only if treated as a rare delicacy.”
― Jason Fried, Remote: Office Not Required

“long commutes make you fat, stressed, and miserable. Even short commutes stab at your happiness.”
― Jason Fried, Remote: Office Not Required

“Forcing everyone into the office every day is an organizational SPoF (Single Point of Failure). If the office loses power or Internet or air conditioning, it's no longer functional as a place to do work. If a company doesn't have any training or infrastructure to work around that, it means it's going to be unavailable to its customers.”
― David Heinemeier Hansson, Remote: Office Not Required

“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*”
― David Heinemeier Hansson, Remote: Office Not Required

“The big transition with a distributed workforce is going from synchronous to asynchronous collaboration”
― Jason Fried, Remote: Office Not Required

“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.”
― Jason Fried, Remote: Office Not Required

“There are two fundamental ways not to be ignored at work. One is to make noise. The other is to make progress, to do exceptional work.”
― Jason Fried, Remote: Office Not Required

“The scarcity of such face time in remote working situations makes it seem that much more valuable. And as a result, something interesting happens: people don’t waste the time. An awareness of scarcity makes them use it wisely.”
― Jason Fried, Remote: Office Not Required

“There’s simply no getting around it: in hiring for remote-working positions, managers should be ruthless in filtering out poor writers.”
― Jason Fried, Remote: Office Not Required

“If you’re not trusted to work remotely, why are you trusted to do anything at all? If you’re held in such low regard, why are you able to talk to customers, write copy for an ad, design the next product, assess insurance claims, or do tax returns?”
― Jason Fried, Remote: Office Not Required

“The ability to be alone with your thoughts is, in fact, one of the key advantages of working remotely.”
― Jason Fried, Remote: Office Not Required

“If you’re pitching your boss to let you work from home a few days a week, a common rebuff is how envious your coworkers would be if you were granted this special privilege. Why, it simply wouldn’t be fair! We all need to be equally, miserably unproductive at the office and suffer in unity!”
― Jason Fried, Remote: Office Not Required

“The ability to be alone with your thoughts is, in fact, one of the key advantages of working remotely. When you work on your own, far away from the buzzing swarm at headquarters, you can settle into your own productive zone. You can actually get work done—the same work that you couldn’t get done at work! Yes,”
― Jason Fried, Remote: Office Not Required

“That’s because offices have become interruption factories. A busy office is like a food processor—it chops your day into tiny bits. Fifteen minutes here, ten minutes there, twenty here, five there.”
― Jason Fried, Remote: Office Not Required

“Past performance is no guarantee of future results.”
― Jason Fried, Remote: Office Not Required

“One of the secret benefits of hiring remote workers is that the work itself becomes the yardstick to judge someone’s performance.”
― Jason Fried, Remote: Office Not Required

“So, coming into the office just means that people have to put on pants. There’s no guarantee of productivity.”
― Jason Fried, Remote: Office Not Required

“Given that, you’re only going to frustrate yourself and everyone else if you summon the brain trust too frequently for those Kodak moments. Because either it means giving up on the last great idea (the one that still requires follow-up) or it means further stuffing the backlog of great ideas. A stuffed backlog is a stale backlog.”
― Jason Fried, Remote: Office Not Required