I became a fan of David Heinemeier since I watched the legendary talk Snakes and Rubies (2005) where he debates web frameworks with the creator of the Django Framework. That’s old tech now, but it’s a highly recommended talk for those interested in how dynamic web frameworks came to be.
This book was on my radar for years. Finally, this year I read it and started to work remotely. Here some bits I loved.
Work doesn’t happen at work
The biggest difference I noticed right away when I started working remotely was a rise in my productivity. David emphasizes this thorough the book.
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.
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!
Most of the time, asynchronous collaboration works just fine
There is no need to always have access to your coworker at any time. If you coordinated the work properly, coworkers don’t need to be at the same place or work at the same time.
A company that is efficiently built around remote work doesn’t even have to have a set schedule. This is especially important when it comes to creative work. If you can’t get into the zone, there’s rarely much that can force you into it. When face time isn’t a requirement, the best strategy is often to take some time away and get back to work when your brain is firing on all cylinders.
A flexible schedule means more room for fun
One of the best things about remote work is the ability to better integrate activities into your life that you love, like traveling.
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.
Trust
People generally are going to behave according to how much you trust and how you treat them. Micromanage them, and they will give you more reasons to micro-manage. Personally, I’ve noticed how much efficient work gets done in a team where trust dominates and where there is no micro-management.
The bottom line is that you shouldn’t hire people you don’t trust, or work for bosses who don’t trust you.
Don’t imitate big business!
Lots of books about entrepreneurship, as well as my own experience as a client, thought me that often a business or even a team starts to lose it’s magic when you put in operations as big businesses do.
Many big businesses get away with staggering amounts of inefficiency and bureaucracy and seem fine for years. Once a corporate behemoth has built a big fat moat around a herd of cash cows, who cares how many cow herders they have or how little they get done?
That’s a roundabout way of saying that looking to big business for the latest productivity tips is probably not the smartest thing to do. The whole point of innovation and disruption is doing things differently from those who came before you. Unless you do that, you won’t stand a chance.
So it really doesn’t matter that Multinational, Inc., forbids its employees to work from home. In fact, you should be happy if the 800-pound gorilla in your industry is still clinging to the old ways of working. It will just make it that much easier to beat them.
The same is true if you actually do work at a big business. Big businesses love to look at what each other is doing too. But if you hide in the herd, you’re not likely to get ahead of the pack.
All you need is confidence—confidence that you see a smarter way of working even when everyone else in your industry is sticking to business as usual. That’s how great ideas evolve from being fringe crazy to common knowledge. Taking advantage of working remotely is one of those ideas. It’ll be common knowledge and practice soon enough, but why wait?
Sync the team
When everyone knows what’s up, it is easy to move forward.
Working remotely doesn’t automatically create that flow. Sure, there might be a project manager who checks in with everyone via email or chat, but that just gives her an idea what’s going on. To instill a sense of company cohesion and to share forward motion, everyone needs to feel that they’re in the loop.
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 hiring, look at candidates work
Most tech companies like to use fancy quizzes to filter out candidates and find what they think are the best people. But being good at riddles and quizzes doesn’t mean being a productive part of a team and getting work done.
This is an important aspect of recruiting in general, but it’s even more important for hiring remote workers. 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 you’ll have wasted everyone’s time by hiring on circumstantial evidence.
Asking to see work product is pretty easy for positions with natural portfolios, such as designer, programmer, or writer. For positions that don’t lend themselves to portfolio accumulation, you can simply pose real-world problems and have the person answer them as part of the application.
Compensate fairly
As a company owner looking for a way to reduce payroll, it’s tempting to recruit from places with a lower cost of living. In some industries with low margins that approach may well be worth pursuing, but it’s not the interesting part of remote working for most knowledge-based companies.
Instead of thinking I can pay people from Kansas less than people from New York, you should think I can get amazing people from Kansas and make them feel valued and well-compensated if I pay them New York salaries.
Look for great workers
When looking for talent, simply look for people who get things done.
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. They exhibit the two key qualities, as Joel Spolsky labeled them in his “Guerrilla Guide to Interviewing”:* Smart, and Gets Things Done.
When the work product is out in the open, it’s much easier to see who’s actually smart (as opposed to who simply sounds smart).
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. Call it “pre-hiring.” Pre-hiring takes the form of a one- or two-week mini-project. We usually pay around $1,500 for the mini-project. We never ask people to work for free. If we wouldn’t do it for free, why would we ask someone else to do it?
Whatever it is, make it meaningful. Make it about creating something new that solves a problem. We don’t believe in asking people to solve puzzles. Solving real problems is a lot more interesting—and enlightening.
Communication
In remote work, good communication is key. You can’t jump into your coworkers’ office, you have to know how to express your ideas, often in written form.
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. So, as a company owner or manager, you might as well filter for this quality right from the get-go.
Lessons from Open Source
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.
Empower decision making
Rigid processes and other roadblocks are productivity killers. Encourage your employees to make decisions on their own. If you can’t trust your coworkers to make decisions on their own, your company is full of the wrong people.
Meetings become more effective if they are scarce
Meetings are productivity killer unless they happen just in the amount necessary to coordinate your team.
When most conversations happen virtually—on the phone, via email, in Basecamp, over instant message, or in a Skype video chat—people actually look forward to these special opportunities for a face-to-face. 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.
Motivation
As Elon Musk said, if you want to attract great talent, you have to work on interesting problems.
As detailed by Alfie Kohn in his wonderful book Punished by Rewards:* neither. Trying to conjure motivation by means of rewards or threats is terribly ineffective. In fact, it’s downright counterproductive.
Rather, the only reliable way to muster motivation is by encouraging people to work on the stuff they like and care about, with people they like and care about. There are no shortcuts.