So take a step toward calm, and relieve people from needing to broadcast their whereabouts and status. Everyone’s status should be implicit: I’m trying to do my job, please respect my time and attention.
Accept that better ideas aren’t necessarily better if they arrive after the train has left the station. If they’re so good, they can catch the next one.
Later is where excuses live. Later is where good intentions go to die. Later is a broken back and a bent spirit. Later says “all-nighters are temporary until we’ve got this figured out.” Unlikely. Make the change now.
The scarcity of such face time in remote working situations makes it seem that much more valuable. And as a result, something interesting happens: people don’t waste the time. An awareness of scarcity makes them use it wisely.
Stress is passed from organization to employee, from employee to employee, and then from employee to customer.
There are two fundamental ways not to be ignored at work. One is to make noise. The other is to make progress, to do exceptional work.
Companies love to declare “We’re all family here.” No, you’re not.
But when you think of the company as a product, you ask different questions: Do people who work here know how to use.
The further away you are from something, the fuzzier it becomes.
The future is a major abstraction, riddled with a million vibrating variables you can’t control. The best information you’ll ever have about a decision is at the moment of execution.
Being comfortable in your zone is essential to being calm.
Whoever managed to rebrand the typical open-plan office – with all its noise, lack of privacy, and resulting interruptions – as something hip and modern deserves a damn medal from the Committee of Irritating Distractions.
The big transition with a distributed workforce is going from synchronous to asynchronous collaboration.
People can’t get work done at work anymore. That turns life into work’s leftovers. The doggie bag. What’s worse is that long hours, excessive busyness, and lack of sleep have become a badge of honor for many people these days. Sustained exhaustion is not a badge of honor, it’s a mark of stupidity.
When calm starts early, calm becomes the habit. But if you start crazy, it’ll define you. You have to keep asking yourself if the way you’re working today is the way you’d want to work in 10, 20, or 30 years. If not, now is the time to make a change, not “later.
But the thing is, there’s not more work to be done all of a sudden. The problem is that there’s hardly any uninterrupted, dedicated time to do it.
Stress is passed from organization to employee, from employee to employee, and then from employee to customer. Stress never stops at the border of work, either. It bleeds into life. It infects your relationships with your friends, your family, your kids.
When companies are in the red, employees worry about their jobs. People aren’t stupid – they know that burning cash means the good times won’t last. The possibility of layoffs is always nagging. CVs are always at the ready.
Without profit, something is always on fire. When companies talk about burn rates, two things are burning: money and people. One you’re burning up, one you’re burning out.
It was amazing that it could be done, but we had forgotten to ask whether it should be done.
And between all those context switches and attempts at multitasking, you have to add buffer time. Time for your head to leave the last thing and get into the next thing. This is how you end up thinking “What did I actually do today?” when the clock turns to five and you supposedly spent eight hours at the office. You know you were there, but the hours had no weight, so they slipped away with nothing to show.