Four Takeaways from rereading Remote: Office Not Required

Basecamp has always been one of the de facto leaders in running a 100% remote company.

In 2013, the founders Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson wrote the book Remote: Office Not Required. In it they detailed how they were able to build a profitable remote company, and how other companies and teams can achieve the same goal.

Since then, Basecamp has double downed on remote, abandoning its physical headquarters in 2021 and, of course, we’ve had a worldwide epidemic that might have been the tipping point described at the conclusion of the book:

It’s so hard to predict tipping points that most people find it easier to pretend they’ll never happen. But a tipping point for remote work is coming. It may not be that the office completely ceases to exist, but its importance has peaked. Life on the other side of the traditional office paradigm is simply too good for too many people.

It was fascinating to reread the book in 2022. Some of the content relating to remote work is just as applicable today, while other content definitely feels outdated given how accepted and normalized remote work has become. It’s also funny to read about recommendations for Webex and Skype when Zoom and Slack are now dominating those respective markets.

The following insights and quotes are just as relevant when reading the book today as they were when it was first published.

1. Do you want an extra 400 hours per year?

Ignoring the obvious benefits remote work has for the environment, for avoiding frustrating commutes in traffic and for being freed from working in an “interruption factory” office, the basic numbers speak for themselves:

Say you spend thirty minutes driving in rush hour every morning and another fifteen getting to your car and into the office. That’s 1.5 hours a day, 7.5 hours per week, or somewhere between 300 and 400 hours per year, give or take holidays and vacation. Four hundred hours is exactly the amount of programmer time we spent building Basecamp, our most popular product. Imagine what you could do with 400 extra hours a year.

2. “Aren’t 100% remote companies missing out on the magic of spontaneous brainstorming and idea generation?”

Basecamp as a company meets up at least twice a year, and individual teams meet up at other times. But the book points out that often those face-to-face brainstorming sessions in front of a whiteboard are not quite as crucial as we think.

Let’s assume for a second that’s true: Breakthrough ideas only happen when people meet face-to-face. Still, the question remains: How many breakthrough ideas can a company actually digest? Far fewer than you imagine.

Most work is not coming up with The Next Big Thing. Rather, it’s making better the thing you already thought of six months–or six years–ago. It’s the work of work. Given that, you’re only going to frustrate yourself and everyone else if you summon the brain trust too frequently for those Kodak moments. Because either it means giving up on the last great idea (the one that still requires follow-up) or it means further stuffing the backlog of great ideas. A stuffed backlog is a stale backlog.

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3. Remote teams are asynchronous teams

The book stresses the importance of learning to shift from synchronous, to asynchronous work.

The big transition with a distributed workforce is going from synchronous to asynchronous collaboration.

The chapter titled “Lessons from open source” served as a reminder that many large, successful software products were built asynchronously. For example, the Linux operating system, the MySQL database, and the PHP programming language were constructed by thousands of different contributors across the globe who never met face-to-face.

A key element to succeeding when working remotely is being able to express yourself succinctly in writing.

Being a good writer is an essential part of being a good remote worker. When most arguments are settled over email or chat or discussion boards, you’d better show up equipped for the task.

This leads to less video calls, and less meetings, leaving people to enjoy lots more uninterrupted time to get into flow state and do their best work.

4. Remote companies work when they’ve got the right people working for them

When you switch to a distributed team across different timezones you stop judging productivity on start and end times and instead start gauging it by each persons outputs.

This means you need to hire people who are passionate about their work and self-motivated enough to get out of bed and open their computer to produce work they’re proud of. But then again, why would you hire people that aren’t like this?

… if you can’t let your employees work from home out of fear they’ll slack off without your supervision, you’re a babysitter, not a manager. Remote work is very likely the least of your problems.

Ultimately this means your company requires less middle management which usually means less unnecessary interruptions and are more efficient team.

Start by empowering everyone to make decisions on their own. If the company is full of people whom nobody trusts to make decisions without layers of managerial review, then the company is full of the wrong people.

Worth the reread?

The book was published at a time when remote work was still not widely accepted. However, there are many timeless tips for companies who have already embraced remote work or those who are considering it.

Have a reread (or your first read) and let us know your thoughts!