Name: Lovro Oreskovic's review of Remote by David Heinemeier Hansson
Item: Remote
Rating: 5
Author: Lovro Oreskovic

David Heinemeier Hansson

Jason Fried

The founders of 37Signals assess the surging trend of working from home while explaining its challenges and benefits, posing compelling arguments about why businesses should promote work-from-home models and how remote work setups can be productively accomplished.

Office Not Required

Remote

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.

Friedrich S.

As detailed by Alfie Kohn in his wonderful book Punished by Rewards (...). 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.

Take your laptop and head to the nearest coffee shop with WiFi. There you'll get to work alone with no interruption from coworkers, but still enjoy the buzzing white noise of the crowd. It sounds counterintuitive, but the presence of other people, even if you don't know them, can fool your mind into thinking that being productive is the only proper thing to do. Who really wants to be the slacker siting in a coffee shop during working hours, watching silly cats on Reddit or playing a video game?

Jason usually spends the mornings at home, then heads into the office around 11. That doesn't mean he starts work at 11. He starts around 7:30 or 8am. But he uses the morning to catch up on things that require zero office distractions, and then heads into the office for more collaborative work (...)

Another hack is to divide the day into chunks like Catch-up, Collaboration, and Serious Work. Some people prefer to use the mornings to catch up on email, industry news, and other low-intensity tasks, and then put their game face on for tearing through the tough stuff after lunch.

One of our employees, Noah, likes to demarcate using his slippers: he has both a work set and a home set! Not everyone uses such props or even requires the mental separation they're meant to cre- ate, but if youre having trouble getting into work mode in the morning, try putting on some pants.

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

However, when (...) meetings occur all the time, they begin to lose their value. Whereas before they'd been the perfect opportunity for a high-value exchange of information, they start to become routine, tired, played out, and, ultimately, an enormous waste of time. Questions that could have been answered in a few minutes via email or the phone turn into forty-five minute in-person conversations. Once in a while these gabfests are fine, but when they become the norm (...) you've got a problem.

In the same way that you don't want a gang of slackers, you also don't want a band of supermen. The best workers over the long term are people who put in sustainable hours. Not too much, not too little-just right. Forty nours a week on average usually does the trick.

Most companies start out by (...) everyone is only granted access to information and applications on a need-to-know basis. That's completely unnecessary. Unless you work in the military, (...) – keeping these access barriers in place is just making it difficult for everyone to get their work done.

Further, formal annual reviews are usually too big-picture to pick up on the small things. Formal reviews cover such things as long-range goals, salary adjustments, possible promotions, etc. But the real dangers are the small things –  the concerns that creep up between annual check-ins. 

We call these regular check-ins "one-on-ones," (...) The key is to make them casual and conversational. This is a "what's up, how are things?" call more than a specific critique of a specific project or a response to a piece of work. These chats typically last twenty or thirty minutes, but it's good to keep an hour open-just in case. If the conversation is going well, you don't want to have to cut things short.

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 offhce stand as equals. (...) People with the power to change things need to feel the same hurt as those who merely have to deal with it. 

Working remotely blows a big fat hole in that style of management. IfI cant see workers come in and leave their desks, how on earth can I make sure they're actually work- ing? Or so goes the naive thinking of a manager of chairs.

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."

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.

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?

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 

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

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.

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.

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.

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. 

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.

david

Lovro Oreskovic

It is a good introduction to remote work, but it reads more like a article than a book. And I think it works better as a thing to give to your manager to read if you are trying to get him to start remote work. 
But none the less, a good introduction.

Bohdan

Позволяет посмотреть на свою работу с другой стороны, со стороны удаленки. Рассказывает как организовать работу, как донести идеи удаленной работы до руководства.

Rafael Matsumoto

In another great book, David and Jason were able to prove that, with the help of modern technology, an office building is just a luxury for many businesses. They also provided some tips that can help you enhance the experience of working remotely.

Mark Gibaud

A good quick read, but not as much insight to remote-working as I would've liked, and too much anecdote/opinion and not enough research cited.

Full review: http://markgibaud.com/2013/12/05/book...

Jimmy Cerone

A good book with some solid insights into remote work, but nothing groundbreaking (at least now that remote work is normal).

Alex Ker

Some insights, but more a persuasive collection of short essays for remote work. Sparse and hand-wavy instructions on how to make remote management effective.

Sanat Gersappa

Cezar Carvalho

A light read and a nice introduction to the topic. For those already familiar with the idea of working from home, might add a thing or two, but it probably shines for those readers that didn't even believe such a thing was actually viable.

Tomita Militaru

Boring book, reiterates 2-3 ideas over & over again. The graphics kinda save the book.

Lincy

Nikolay Bachiyski

Thin, short-paragraphed, biased, opinionated, beautifully written and illustrated remote work manifesto and a sales pitch. Every copyrighter should be jealous.

“Remote” shares the advantages and the problems of the advertisement as a literary form.

If you don't have much experience with remote working or you let your mind wander for a bit, the book is extremely
convincing. DHH/Fried know how to write well.

If you look deeper, you may notice that they offer faux acknowledgements for all the drawbacks and unsuitability of remote working. All problems seem to have very easy solutions in the book. In practice, it's a lot more complicated.

The book is great remote work sales tool, just don't forget to think of all angles if you need to put it into practice. The 37signals’ experience is not all there is.

Hooman Askari

Not very relevant anymore. It was an important book at some point though.

Lance Willett

A quick and insightful read into how 37Signals (now Basecamp) works remotely. Not much new for me, as I've been remote since 2005 and my employer — Automattic — does this with 5x more people than Basecamp. If you're new to remote working, I'd recommend it highly.

Kevin S Perrine

Love remote work, and this book has some great insights, but comes off as a little too self-congratulatory. It could have been condensed quite a bit.

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Remote by David Heinemeier Hansson

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