Remote Work

Questions and model answers

1. Where do you usually do your best work?

   At the kitchen table, early, before anyone else is up. I've tried to make a desk corner work and I never use it — I think because it looks like a place where work happens, so sitting down there feels like a commitment. The table doesn't, so I just start. It falls apart around eleven when the house wakes up, but by then I've usually done the hard part. The other thing I've stopped fighting is that I can't do the same kind of work all day. Mornings are for anything that needs a blank page, and afternoons I answer messages and tidy up files. I used to think that was a discipline problem, and now I just plan around it.

2. If you could choose, would you work from home or in an office?

   Mostly home, with two days in — and the two days are the part I'd defend, not the three. Working from home is better for anything I can define before I start. What it's bad at is the work I don't yet know I need to do, which arrives sideways, from someone mentioning a problem near me. On video nobody mentions anything sideways, because every conversation has a subject and an end time. So the office days aren't for focus at all, they're for finding out what I'm missing. The version I'd avoid is full-time home, since it looks efficient for about four months and then you notice your work has narrowed to whatever people remember to send you.

3. Tell me about a time working remotely made something harder.

   We had a new person start while we were all remote, and I was supposed to be showing her the work. I did what felt thorough — long written explanations, a call whenever she asked. Three weeks in, she told me she'd been guessing at most of it. The written stuff answered questions she already knew to ask, and everything else she'd have picked up by sitting near someone for a week. I felt bad about that for a while, because from my side it had looked like I was being generous with my time. What I do now is ask people to talk me through something back, out loud. It's slower and I find out much earlier.

4. Do you think remote work makes people less connected to their colleagues?

   Less connected to people they haven't already met, yes. The relationships that existed before the change survive it easily, because they run on goodwill that was built in person and gets drawn down slowly. New relationships have no such stock, and a scheduled video call is a poor way to build one, since nothing unplanned can happen inside it. So remote teams look fine for a year or two and then quietly get worse at disagreement, which is the thing that needs trust. Where I'd resist the argument is the assumption that offices produce connection on their own. They don't, and they never did. I sat ten feet from someone for two years and we spoke about four times.

The Korean translation, the expression breakdowns, the reusable frames and the common-mistake notes for these four questions are in the book. The recording and this transcript are free, here and on YouTube.