LET’S BE FWENDS ISSUE #74:

REMOTE WORK AND THE FUTURE OF PERSONAL PRODUCTIVITY

“Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never merely as a means to an end, but always at the same time as an end.”

~ Immanuel Kant, semi-professional promenader

Tech giants are doubling down on Remote Work

27.7 Billion Dollars. That’s the price Salesforce paid for Slack.

It’s a steep price for a place at the Remote Work Table, and Salesforce is joining other tech giants like Facebook, Microsoft and Google in a bid to change the way future organisations work:

“Together, Salesforce and Slack will shape the future of enterprise software and transform the way everyone works in the all-digital, work-from-anywhere world”

Says Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff.

So, just in case you weren’t sure wether this whole “Remote Work” thing will blow over soon.

Remote work needs the reorganisation of tasks

McKinsey reports that the majority of workers need to be in the office daily, because many of their tasks can only be performed on-site.

Of course, this is true for the occupations they list - firefighters (although for them, working on-site is kind of a weird concept), barbers, baristas, and many others need to be “in the office” to do their jobs.

On the other hand, typical office workers can probably go on with their tasks without being in the office for most of the week - maybe even indefinitely.

But I’m more interested in that middle category - those who report they need to be in the office between 3 to 4 days per week. Is that really true? Are they happy with it? And how could we organise our work and bundle “on-site” and “off-site” tasks so that  people have more freedom when it comes to from where they work?

This is important because even though McKinsey framed that question as a “Work from Home” issue, it is actually a “Remote”, and therefore a “globally distributed teams” issue.

Personal Productivity really never is only personal

Source

The New Yorker has an interesting story about the rise and fall of Getting Things Done - a personal productivity system, as seen through the personal story of Merlin Mann. Mann was the person who made GTD popular on the Intertubes: He translated the manager-focussed system of GTD into the realm of techies. For example, he coined the term “Inbox Zero”, trying to describe a way to deal with email, but actually highlighting everything that is broken with it.

A couple of years later, and with the help of Remote work, the idea starts to sink in that something like “personal productivity” doesn’t really exist, because all of our work is embedded in a greater context. And the productivity of that context is what we actually need to manage, otherwise our efforts will fall short.

The danger here is that working remotely introduces systemic information overload, and we’re trying to cope with it by writing better Todo-lists.

It’s a bit like bringing a knife to a gun fight. Never ends well.

The answer to that lies in re-organising how we work together in teams, and bring visibility and transparency to our work. And we can all look to software development teams to see how they do it. Because they’ve mastered this challenge.

11 Minutes of Exercise can undo a day of sitting

Here’s some good news: Maybe sitting still is the new smoking, but you can still reverse the effects of sitting all day by daily moderate exercise of 30 to 40 minutes, and even getting in just 11 minutes will undo most damage a day in the chair does to your body.

A two-year-old’s approach to the Trolley Problem

Ah - the infamous Trolley Problem.

To me, it always felt like a trap Utilitarianists set up to get into an argument with us Deontologists, because nobody else would want to talk to them.

Here’s a young fellow philosopher bringing forth a completely new concept on how to deal with this moral dilemma, and I would describe his solution as: Biblical.

Wait - what did I just see?

That’s a great optical illusion - scroll down the thread as people try to dissect and understand it.

Tortoise performing their TNT set live

I linked to a great video of Tortoise performing Swung from the Gutters the other day, and I figured you might also enjoy a link to this full performance of their album TNT. Watch it with a cup of herbal infusion, or a really nice glass of red wine.That’s it for this issue of Let’s be Fwends. Have you found a new approach to the trolley problem lately? High-fives to you if so, but also high-fives to you if you didn’t, because life ain’t a zero-sum-game and utilitarianism stinks (there, I said it). 🚋