Remote

If you ask people where they go when they really need to get work done, very few will respond “the office.”

The ability to be alone with your thoughts is, in fact, one of the key advantages of working remotely.

The big transition with a distributed workforce is going from synchronous to asynchronous collaboration. Not only do we not have to be in the same spot to work together, we also don’t have to work at the same time to work together.

Your life no longer needs to be divided into arbitrary phases of work and retirement. You can blend the two for fun and profit—design a better lifestyle that makes work enjoyable because it’s not the only thing on the menu.

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.

Letting people work remotely is about promoting quality of life, about getting access to the best people wherever they are,

coming into the office just means that people have to put on pants. There’s no guarantee of productivity.

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.

you shouldn’t hire people you don’t trust, or work for bosses who don’t trust you.

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.

Culture isn’t a foosball table. It’s not a paintball outing in the forest. It’s not even the Christmas party where Steve got so drunk that everyone had a good story for the rest of the year. That’s people hanging out and having a good time. No, culture is the spoken and unspoken values and actions of the organization.

not every question needs an answer immediately—there’s nothing more arrogant than taking up someone else’s time with a question you don’t need an answer to right now. That means realizing that not everything is equally important.

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.

avoid locking up important stuff in a single person’s computer or inbox. Put all the important stuff out in the open,

you, the remote worker, are in control of your social interaction—when it happens and how much of it you need. At first it might simply seem like a waste of time, especially if you’re not already used to reading Reddit on the side, but it’s a quality waste of time with your coworkers. We all need that.

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.

When meetings are the norm, the first resort, the go to tool to discuss, debate, and solve every problem, they become overused and we grow numb to the outcome. 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.

You need solid writers to make remote work work, and a solid command of your home language is key.

the human connection is even more important when hiring remote workers because it has to be stronger to survive the distance.

Being a good writer is an essential part of being a good remote worker. When most arguments are settled over email or chat or discussion boards, you’d better show up equipped for the task.

Working remotely blows a big fat hole in that style of management. If I can’t see workers come in and leave their desks, how on earth can I make sure they’re actually working? Or so goes the naïve thinking of a manager of chairs.

If you treat remote workers like second-class citizens, you’re all going to have a bad time. The lower the ratio of remote worker to office worker, the more likely this is to happen.

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.

Start by empowering everyone to make decisions on their own. 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.

you might think that the major risk in setting your people free is that they’ll turn into lazy, unproductive slackers. In reality, it’s overwork, not underwork, that’s the real enemy in a successful remote-working environment

If work is all-consuming, the worker is far more likely to burn out. This is true even if the person loves what he does. Perhaps especially if he loves what he does, since it won’t seem like a problem until it’s too late.

make face-to-face harder and less frequent and you’ll see the value of these interactions go up, not down.

Motivation is the fuel of intellectual work. You can get several days’ worth of work completed in one motivation-turboed afternoon. Or, when you’re motivation starved, you can waste a week getting a day’s worth of work done.