Tag: remote work
My colleague Paolo discusses his approach to leading a fully distributed team – really insightful stuff, a must-watch for anyone currently leading or would like to lead a remote or distributed team.
Paolo Belcastro: Around The World 80 Times Per Day | WordPress.tv.
From Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential:
Mise-en-place is the religion of all good line cooks. Do not fuck with a line cook’s ‘meez’ — meaning his setup, his carefully arranged supplies of sea salt, rough-cracked pepper, softened butter, cooking oil, wine, backups, and so on.
As a cook, your station, and its condition, its state of readiness, is an extension of your nervous system…
The universe is in order when your station is set up the way you like it: you know where to find everything with your eyes closed, everything you need during the course of the shift is at the ready at arm’s reach, your defenses are deployed.
Mise-en-place is not just for cooks – one thing I’ve learned working remotely for almost two years is that if my meez is thrown off, or I let it get thrown into disarray during my workday, it disrupts my flow and makes my whole day a bit more stressful. Keeping things in order, digitally, is just as important as the physical space in the kitchen.
For me, that means being vigilant about my desktop usage – I use three desktop spaces on my Mac at all times. One for communication, where Slack, Skype, and other tools like that hang out. The middle desktop is where the work happens – and only The Work. If I am digging through an analytics report, or posting on an internal blog, or talking with our customers, that’s all I’m doing. I know that if I want to check Facebook, or Slack, or whatever else, I’d have to swipe to the third desktop – and that piece of mental friction helps keep me focused.
The third desktop, that’s for Rdio and anything else that’s not communication or The Work. Twitter, feedly, that sort of thing.
I’ll admit it – sometimes I’ll open Hacker News, or Quora, or Rock Paper Shotgun in my work Desktop – and it throws me off every time. It isn’t a distraction, it’s pollution. It’s as though I’ve mixed up the tomato bin with the sliced cucumbers – it throws me off and creates a hitch in my step.
Think about your meez – take it seriously. Staying focused and staying organized can be the difference between success and stress – at least if you’re an insane person like me.
A post on Paper Planes got me to thinking about vacation, and the nature of paid time off, and the way that great ideas can collide with the real world in unexpected ways. I also took a second look at Jacob’s great post about open vacation policies when writing this post.
Some part of this discussion reminds me of the discussion in Freakonomics, where Dubner and Levitt discuss a day care center that had a small number of parents who would consistently arrive late for child pickup – in order to fight against this, they imposed a $3 fine, and the unexpected result was that even more parents arrived late, the day care center replacing a moral penalty with a tiny financial penalty.
When we remove the upper limit of paid vacation, and also remove the motivating factors of the use-it-or-lose-it system, folks are left only with their own interpretations and psychological barriers – which lead to fewer trips to Aruba. And no one wants that.
(Yes, Daryl, I read Mathias’ company as “Tavis” as well. )
Automattic is a fully distributed company; we all work from where ever we are, any flat surface with access to the internet. This comes with many benefits, as well as some curious downsides, but one of the most interesting things is the way that a fully global, exclusively-online working community interacts socially.
Like any group who spends time on the internet (ie in 2014, most groups) we are exposed to different memes and cultural references, and like any group, we create our own sort of tropes and references and inside jokes. One of these is “+t +d.”
“+t +d” on the most superficial level is an abbreviation of an abbreviation – you begin with “Totally, Definitely,” which is reduced to save time and increase it’s cool factor, to “Totes Def,” which of course is naturally shortened even further to “+t +d.”
Yes, there are those who see this as an affront against the English language, a further breakdown of the same sort as emoji and text message shorthand. There’s something to that – I can see it both ways. However, I think that looking at this piece of the Automattic Lexicon and seeing it only as a shorthand is missing a bigger piece of the message here.
“+t +d” represents to me not just a quick affirmation, but rather an aspirational view of the way that Automatticians (and I would suggest all remote workers) have to approach The Work. “+t +d” is our version of “Yes, and…” the cornerstone to all great improvisational comedy. It represents a necessary positivity that absolutely needs to be injected into all of our work, and all of our interactions.
Working with people almost exclusively through text means that you have to be generous; you have to read only what’s on the page, and make assumptions only when they are justified and work toward a goal. It’s very easy to slip into negativity and read a message into a sentence that simply isn’t there – but if you maintain a sense of positivity, an ingrained automatic response of “Totally, definitely,” things work. Things flow. Great stuff is created.
Working with distributed teams on cohesive products means that you have to make space for error, and for oversight, and for outright missteps. Your response to these things cannot be defensive or accusatory, but rather “+t +d, what can I do to help?” – “+t +d, how can we fix this?” – pushing for the positive, for the tide that lifts us all rather than the torpedo that sinks.
Rick Steves, reknowned travel author and someone I consider a role model, talks about the need for militant optimism in travel – this resonates with me when I think about The Work. I think that “+t +d” is our militant optimism. It’s not always easy, and I’ve certainly fallen victim to defensiveness and pointing of fingers – but I try to stay positive. We all do. And from that trying, we’re able to work together, from all around the world, to make things that simply did not exist before.
+t +d everybody.
Fingerpaint, an advertising agency here in Saratoga Springs recently published an article about the idea of work life balance on their company blog – here’s a link.
Given my obsession with The Work, this is something of real interest to me. I’m a huge Fingerpaint fan – their offices are beautiful, their work is lovely, and they are great members of the greater Saratoga Springs community. I can see their office from my perch at Sharatoga even!
I think that Jason and I fundamentally agree – life has to be about more than The Work, and the only way that you’re going to find meaning in your life outside of work alone is by pursuing some kind of balance. He says;
Work hard at work but be smart about it and then leave it there.
and
When you’re done you’re done. Go home. Turn it off.
These sound like the kind of things you’d hear from a man who was a strong proponent of finding a work life balance, right? Someone who really believes in keeping work at work. Interestingly, Jason tells us that we should look instead to abandon the idea of a work life balance;
Because no matter how hard you plan, you will never achieve “balance.” You will always regret not spending enough time with your significant other or your kids, or seeing friends or family members. I believe this is something called human nature.
I think this might be where we split in our thinking. I don’t think living without regret and having a job you love are mutually exclusive, and I think that finding some sort of balance between what you do for a living and what you do that really rings your bell is a huge piece of a fulfilling life. If you’re lucky enough to have a job that also helps fulfill you in non-bill-paying ways, even better.
If your work environment is causing you to miss things you’d rather not miss, important things like family events, things that you will regret? That’s either an unhealthy work environment or you have an unhealthy relationship with it. You should find a solution either way.
Leave work at work, definitely. Live in the moment, absolutely. But don’t think for a moment that you need to accept missing out on things that are important to you* – that’s not accepting a brave new world, that’s holding on to The Old Ways.
I’d recommend keeping an eye on this tenuous balance, and protecting it with vigilance and vigor. This is your only life, after all, and work is just work.
* – Kids recitals, not Warped Tour dates. Unless you’re playing in the Warped Tour, then that’s pretty cool actually.
Simon Ouderkirk 