„Remote” by David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH) and Jason Fried is a book about (you guessed it) remote work. Both DHH and Jason are huge advocates of the distributed setup as they should – they run a company called Basecamp that hires remotely.
And so am I – I work in one of the biggest distributed companies ( Automattic ) and I help to run a foundation in Poland called Remote Ninja. The focus of the initiative is to promote and help set up remote companies and lifestyle so that people in the most remote parts of Poland can participate in the global economy without leaving their families.
Since remote work is weaved into every part of my life, it is hard for me to learn something new from the book. I can swear by everything that they have written there and I would highly recommend it to anyone wanting to know more about remote work.
Benefits of remote work
- As a company, your talent pool is much wider
- Employees are much more loyal, since they can fit work intoo their lifestyles with ease
- They can fit the work into their chronotypes easily
- If you work remotely you dont have to wait for retirement to travel the world
Stuff I wholeheartedly agree on with the authors
- Office is much more distracting environment than home
- Remote work puts work first, hours spent last
- I am much more productive when I can work when I feel like it, not when my ‚office hours’ are
- Asychronous communication is the only way to do the work in a sane manner
- Urgency is overrated
My highlights
- If they do say the office, they’ll include a qualifier such as “super early in the morning before anyone gets in”
- We traded the freedom and splendor of country land and fresh air for convenience and excitement.
- That’s a much more realistic goal than buying lottery tickets, either the literal or figurative ones. As an example of the latter: pursuing a career-ladder or stock-
- But why wait? If what you really love doing is skiing, why wait until your hips are too old to take a hard fall and then move to Colorado?
- In this world very few leaps of progress arrive exclusively as benefits. Maybe the invention of the sandwich, but that’s it.
- People have an amazing ability to live down to low expectations.
- And let’s not forget the ergonomics of sweatpants!