Remote Work Is Intentional

You’re reading an excerpt of The Holloway Guide to Remote Work, a book by Katie Wilde, Juan Pablo Buriticá, and over 50 other contributors. It is the most comprehensive resource on building, managing, and adapting to working with distributed teams. Purchase the book to support the author and the ad-free Holloway reading experience. You get instant digital access, 800 links and references, a library of tools for remote-friendly work, commentary and future updates, and a high-quality PDF download.

Successful remote work requires intentionally examining how and why people communicate, make decisions, collaborate, and learn to trust each other. Being together in the same space makes up for a lot of messy, inefficient human tendencies, all of which are critical to examine and account for when you won’t be together. It has little to do with which new whiteboarding SaaS app your company tries out or how many channels you have in Slack.

Even in fervently titled posts like “Why Naval Ravikant Thinks Remote Work Is The Future,” Naval Ravikant acknowledges that remote work isn’t a magic solution. “It’s going to be done through lengthy trials. It’s going to be done through new forms of evaluating whether someone can work remotely effectively,” Ravikant says.