Remote
by Jason Fried (2013)
Key Takeaways
- ✓ The office is actually the worst place to get work done -- between meetings, interruptions, and commutes, the office is optimized for everything except focused work
- ✓ The best talent is not concentrated in one city -- remote work gives you access to a global talent pool that local-only hiring cannot match
- ✓ Managing remote workers requires shifting from measuring presence to measuring output -- this is harder but more honest
- ✓ Overlapping working hours, not identical working hours, are what matters for distributed teams -- asynchronous communication handles the rest
- ✓ The biggest barrier to remote work is not technology but trust -- companies that cannot trust their employees to work remotely have a management problem, not a logistics problem
Who Should Read This
Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson make the case for remote work years before the pandemic forced the world to adopt it. Drawing on their experience running Basecamp as a fully distributed company, they address every objection managers and employees have about working outside a traditional office...
The Book That Predicted the Future
Remote was published in 2013, seven years before the pandemic forced the world’s largest remote work experiment. Reading it now produces a strange feeling of vindication mixed with dated-ness. Everything Fried and Hansson predicted about remote work came true. But the debate they were participating in — convincing skeptics that remote work was even possible — has been settled by events.
The core argument is that the office is not optimized for productivity. It is optimized for supervision. The open floor plan, the mandatory meetings, the interruption-rich environment — these serve the needs of managers who want to see people working, not the needs of workers who want to do good work.
What the Pandemic Proved
The pandemic confirmed several of Remote’s key predictions. Remote work is viable for knowledge workers. Commutes are wasteful. Measuring output is more honest than measuring presence. The talent pool expands dramatically when you remove geographic constraints.
But the pandemic also revealed problems that Fried and Hansson underweighted. Loneliness. Blurred boundaries between work and life. The difficulty of onboarding new employees remotely. The erosion of serendipitous social interactions that generate ideas and build culture.
The Practical Value
The most useful parts of the book are the tactical sections on how to make remote work function: overlapping hours rather than identical schedules, writing-first communication culture, virtual water coolers, and the importance of occasional in-person gatherings.
Read This If…
You are transitioning to remote or hybrid work and want practical guidance from people who have been doing it for over a decade.
Skip This If…
You have been working remotely since 2020 and have already figured out what works for you. The pandemic made much of this book common knowledge.
Start Here
The chapter on managing remote workers is the most useful for leaders. The chapter on staying productive is most useful for individual contributors.
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