Remote Work is quite different from sitting in an office: It’s not just changing your work chair for the couch at home. With Remote Work, there is no assigned seating at all.
- Nobody walks you to your desk
- Nobody tells you how to live
- Nobody tells you who you are
The transition from Office to Remote is a tricky one. You will have to answer many questions for yourself:
- How do I get coffee?
- Obviously, it’s Aeropress
- What is the best desk?
- IKEA Bekant
- How do I structure my day? Do I keep 9-to-5?
- When do I exercise if not on the way to work?
- Do I see my kids more often?
When you don’t answer these questions for yourself – you will get pulled into a new identity, where you don’t have to think. Watch out, the gravity of ‘popular‘ identities is strong!
Paul Millerd is an expert on the Future of Work – and more importantly – advocates for more “life” in the work-life balance.
My new piece about Remote Worker identities is in issue 105 of his splendid “Boundless” newsletter
Three Surprising Effects of the Internet
- Success Addicts Choose Being Special Over Being Happy underscores our obsession with being special and how people sacrifice their happiness for a feeling of superiority. The piece highly resonates with my feelings about Social Media.
Many scholars, such as the psychologist Barbara Killinger, have shown that people willingly sacrifice their own well-being through overwork to keep getting hits of success. I know a thing or two about this: As I once found myself confessing to a close friend, “I would prefer to be special than happy.”
“the physician Robert Goldman famously found that more than half of aspiring athletes would be willing to take a drug that would kill them in five years in exchange for winning every competition they entered today, “from the Olympic decathlon to the Mr. Universe.” - Where did this tower come from?
Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 is a duct tape marvel. Microsoft wizards grabbed freely-available map data from the Internet and generated realistic vistas you can fly over in your aircraft.
What they didn’t count on are human errors resulting in some funny glitches explored in this thread. - We live in a post-scarcity world of ideas.
So much so, that it’s a bigger problem to manage brilliant insights than to stumble upon them. I use Evernote and Roam as my note-taking tools, Twitter and Pocket for consuming articles, and Kindle for books. To manage this deluge of apps, I previously used a hodge-podge of custom scripts, but now I’ve switched to Readwise.
Readwise syncs all these apps (and much more) and helps with recollection implementing spaced repetition. The team behind the app is coming up with creative integrations that I never knew I needed.
A thing I learned this week:
I just finished my week-long Windsurfing lesson – I’ll definitely repeat that. During my ‘commute’ I was listening to David Perell’s podcast with technologist Balaji S. Srinivasan – they chatted a lot about learning by doing, future of media, genomics and a roster of other topics. It occurred to me, that practicing sports is more like applied engineering than watching sports:
- Building stuff = Practicing
- Theorizing = Watching
Nassim Taleb calls the transition from theory into practice the “Platonic Fold”. But I’d go even further: doing stuff in the real-world and mastering these feedback loops is more different from theory than the branches of the theory are from each other.
The theory of windsurfing was lost on me, but I quickly levelled up while falling from my board.