Remote Work

Remember in the before times how on hard days you could grab your work bestie and go have lunch blocks away from whatever was bothering you?

It’s crazy to me how most of us are now going to spend the majority of our career working remotely, and if it hadn’t been for the pandemic we’d have all just kept going to offices for 8+ hours every day. Makes you wonder what else we’re all doing just because everyone else is.

“Burnout” is a particularly modern affliction, feeling simultaneously overwhelmed and paralyzed. I’ve found it’s best to think of burnout not as a disease but as a symptom, with many different etiologies. The big three: permanent on-call, broken steering, and mission doubt.

Prediction: There will be a bimodal distribution of remote work. At the top end it will allow organizations to employ the best people regardless of their location, and freed from the drag of commuting and distractions of the office, they'll be even more productive.

This is the fundamental tension: culture vs. math. 1. Management has clearly and consistently shown a greater preference for offices than workers. vs 2. During a downtown, it’s clearly advantageous for zombie-office companies to reduce their footprint

I’ve been working from WeWork this week. I am less anxious overall. The act of getting up in the morning, getting dressed to go to work is such an important mental marker. I feel like we’re all gambling away our mental health by WFH everyday.

Elon Musk on remote work May 31, 2022

Creative work is inherently unequal. This is very visible in the income distributions of singers and movie stars, but less visible in white-collar professions. Why? Thanks to/because of the office. 1/7

Endless opportunities to build software for the future of work.