How to Do Remote Work Correctly

I have been working remotely for more than a decade, and, with the rise of COVID-driven remote work, I have been intrigued to see how other people contend with it.

Someone recently sent me a DM on Twitter asking how he could perform better while working remotely, and after responding to him, I put my thoughts into a Twitter thread, which you can read here:

But I think that this subject deserves something of a longform answer, too, and that is this post.

Caveats, etc.

This is a post about how employees can perform well while working remotely. It is not about what employers can do to more effectively manage remote workers. That is another subject entirely.

First considerations

Not everyone is cut out for remote work. And the good news is, you don't have to be. Neither absolutist is correct: offices will not disappear, and everyone won't return to offices. The muddled middle is where we will end up. Some companies will be fully remote, some companies will require all employees to be in the office, and some hapless companies will try to appease both constituencies and embrace a so-called "hybrid" model. Hybrid is the worst of both worlds, and if you don't want to, or can't, work remotely, be sure that you don't work for a company attempting a hybrid structure.

Be ruthlessly honest with yourself about whether your skillset and personality conform to the needs of remote work. If they don't, either develop the skillset/personality required, or find office-based work. Office-based work won't disappear. The world is not zero sum.

The skillset required for remote work

Remote work requires an enviable mix of skills: you have to be a self-learner who quickly groks new software, you communicate effectively in writing, you're highly organized, and you're internally motivated. This clearly does not describe every employee, or even every white collar or knowledge employee. Remote employers will have to be smart about how they screen for these skills.

A brief description of each of these skills, and why they matter for remote work follows:

• You're a self-learner: This means that you are able to teach yourself new skills. You are able to decompose a novel problem into first principles. "OK I was just told there's a new payroll system, and in order for me to use it correctly, I need to understand A, B, C in order to get to D..." If you read that, and think to yourself, "that's trivial!", well, good news: you're likely on your way to being able to work remotely. But not everyone can do this.
• You communicate effectively in writing. Good writing is the bread and butter of remote work. Remote-first companies like Gitlab and Remote have a "documentation first" culture, in which employees are expected to document, in detail, their tasks. Further, the product that Gitlab sells is extensively documented, both by its employees and its users. Writing is the principal medium through which most information is conveyed. This is much different from office-based cultures, in which most information is conveyed via face-to-face meetings.
• You're highly organized. Being an effective remote worker requires that you master a variety of different software tools in order to do your work. It further requires that you be able to synthesize all of the work that you are doing, and document it, both for your own sake, and for your manager's and report(s)'s. Poorly written emails, misplaced spreadsheets, etc. will quickly knock you off track.
• You're internally motivated. Remote work requires a significant degree of independence and discipline. A lot of people rely on the office to provide them with structure. You don't get that with remote work. You need to be able to do the work required of you without a boss breathing down your neck.

Self-awareness about your skills, preferred working environment, etc.

I discuss the skills required, above. Given those skills, the question then becomes whether you have them. And this is where self-awareness comes in. My view of self-awareness is that you either are self-aware or you're not. And in my experience I don't think many people are self-aware. I don't really have much more to add here, other than to say: if you don't know if you have the skillset required to do remote work, perhaps speak with a trusted friend or colleague, and see if she thinks you have these skills.

It is possible that these skills can be learned. For me, they seem to be innate.

Coda

Remote work isn't going away. Technological, cultural, and political trends will only make it more widespread.

Balaji Srinivasan's recent book The Network State has gotten a lot of attention. I don't completely buy his thesis, and it's not really germane to this post. However, a network state, as construed by Balaji, is one which facilitates remote work.

Here's a part of Antonio Garcia Martinez's review of Balaji's book:

The most radical (and underrated) change wrought by technology has been the decoupling of information from physical movement, the flight of bits liberated from the low lurch of atoms. This dislodges human life from a geographic setting, making what you see, think, and experience independent of the colored shape on the map labeled "San Francisco, California, USA" (or whatever). It's what the early media theorists like Marshall McLuhan puzzled over, the global wiring-together of the human nervous system. His "global village" however was one warmed by the blue tones of an old-timey television receiving signals from a centralized transmitter in a still geographically and politically unified state.

The physical is divorced from the labor: "Human life is dislodged from a geographic setting," in Antonio's words. That is, if you're in a position to work remotely, it doesn't matter if you live in San Francisco, Dallas, Shanghai, or Johannesburg. Companies certainly have to learn how to manage remote workforces, and new software and hardware will better enable remote work. But remote work is not going away. It is, to borrow the phrase of someone resolutely opposed to remote work, indicative of "directional arrows of progress".