On Remote Work

The pushback I heard most often was that remote work is laziness in disguise.

People doing it to work less, to disappear, to collect a salary from a hammock.

I understand where it comes from. It’s also completely wrong.

The people I’ve met working remotely—properly, intentionally, not just waiting out a pandemic—work harder than most people I’ve sat next to in an office. Not because they’re trying to prove something, but because the trade is real. You work well, you live well. The two reinforce each other.

The office version of that trade is you commute, you sit, you perform presence for eight hours, and you call it productivity. Nobody questions it because everyone can see you doing it.

That’s the thing remote work exposed that nobody wanted to admit. Presence was never the same as output. It just looked like it was.

I spent years living and working across Southeast Asia and Europe, long stretches by the beach in Taiwan. The reason wasn’t to work less—it was to actually live while doing my best work.

The office wasn’t making me better at my job. It was making me better at being in an office, which is a different skill entirely and not one I was particularly interested in developing. The personal side of life wasn’t fulfilling. The work suffered for it in ways that are hard to measure and easy to ignore.

Remote work fixed that. Not because the work changed but because the context did.

Good life and best work stopped being in opposition.

The reason it failed for so many companies had nothing to do with remote work itself. It failed because managing remotely is a different skill to managing in person, and most managers were never asked to develop it.

The instinct to equate visibility with productivity runs deep—if I can see you, I know you’re working. If I can’t, I’m taking your word for it.

That anxiety is understandable. It’s also a management problem, not a remote work problem.

The companies that figured it out didn’t do it by building better surveillance tools. They did it by hiring people they trusted and measuring what actually mattered.

There’s also the other thing, the one nobody says out loud.

At the height of remote work adoption, a lot of pressure to return to the office had less to do with productivity than with what empty offices were doing to the economies built around them.

Commercial real estate, the lunch places, the coffee shops, the whole infrastructure of the nine to five. Remote work wasn’t just a threat to how companies operated. It was a threat to a lot of other balance sheets too. The productivity argument was convenient. It wasn’t always the real one.

I’m not done with this. The setup, the routines, what it actually looks like to build a life around working this was—that’s worth writing about properly.

This is just the argument for why it’s worth doing in the first place.