David Heinemeier Hansson

Jason Fried

For too long our lives have been dominated by the 'under one roof' Industrial Revolution model of work. That era is now over. There is no longer a reason for the daily roll call, of the need to be seen with your butt on your seat in the office. The technology to work remotely and to avoid the daily grind of commuting and meetings has finally come of age, and bestselling authors Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson are the masters of making it work at tech company 37signals. Remote working is the future - and it is rushing towards us. Remote: Office Not Required combines eye-opening ideas with entertaining narrative. It will convince you that working remotely increases productivity and innovation, and it will also teach you how to get it right - whether you are a manager, working solo or one of a team. Chapters include: 'Talent isn't bound by the hubs', 'It's the technology, stupid', 'When to type, when to talk', 'Stop managing the chairs' and 'The virtual water cooler'. Brilliantly simple and refreshingly illuminating this is a call to action to end the tyranny of being shackled to the office.

Office Not Required

Remote

Friedrich Schuler

How often can you say that a given meeting was worth it? Remember, there's no such thing as a one-hour meeting. If you're in a room with five people for an hour, it's a five-hour meeting.

insurance company Aetna, which has nearly half its 35,000 U.S. employees working fron home. They discovered that the remote-working half tended to be heavier. 

If there aren't built-in reasons to move during your day, find excuses to move for example, instead of just ating lunch at voUur desk. walk to a café or sandwich shop.

When the bulk of your communication happens via email and the like, it doesn't take much for bad blood to develop unless everyone is making their best effort to the contrary. Small misunderstandings that could have been nipped in the bud with a wink of an eye or a certain tone of voice can quickly snowball into drama.

The old adage still applies: No assholes allowed. But for remote work, you need to extend it to no asshole-y behavior allowed, no drama allowed, no bad vibes vibes allowed.

the first filter that really matters is the cover letter explaining exactly why there's a fit between applicant and company. There's simply no getting around it: in hiring for remote-working positions, managers should be ruthless in filtering out poor writers

You should read, read, and read some more. Study how good writers make their case. Focus on clarity first, style second. Here are a few books to start with if you're serious about becoming a better writer: 

The Elements of Style by William Strunk and E. B. White 

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 someon else to do it?

The project depends on the job they're applying to. A designer might be tasked with redesigning one screen from our website or one of our products.

Since we already know we like their skills (otherwise they wouldn't have gotten this far), the in-person mneeting is to determine if we like the "person."

Remote quotes

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