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This post is a crash course on Remote Work for a smaller team that is forced into this reality by COVID-19. I am linking some all-encompassing tutorials at the end. This post is meant to get you started with the basic ideas of remote work in 15 minutes.
Switching to a remote environment will take work and won’t be ideal in the beginning. Remote work requires shifting mindsets, and people are not great at that. But you have no other choice. I am using terms “Remote Work” and “Work from Home” interchangeably in this post, because to slow the spread of the virus, your colleagues should stay at home.
Who am I? I am leading a remote team in a company that has been distributed for 10+ years. We have 1200 employees in 76 countries. These are practical tips I learned there.
What’s the deal?
COVID-19 ( / Coronavirus / SARS-CoV-2 ) is an exceptionally infectious virus that can spread „by air.” A long incubation period means that people will infect others before they even realize they are feeling unwell. The virus has already spread to the majority of the world’s countries (a primer on the virus here).
That means a couple of things:
- One employee can infect the entire office by coughing into the coffee cup cabinet
- In fact, everybody can be infected right now and not show any symptoms
- People are stressed with the situation and will be reluctant to work effectively. Most likely, they will be sitting in your office, browsing Twitter, reading up on the virus, and freaking out.
- The most effective tool we have available right now to cope with the Coronavirus fallout is to slow the spread.
We are pretty sure that hospitals won’t be able to deal with all the cases once we reach pandemic levels. 80% of cases are relatively mild, but 5% requires intensive care. Approximately 1% of people who catch the virus die.
As The Economist has put it: „Flattening the spike of the epidemic means that health systems are less overwhelmed, which saves lives.”
What can YOU do?
If you are a small business owner or a team lead, you need to get on that Remote Work bus ASAP. The most responsible choice you can make is to let your employees work remotely.
- They will minimize the risk of getting infected during the commute in your office
- If (god forbid) they get infected, they won’t pass that on to everybody else while sharing a donut
- They will be able to take care of the loved ones if it comes to that
- You will help slow down the progress of infections in society.
“To minimize risk, stay home if you can. This may mean canceling meetings, working remotely, or skipping a conference (if it hasn’t been canceled already).” – „How to work during pandemic”
How seriously should you take this?
This is a sample of companies that have closed down entire offices in light of the Coronavirus:
Ok, what is this Remote Work?
I am going to explain to you four pillars of remote work and recommend you another four tools to start doing it ASAP.
If your work happens in front of a computer, it can happen remotely. Yes, face-to-face interaction is the best way to transmit complex ideas, details of the tasks, hilarious jokes, and deadly viruses.
We now have fantastic technology for all of the above except viruses. These tools have been used for a while now – Remote Work was exploding even before the SARS-CoV-2.
4 Pillars of Remote Work.
Asynchronous work
Remote work is by design asynchronous. People will take tasks, post updates, have discussions, and go to focus on new tasks.
You can try to keep everybody in sync all the time, but this is exhausting, frustrating, and futile. You won’t know what they are doing at their homes or if they are checking Facebook, and you need to make peace with that.
Newsflash: They probably check Facebook at your office as well.
The biggest challenge with asynchronous work is that you may be blocked by someone else’s task. But you can plan around that – think of what you will need tomorrow and have started working on it today.
It’s challenging but worth it. When you see in the same office, it’s easy to hide inefficiency by looking busy. Remote environment strips that facade, and you are left to confront the reality of your management style.
Making sure nobody is blocked is the biggest challenge as a manager. It will take practice and yield exceptional rewards.
The takeaway is:
Instead of worrying about what your people are doing right this second, try to slice the work so that they can work on pieces independently. And let them have their lunch.
Intrinsic motivation
You can’t just walk in, scold people and control what they do. When you do that online, they can just run away from the computer. You don’t want that. Instead, you want your people to be challenged by the work or at least see the value of it. It’s surprisingly easy – we all want to be useful, challenged and learn new skills.
Remember to provide enough context and give them input into the details of what you need done. You are not as smart as you think, and your employees may be more capable than you imagine.
Takeaway:
They want to do a good job. Let them do a good job.
Communication
Communicate a lot. A massive chunk of what you want to say will be lost in text, and even video calls help only to a certain extent. You will say one thing, and your team will understand something completely different. It’s easier to spot that in person.
Double-check, over-communicate, and write things down. If you feel it takes too much time, you’ll save it by having already written it down and being able to re-use previous notes.
Takeaway:
Write stuff down in Google Docs. Discuss in Slack and Zoom.
Level playing field
If you are letting people work from home, EVERYBODY has to work remotely. If the situation is not the same for everyone, then co-located people will keep their old communication habits, and remote colleagues will be left in the dark. Companies that „failed at remote work” did a half-assed job of choosing a poor soul to be left in the dark and continued to share information face-to-face.
Either your team is in the same space, or it’s at home. This is not quantum physics, where you can be in 2 places at the same time.
Takeaway
Do or do not. There is no try.
4 Free Tools to set you up for remote success.
Zoom.
Zoom is the new Skype. It’s more reliable, more dependable, and better suited to remote work than any other video-call software. It has taken over the remote companies by storm because it has unmatched quality. There are other tools, just none worth trying.
Since you don’t see your coworkers in the office, meeting them on video helps to transmit all those non-verbal signals that are lost during voice calls or email exchanges. I recommend you do zoom calls frequently at the beginning.
My best tips for Zoom calls:
- If you are switching from the office and are on the same timezone, set up a daily check-in call ( say 10 am ). Ask everybody what they worked on yesterday and what they are planning to work on today. Make notes in Google Docs. Use that call to also work on your remote setup. Put that on the Google Calendar and invite your coworkers, so everybody has a link to the call handy.
- Zoom has a good enough free plan. You need to start paying if you want to have meetings for 3+ people longer than 40 minutes. You can also stop and hop on a new session every 40 minutes. That is what I do.
- Buy your employees good headphones ($20-$45). Take this seriously. Lousy audio from (god forbid) earbuds they got with their iPhones will be disproportionately frustrating.
- Back against the wall, light in front. Selfie ring helps. Seth Godin has more advice.
- The internet does not have to be that fast. Even the one from your iPhone hotspot will be fine.
Slack
This will be your primary communication channel. Since you are no longer communicating in person, you need a central hub and email is not suited for that. Slack is for all those situations where you would come over, say something in the shared space, share a joke, or have a look at what your coworker is doing.
Slack is a shared chat, with different channels. Channels help to separate various concerns and make it easier to manage.
- Do not require everybody to read everything. Chose one channel with mandatory reading (the typical pattern is „#announcements” ). Every new mandatory thing decreases the chance they will keep up.
- Once you make a decision or have takeaways, move to more permanent storage. Google Docs is good.
- Remember to goof off. You need to provide an upbeat environment. If it becomes stressful, your employees will just stop working. The common pattern is to have a „#watercooler” channel and post lots of memes.
- The free plan will have some limitations. Mainly it has a limited history of conversations. Free is enough.
Google Docs / Drive
You need one place which will be the source of truth, and people will refer to when they are confused. Since they will be working asynchronously, you have to make it easier for them to find information that they need. Shared Google Drive and Docs will help you exchange documents and keep track of your decisions. You are also producing work, which most likely has the shape of documents.
My tips on working with Google Docs
- Write down as much stuff as possible.
- Do make a shared folder in Drive and tidy up the structure frequently
- Make sure to have one place where everything is linked – it can be a Google Doc with a list of running projects and links to docs each describing the progress of the project
- Update those documents!
- „Where is X, what the status of Y” should require no answer – it should be apparent where the information is always.
- You can work using the personal Google Accounts. You don’t need paying for GSuite.
Honorable mention: Trello
Trello is a simple tool to track the progress of the tasks in your team. Who is doing what? How is X doing? Did we finish Y? That’s what Trello is for.
- You can connect it to Slack so you can always see what your people are working on
- Again, the free plan is your friend
How to put it all together – your action plan:
- Make sure everybody has a computer at home they can use. Buy them headsets. They will need email addresses, but @gmail.com is fine.
- They need accounts for Google Docs, Trello, and Zoom. They will also need to install Zoom
- Wash your hands
- Register a new Slack for your company, invite your team
- Start chatting on Slack, make #announcements, #general, and #watercooler channels.
- Wash your hands
- Start your first Zoom Call. See how it goes
- Don’t touch your face
- Dump all work into actionable tasks in Trello.
- Start writing stuff down in Google Docs.
- Wash your hands
Further reading
- „Remote: Office not required” is the best book on the topic.
- The ultimate guide to remote work by Zapier
This list is short on purpose. Sign up to my newsletter to get more resources about remote work:
[mailerlite_form form_id=1]Good luck and wash your hands!
Dear ,
I have been failing our company and failing you – personally. I withheld valuable feedback.
To say that feedback is essential is an understatement. All human progress comes from experimentation, analyzing results, and tweaking the actions, one small challenge at a time.
I would even identify the most significant societal challenges as breakdowns in feedback cycles:
- Obesity would not be an issue if a tasty cookie did not deliver faster ‘positive’ feedback than years of exercise and proper nutrition,
- Climate Change is a result of quarterly profit cycles providing more immediate data than decade-long weather pattern changes,
We do a thing that we think is good, we get a consequence three decades later and are surprised what exactly is behind this result. Humanity is not built to work at this scale.
But let’s get back to business and the case at hand. Lack of feedback UP the „chain of command” is how companies fail. On paper, big organizations have every advantage. But as the company grows, „The franchise blinders harden” – as Safi Bahcall phrased it in Loonshots. Ben Horrowitz agrees, and in Hard Thing about Hard things identifies that „The biggest problem is the one that blindsides you.”.
No wonder that effective leaders not only shy away from feedback but crave and ask for it. I know you are the same way. You ask for feedback, you act on it swiftly and everything is better after the exchange. And yet, I haven’t been giving you enough feedback to you, and I find it hard to pinpoint why.
Following reasons come to mind:
- I consider myself a competent professional. As such, I pride myself in taking on challenges and solving problems. My default is to take your suggestions as a challenge and run with it.
- I noticed it’s easier for me to disagree with “two levels up” than with you. I am not sure what is causing this. Maybe I am afraid of bringing this up so you won’t retaliate on my performance review? I know this is ridiculous!
- I am pretty outspoken and have publicly passionately argued with the company direction. Everybody (including you) assumes that I will have the same force in private conversations, but it’s not true. Privately, I tend to concede much faster.
- I optimize my career to work with smart people on exciting projects. You can teach me a lot, and I always assume that you know a little more (or a lot) than me and have stuff figured out way better than me.
- Lastly, we all work remotely. I know blaming this on the remote environment is a noob move, but it’s tough to catch the misunderstandings early. When we are not on the same page, it’s really hard to see if it’s a communication problem, or we have different points of view.
Because of these points, I have robbed you of valuable feedback. There were situations where we disagreed, and I conceded when I shouldn’t have. I did not want to introduce more tension or come off as stubborn because I have behaved so in the past.
What can I do?
I don’t think being more outspoken is the way I want to pursue. I am plenty vocal already so that I will try a different route:
Whenever the „I don’t think he’s right” thought appears, I will note it diligently and set time before our 1:1 to make sure my opinion still has merit. If that will be the case after a few days, I will bring this up on our 1:1. That’s what they are for.
I know this feedback is valuable for you, and I know you will act on it. I need to be better at giving you the opportunity to improve.
Sincerely, Artur.
PS: Dear commenter, if you have any tips on how to be better at giving feedback to your manager, please share!
Good news: Scientists have discovered a simple, effective trick to reach your optimal performance and be the smartest human you can be.
Bad news: You’re not gonna do it.
Here is the trick:
- Breathe deep,
- Drink more water,
- Sleep 8 hours every night
- Eat more vegetables,
- Move your ass
- Go outside
For optimal results, do it every day.
I am sure I am not blowing your mind with novel insight.
You probably are aware that air, water, sleep, and exercise are important. But because these are such basics, we tend to discount them. They are not newsworthy, they won’t make the headlines, and they don’t help you delude yourself that „this time will be different, because you have one more magic trick up your sleeve.”
You probably have heard those points before, but you have a list of concerns and cannot deal with a yet-another morning routine that will take your precious time away from you.
But there is more good news: taking care of these basics seriously will have an immediate effect on your to-do list.
“Energy, not time, is the fundamental currency of high performance.”
Power of Full Engagement
In a best-selling book „Power of Full Engagement”, Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz have listed 4 sources of energy that can fuel your attention, performance, and productivity:
- physical
- emotional
- mental
- spiritual
And your „Biggest Bang for the Buck” is the physical level by far – it is the cornerstone of the other ones. Unfortunately, Humanity has a fascinating ability to forget important lessons.
Breathing
Physical energy is derived from the interaction between oxygen and glucose.
„Surely I know how to breathe!” You may think to yourself.
If you feel constant anxiety or are low-key stressed all the time, here me out: you may be breathing incorrectly. Shallow breathing can very often influence your mood, focus and energy levels. Throughout our evolution, we would shallow breathe only when there is danger, or we have to chase after prey.
So guess what? Your body is releasing cortisol based on your crappy breathing.
But you are sitting in front of your laptop, doing none of those things and yet getting stressed like your life depends on it.
Proper breathing:
- Your arms are back
- Your belly sticks out while you are breathing (that is the diaphragm)
- Air goes in through your nose
- Inhale is at least 3-4 seconds
Watch this video of two navy seals explaining how to breathe:
A sidenote about your laptop/smartphone:
When you are sitting in front of a laptop or holding your smartphone with two hands, you are constricting your lungs.
- Your arms get close together, closing your chest and lungs
- Your head is down, constricting the air canals
- This position is similar to how you would hide from a predator, prompting your body to release cortisol
Homework:
- Watch the navy seal video
- Set a timer in your phone for every 3 hours that says “breathe”
- If you work on your laptop, buy a keyboard and a monitor.
Drinking Water
Drinking water, we have found, is perhaps the most undervalued source of physical energy renewal.
Power of Full Engagement
Your body has lots of water, chances are you know that. But if you are like me, you probably keep putting other stuff in it, like:
- Coke
- Coffee
- Tea
Even though they contain it, none of those things ARE water.
They have much lower PH (they are acidic), which means your body has to work hard to filter them before the water content can be used in metabolic processes.
On top of that, beverages tend to flush out the essential salts ( Magnesium, Calcium, Potassium ) out of the body. All of these elements are needed to keep your brain spinning to ingest my insightful blog posts.
A study published in “Frontiers in Human Neuroscience” has found evidence that drinking water improves cognitive performance in both children and adults. Hydration for health is collecting empirical evidence for the many benefits of just drinking water.
Homework:
- Buy a water bottle and put it by your computer
- Put a post-it on it that says „Drink Me.”
- Drink whenever you feel foggy
Sleeping
Loss of sleep hurts attention, executive function, working memory, mood, quantitative skills, logical reasoning, and even motor dexterity.
Brain rules
I am writing this for you as much as I do it for my own benefit. Every once in a while, I will get deep into a fun automation project – a book, or a new Netflix series and realize that it’s 3 am already.
The next day is totally wasted and I promise to never repeat that mistake until the next time. Goddamnit, Artur!!
- Yes, you need 8 hours of sleep.
- You are not as productive at 10 pm as you thought
- Go to bed
Arianna Huffington, the founder of HuffPost has decided to devote her entire career to promoting sleep and in this TED Talk, she explains why:
Homework:
- Set an alarm that says „Go to sleep” at, say 21:45
- Go to sleep when the alarm rings
Moving your Ass
Physical activity is cognitive candy. Civilization, while giving us such seemingly forward advances as modern medicine and spatulas, also has had a nasty side effect. It gives us more opportunities to sit on our butts.
Brain rules
Apart from the countless evidence that exercising keeps your body healthy, it also helps you think.
Read more about Ass-Shaking here
Exercise gets blood to your brain, bringing it glucose for energy and oxygen to soak up the toxic electrons that are left over. It also stimulates the protein that keeps neurons connecting.
Homework:
- When you wake up, go for a fast walk, every day for a week. Just try it.
- Report back
Basics are your key to success
We search for “advanced tricks” and “pro tips” in a vain effort to save ourselves time and effort on the basics.
The harsh reality is that mastering the basics is the real “trick”. We gloss over them, because they are intellectually simple. Yet simple is not easy and it takes practice to engrain proper habits and foundations.
Maybe someday I will. Until them, I’ll keep having to remind myself to drink more water and move once in a while.
“What gets measured, gets managed,”
Peter Drucker famously said.
The sentiment makes sense. If we are not looking at a compass, how can we know if we are going in the right direction? How can we keep ourselves honest, and how can we course-correct?
Thanks to the culture of metrics, in 2019 Amazon has surpassed Apple as the most valuable company on the face of the planet.
Indeed, what gets measured, gets managed, but at the expense of everything else. Less famously, Drucker said
Working on the right things is what makes knowledge work effective. This is not capable of being measured by any of the yardsticks for manual work.
It is very human to want a put significant round number, so we can judge it’s value. We like explicit situations, and a moral gray area is always unwelcome. Your score is 73rd percentile, and eating meat on a Friday is a sin. At least that is clear.
But life is more complicated and nuanced. It is somehow tough to measure the desired outcome accurately. So we defer to measuring the closest thing that is easy to gauge. Can’t hurt, right? At least we’re in the ballpark.
Well, it can.
In 1956 V. F. Ridgway has pioneered an area called “Dysfunctional Consequences of Performance Measurements.” In the first study of such kind (and the one that gave the name to the whole genre), a systematic analysis of the quantitative measurements in the governmental sector and found multiple examples of it going terribly wrong.
(Quantitative is a fancy term for something that has a number.)
“Indiscriminate use ( of quantitative measures) may result in side effects and reactions outweighing the benefits.”
It boils down to the fact that unlike scientifical phenomena, organizations, markets, and people are really complex. By creating simplistic representations, we leave uncomfortable stuff out, ending up with a perfect model for a world that does not exist. We develop synthetic metrics to gauge “the best we can” and start to measure the progress against that number.
As phrased in “Goodhart’s law“, once you make that artificial number your target, it stops being a useful metric. Everybody in the organization will now realign their priorities in order to “bump” the number. With no regard to how that translates into the bottom line.
- As pictured by sketchplanations above, as a nail-making company, you want to make a lot of customers happy with your nails (a noble cause indeed). But if you are sloppy with your metric-choosing, you can get the opposite effect,
- Let’s imagine you are trying to measure the output of support employees. If you make them answer the most support tickets, they will try to hit that number at the expense of actually helping the customer, or even worse – making the customer come back a few times with the same problem.
- If you’re a private doctor trying to avoid lawsuits (like in the USA), you will order unnecessary expensive tests to ensure legal defense. Conversely, when incentivized to curb spending (like in Poland), you will try to guess the diagnosis to avoid costly tests.
Jerry Muller, the author of “The Tyranny of Metrics,” coined the term Metrics Fixation, which is where you replace judgment with numeric indicators.
The most characteristic feature of metric fixation is the aspiration to replace judgment based on experience with standardized measurement.
Jerry Muller
In a frantic search for performance metrics, we often grab the number that is easiest to gauge, ignoring that “Not everything that matters is measurable and not everything that’s measurable matters” (Jerry Muller).
Metrics fixation not only punishes the organization by delivering unexpected outcomes and lower performance. I would argue that it is one of the most significant risks the modern world faces today.
Broad societal problems with metrics.
1. The educational system.
Public Education is, of course, a lofty goal and a massive achievement of our civilization. It is intended to teach young people a habit of life-long learning, open their minds, and realize their full potential. But the education system has a metric: grades.
The entire school experience is designed to be measurable, controlled, and spoon-fed. You cannot take a long time getting to know algebra because it would be unfair to your fellow test-takers. You cannot skip ahead because the class is not moving at your pace. And in effect, children learn one lesson the most: Learning is not fun.
When students cheat on exams, it’s because our school system values grades more than Students value learning.
Neil deGrasse Tyson
2. Economy and finance.
Shockingly, economists and investors are not judged by the performance of their models in real markets! They are not eager to wait decades to validate a model, so they pick metrics easier to measure – testing the hypothesis on synthetic data, ending up with a perfect model for an ideal world.
If you are a passenger on a plane and the pilot tells you he has a faulty map, you get off the plane; you don’t stay and say “well, there is nothing better.” But in economics, particularly finance, they keep teaching these models on grounds that “there is nothing better,” causing harmful risk-taking. Why? Because the professors don’t bear the harm of the models.
Colorful Nassim Taleb, best-selling author of Incerto, on Economy.
3. Artificial intelligence
Unintended consequences of metrics is the core reason why Elon Musk thinks artificial intelligence is the biggest threat to the human race.
The biggest problem with AI is not that it will become wary of us giving it orders and decides to wipe us out on a whim. This is exemplified in the canonical thought experiment called the paperclip maximizer. Nick Bostrom shows us that artificial general intelligence, presented by a single metric ( number of paper clips produced ), designed competently and without malice, could ultimately destroy humanity.
OK, I GET IT! But what else can we do? Should we fly blind?
Of course not!
Measuring is still the best way to keep you honest and on track. If you measure against real, tangible goals like revenue – it will help you achieve them.
But it’s hard to find those goals in other areas. If your goal is to “be healthy,” should you aim for lower weight? Body Fat percentage? VO2Max (the amount of oxygen you can consume in the unit of time)? Your maximum bench press weight?
Every single one of those numbers represents an opinionated model, and those models are in odds with each other. If you go to 10 different doctors, you will probably get 11 different answers. And each one will not be focused on you but their pet model of the world.
But you know what a great model of reality is? Real-world. It is not entirely measurable, it’s not an exact number, but it’s real. If you want to feel great, then you can use what “Qualitative” measuring is – your answer to the question “do I feel great”
- If your goal is to learn a foreign language, then ask yourself the question, “did I just have a meaningful conversation in a foreign language.”
- If you want to hire a great employee, don’t judge them by the diploma. Give them a trial project and see how they work, interact with colleagues, and further the real goals of your organization.
People have a natural drive to do a good job and demonstrate autonomy, mastery, and purpose. It has been proven over and over again that intrinsic is the only motivation that makes sense long-term It has also been proved, that when you introduce extrinsic one (this one big metric, higher salary, more pocket money for doing house chores), the intrinsic motivation will vanish, and your employees will stop trying to further your agenda under the singular guidance of the all-important metric.
The more a quantitative metric is visible and used to make crucial decisions, the more it will be gamed—which will distort and corrupt the exact processes it was meant to monitor.
An adaption of Campbell’s Law
Instead of putting a round number on the wall, create an organization where you can trust your people to do the right thing. At least until the advent of Artificial Intelligence.
When Peter Diamandis stood under the arch of Saint Louis, with 20 astronauts behind him, he announced a 10-million dollar prize for developing commercial space flight.
The prize was called X-Prize because he did not have that money, nor did he know where it could come from. X stood for the name of foundation or individual that would finance this.
And yet, without the money, without really means to pull it off, X-Prize has renewed the interest in developing the commercial space flight industry and sparked the imagination of other entrepreneurs.
I urge you do do the same in your organization.
Doing the hard things is both the best thing for the company, for you and counterintuitively – your lifestyle.
Corporate environments and more established companies tend to be risk-averse. Everyone tries to be in the middle – do a little more than enough to be considered a good employee.
But surely in your workplace, there is a couple of things to tackle that are considered too hard, way out there, maybe not now. It is my long-standing career strategy to go after those things with guns blazing.
It’s possible because of Super-Credibility.
Peter Diamandis says his stunt was only possible because he used Super-Credibility. He tackled a venture so outrageous, bold, and out there, that people stopped evaluating it in terms of logic.
This bold claim jumped over the usual evaluation straight to emotion. People wanted it to happen, so they believed it without a proof.
Warning: this is a mechanism that can-and-is used for evil as well. Please don’t be a fake news jerk.
You can use super-credibility at work without rebuilding one of the toughest industries in the world like space transportation.
When you tackle something considered extraordinarily hard at work:
- Everybody knows your attempt is outrageous,
- People like to see outrageous endeavors succeed,
- Focus helps you judge what is essential and what is not,
- It’s a bullshit remover. And bullshit is one of the biggest momentum killers out there.
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I write about the psychological and technical aspects of the Internet, focusing on remote work, online economy, and cognitive load. Every monday.
[mailerlite_form form_id=3]It’s easier than you expect
Imagine you are just joining a team that has a hard problem to solve. When you ask about the Elephant in the room, you usually get:
- This is just the way things are
- This part is just too hard.
- We tried once, and it ended badly.
The original decision to not touch the Elephant may have been not as clear, but as any great story, it grows in myths and legends.
With every new teammate, the story is retold and how it usually is with humans, gets more exciting because:
- This is how human memory and tales work. Yes, the fish was thiiiiis big.
- The current team has to justify – in front of you and each other – why they didn’t tackle this problem yet. To reduce cognitive dissonance, if they haven’t addressed it – it must have been too hard.
And that is not only the perception – when you are working against or around a particular piece of code or business process, you are introducing cancer growth processes – something that should not be there but is contributing to the state of brokenness.
But the Elephant in the room is much, much smaller than previously thought. His most threatening quality is that he is unknown, fuzzy – a maverick.
Why you are providing massive value
According to Ray Dalio (the most successful hedge-fund manager currently), the simplified way to solve any problem goes as follows:
- Identify the problems in front of goals
- Solve /work around problems
- Repeat
When you have an untouchable problem, people will work on other stuff. The problem is that sometimes the “Elephant” will be a prerequisite to solving other tasks.
In the ideal world, the organization would throw significant resources at this issue, because solving it will unlock tremendous value. But resources are people – often the same people who have repeated for a long while that this cannot be tackled. Doing the thing now will hurt their egos.
Good people get sometimes emotionally invested in issues being unsolved.
So when you actually take the Elephant out of the bottle, you unlock all this fantastic realm of possibility. When a company does that, we call it disruption. The whole industry is changed because bottled-up ideas are now reachable.
Benefits to you
I value my quality of life. The hardest problems are interesting, but I do not want to work crazy hours or sacrifice my happiness on the altar of the company’s bottom line.
And yet, taming elephants has become my go-to strategy for more leeway and a happier work environment.
As previously mentioned, super-credibility is a bullshit remover. You get VIP passes to get around conventional processes – aka “bureaucracy.” ( Sidenote about Bullshit: I recommend “Life is too short” essay by Paul Graham ).
- People are used to ignoring the Elephant. It’s quiet near him, no micromanagement, a lot of autonomy and space to work.
- When you have a huge, audacious goal in front of you, it’s tough to wander and lose motivation.
Procrastination is your brain refusing to waste resources on your lack of decision. Without this uncertainty, your productivity is easily 10x.
In his New York Times bestseller Drive, Daniel Pink describes what motivates us:
- Autonomy
- Mastery
- Purpose
Read about Daniel’s ideas on the fantastic fs.blog
All of these three things are immediately given to you once you volunteer to take the Elephant out for a walk.
Accelerated learning
Continuing to support my point with famous New-York-Times bestselling authors, I’ll touch upon Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers.
Trying to dissect the story behind success, Gladwell discovers, that the extraordinary people:
- Have a certain, but not disproportionate amount of innate ability – aka Talent,
- Have put in over 10 000 hours of practice during their ascent to stardom (the famous 10 000 hours rule)
- What is very often overlooked, that was deliberate practice. Always on the edge of ability, always challenging themselves.
Most of us have some innate ability that we utilize in our careers. Most of us have access to 10 000 hours to be extraordinary. The hardest piece to arrange is a steady stream of ever-more-challenging problems to solve.
The Beatles honed their craft on the Hamburg club scene, and Bill Gates used (illegally) his school’s computer to get better at programming.
If you can go after the Elephant during your work hours, without breaking the law or going to Hamburg, then you are in a unique position!
Tackling the most challenging issues at your organization will not only result in more leeway but is the most effective way to advance your career.
A trap: The Elephant is hard, not tedious.
The Fantastic Seth Godin has made the essential distinction in regards to succeeding at work:
Long work has a storied history. Farmers, hunters, factory workers… Always there was the long work required to succeed. For generations, there was a huge benefit that came to those with the stamina and fortitude to do long work.
The Fantastic Seth Godin.
Hard work is frightening. We shy away from hard work because inherent in hard work is a risk. Hard work is hard because you might fail. You can’t fail at long work, you merely show up. You fail at hard work when you don’t make an emotional connection, or when you don’t solve the problem or when you hesitate.
The Elephant – the hard work I am urging you to tackle is the task that is unknown, complex, and emotionally challenging. Your Ego can be hurt, you can be ridiculed, and you can fail. That is the hard part.
Copy-pasting spreadsheets or tackling something that should never be done in the first place is safe but tedious and time-consuming. This is dead-end, laborious, and unfulfilling work. Avoid that. Or Automate.
Once you deal with the Elephant, everybody will marvel at your skill, even if you don’t have any extraordinary talents. You have seen my drawing ability and it only goes downhill from there.
Go take that Elephant out for a walk. It’s really friendly, it really needs to pee, and the weather is beautiful out there.
Hey Fellow Hacker News reader! ?
I think you could also enjoy my piece “Well, we have to measure something.”, And the perils of metrics.
It shows when Quantitative metrics can sometimes not only be beneficial but sometimes turn out harmful, despite popular opinion.
Everything was going fine in my life, and I was miserable.
Five years ago, I had a ‘fine’ job, but I craved a challenge – something I could be proud of. Slacking off at the office, I was browsing Hacker News (a technology-oriented version of Reddit), marveling at the fantastic things everybody ELSE was doing. I could see my future as a cog in the corporate machine, and it was not inspiring.
Ramit’s advice helped me truly level up. During one of those Hacker-News-Fueled ‘breaks’, I stumbled upon this financial blogger with marketing, business, and job-search advice. Despite the scammy-sounding title of his blog – “I will teach you to be Rich”, I found it very helpful and ended up taking the “Dream Job” course.
Fast forward five years, I work remotely for the best company I could ever dream of, making past me very proud. I travel the world with my wife, who also works remotely – thanks to Ramit’s advice. Our company even flew us to India to present at a conference. We never dreamt of going to India, let alone on the company’s dime. We went to a city known for one of the most luxurious hotels in India – in fact, Ramit went there on his honeymoon!
After taking Dream Job, I have attended Success Triggers, Delegate&Done, Mental Mastery and How to talk to anybody. I recommend each one of these courses. They deliver consistent, exceptional quality and are great lenses to organize your existing knowledge.
To answer the title question: Yes, he is legit. Any course you will choose will be the best one in the category.
“Ramit Sethi is very, very legit”
Tim Ferriss
The biggest value I get from these curriculums is what not to focus on at this moment. Ramit claims that he and the team spend the majority of the time on nailing the lesson plan and it really shows. In the world where information is abundant, this curation is the ultimate value.
Ramit is about the “Rich Life”
Yes, he is in the personal finance sphere. But instead of focusing on curbing spending, budgeting, power of compounding in investments – and all the other components of successful financial future, he focuses of the end goal – the Rich Life, whatever that means for you:
- Getting rid of credit card debt ( in the “I will teach you to be rich” book )
- Getting a better job ( in Dreamjob )
- Starting a business (in Earn1K and Zero to launch Courses)
- Negotiating a raise (in Dreamjob )
- Reclaiming your time (in “Delegate & Done” course about virtual assistants)
5 principles of Ramit
After reading Ramit’s content for years, I have teased out these underlying messages in all of his teachings:
Disproportionate results
By investing 10% more than others into preparation, research and figuring out the strategy, you can get 10x – 100x better results. This approach is applicable in job search (make connections first), building a business (nail down your target niche first), fitness, dating and other areas of Rich Life.
Strategies, not tactics
The Internet loves gimmicks and listicles like “10 apps to polish your resume, 20 online marketplaces for creators.”. But these are tactics. The important things to internalize are the strategies that help us understand “game being played around us”. Not frantic tactics that will be useless after a year.
Focus on the big wins
You can focus on saving a few hundred bucks a year by cutting back on lattes, or you can get a 30 000 dollar raise. Nuff said. Click here if you want to read one of Ramit’s classic rants on ‘cut back on lattes’.
Psychology is key
The best advice is the one you take and follow-through. Ramit understands that and optimizes his courses, emails, and tips to make help you follow-through. They are not stuffed with every conceivable piece of information on the topic, but meticulously designed to make you succeed. That being said, his courses include “Vaults” that have 10x the amount of tips and tactics as the main material. But as I mentioned, the tactics are never the focus.
Test relentlessly
Do stuff that works. Take a hard look at what doesn’t. Don’t try to make yourself feel better by confusing the two.
Get his advice for free
Ramit frequently claims that 95% of his advice is free. I don’t think this is accurate. I found that he shared 305% of his advice for free. But you still should take his courses, because they put everything in place.
I would recommend the following path to take advantage of this plethora of resources:
Step 1:Check his Instagram.
It’s hilarious. It’s also a good test if Ramit ‘resonates’ with you.
Step 2: Tim Ferriss interview.
Tim is a world-class interviewer and they are friends.
Step 3: Briefcase technique
The technique illustrates all the principles I laid out above and helped me get my job.
Bonus round: Ultimate guides
Following that, I recommend his free “ultimate guides”:
- The ultimate guide to making money
- Guide to finding your dream job
- The ultimate guide to starting an online business
“How much should a man spend on an engagement ring?” is a fascinating example of Ramit diving into an area populated with generic advice and actually providing an exceptional answer. This is my gold standard on what a blog post should look like.
A note about joining Ramit courses.
The only way to join Ramit Courses is to sign up for his email list. There is a public page with all the products he sells, but they are only “open” one at a time.
Sign up to his email list. You don’t have to pay him a dime, but you will get tremendous value out of the emails. They are packed with knowledge.
And I do recommend the courses.
Ramit’s vision of Rich Life has rubbed on me a little bit. Even though he does not sell anything in the space, he convinced me to get a personal trainer, cleaning help for our apartment and I even have a personal VA.
Past me would marvel at a life I built.
And if you want to hear in detail what I learned, and how I adapted Ramit’s advice to suit the Remote work environment – sign up for MY email list. ?
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If I died today, I don’t think my friends would notice for a while.
My digital ghost would keep responding to some emails, pay my bills, and send birthday cards. He would read my text messages, forward important ones to my virtual assistant, or respond.
This spooky afterlife is not the goal. I have been automating bits and pieces of my daily responsibilities for the opposite purpose – to save more time for the things that truly matter in life. My ghost is here to help me now.
Ikiryō (生霊, lit. “living ghost”), in Japanese popular belief and fiction, refers to a spirit that leaves the body of a living person and subsequently haunts other people or places, sometimes across great distances.
Examples include:
- Reading the invoices I get over email to pay specific ones and file them for my accountant,
- Answering, recording and transcribing the calls I get from all unknown numbers,
- Putting all the newsletters that I choose to receive in my pocket app, where I consume all articles,
- Monitoring my communication and reminding me to contact friends I haven’t reached out to for a while,
- Many many more, including sending birthday cards to my friends.
And this list does not even include automations that run this blog!
You see, I don’t automate to save a minute here or there. Writing, testing, and ensuring nothing goes awry is labor-intensive. I automate to forget about things. My digital ghost worries about A LOT, so I don’t have to.
My goals of automation
Do you know that glut of “stuff” sitting in your stomach? The nagging notion that you have SO MUCH to do? Or maybe you are familiar with the guilt that you are so far behind in errands?
Transfers have to go out, invitations to whatever event sent, expenses reported. How can you find time this weekend to do something fun when you have amassed all this?
It certainly was a feeling for me!
That stressful notion of overwhelm is called the “Cognitive Load.” Think of it as a tax for remembering to do stuff. It does not even include doing the actual task – it’s just an overhead and my first goal of automation is to cut it as much as possible.
My second goal is to make sure things are done. Since both me and my wife work remotely, we travel a fair bit. After work, we have been exploring the cenotes of Yukatan, safaris of South Africa, and depths of underwater Thailand. But when you have to put in 8 hours of solid work and then rush to catch a diving boat, doing bank transfers, taxes, and calls is a real inconvenience. It’s really hard to do taxes underwater (although the feeling is the same).
We would postpone those things, and then, after the trip is finished, we would be hit by a freight train of obligations. Taxes on Jetlag are not much fun either.
As Stephen Wolfram summarized in his fantastic post “Notes on my personal infrastructure”, my bots consist of “the technology and other things that help me live and work better, feel less busy, and be more productive every day.”
Building a personal infrastructure has freed my time, mental energy and capacity to focus on more inspiring tasks. Instead of treading the water copying cells from one excel spreadsheet to another, I can spend time with my wife or promote Remote Work in an effort to help curb climate change.
And I want you to free your potential too, so you can focus on a higher calling.
Everyone can Automate
Automation is no longer only for programmers like me and theoretical physicists, like Steven Wolfram. It often does not require a single line of code.
Eric Dietrich has a fantastic post, “Don’t learn to program, learn to automate” where he describes his process of automation. Here are the steps required to write your first bot:
1 – You have to get very clear on what you are trying to achieve.
2 – You have to think about your process of achieving that.
If you are familiar with the GTD methodology, you might have noticed that these steps are the surefire way to Get Stuff Done. In the majority of cases, I would stop here. Focusing on goals and optimizing the “algorithm” of a manual task pays off before automating, and it’s sometimes enough.
But If you want to get the thing totally out of your mind:
3 – Implement the process. I know this sounds daunting, but have a look at a service called Zapier (or the free alternative – IFTTT). With a few clicks, I have created automations that will:
- Save messages I starred in slack to my TODO list,
- Tweet 3 and 10 days after I have published a blog post
- Remind me what my mom needs help with whenever I’m close to her place
- Keep the tweets and pocket articles I starred in a spreadsheet
- Many, many more.
I would often need to change my manual process because Zapier would not let me implement a specific flow, so don’t be surprised if you’ll have to go back to the previous point.
4 – Bonus points: maintenance
Stuff breaks, services change their offerings, and your automations will work unreliably. Just like a manager ensuring his team is getting the intended results, you’ll have to budget an hour per month to make sure everything works as expected.
With your own bots (or Ikiryo if you prefer) handling the overhead, you could have more time for what you want from life.
But I have to warn you: busywork is sometimes enjoyable. It gives you a quick dopamine boost and satisfaction from a well-accomplished task. Having the stuff to do has a way of making us feeling essential and special.
The more you automate, the more deliberate you have to be with your life.
For me, that’s the third goal of automation.
This post has been previously published on Maria’s blog
When I lived in Korea, it shocked me how everyone perceived ‘busy‘ as a badge of honor. It meant you’re a productive member of your group and people can rely on your sacrifice. It meant you’re working hard and should be praised for it. I remember how I told my colleague once that everyone was so busy, and she said “Don’t worry, Maria. You are busy too!”.
I found it funny back then, but she was right.
I’m addicted to busy in a lot of ways. I often feel that I can’t take a break, or I’ll never be able to catch up with all the things on my neverending todo list. I feel like everything will fall apart if I step away, and everyone will find out what sort of fraud I am. I feel like if I don’t take care of some things, no one will, and disaster will ensue.
I told my team lead recently how the workload in a project I lead overwhelms me. These days it’s enough for one person to get sick, and we’re barely catching up. He listened to it all very gently, then said I should consider stepping away from the lead role, cause I’m on collision course with planet burnout.
It was a hard pill to swallow, but he was right too.
The way I dealt with this challenge was very unhealthy. It was like running around with an empty wheelbarrow, too busy to actually load it. I felt I was doing everyone a favour by working overtime and feeling personally responsible for every single problem. In fact, I became less capable of deep troubleshooting, supporting my fellow team members, or making strategic decisions that would solve the crisis at its core. Because of my desire to do more, I was actually doing less, but felt more tired in result.
What he said to me was a much needed wakeup call. I realised the things that I did weren’t working, and that I can’t repeat the same steps again and expect a different outcome. So I did the scariest thing I could do.
I took a break.
I’ve let the raging fires burn on their own, and spent an entire day catching up with all the important-but-not-that-urgent stuff. The kind of things that never openly ask for your time, but can leverage your efforts elsewhere if you let them.
I felt like I was letting my teammates down by leaving them alone in trenches. This couldn’t have been further from the truth. I finally had a chance to analyse why exactly we’re lagging behind, understand what we need to get back on track, and lay out a plan how to get there. I could chat with a mentor and ask her for advice. I could kick off the training of another colleague, which I’ve been putting off for a week. You thought the empty wheelbarrow was a hyperbole?
I thought I was too busy to do all of that. I was wrong.
Whenever I’m feeling too busy to take a break, it is precisely when I most need one.
Whenever I’m too busy to exercise, or meditate, or go for a walk, it’s the surest sign that I should just do it.
Whenever I feel that everything will fall apart if I step away, I should let it fall apart. If the only thing that holds the entire structure together is my enormous effort, it’s probably not a structure worth preserving.
Whenever I feel like I’m banging my head against the wall, I should take a step back, look around, and see if there’s a door nearby, even if my first instinct is to keep smashing harder.
The feeling of busyness can be quite overwhelming. But ultimately, busy is a choice.
When I pictured my dream house, it always had a lot of books. Maybe even a dedicated „library” room, with walls invisible under shelves of volumes, all neatly stacked.
Of course, one of the bookstands would hide a secret passageway. There has to be a secret passageway in a dream house, duh!
Now I do have a house and I am sorry to report that there is no library room and its fine. I did not give up on my childhood dream nor gave up reading. In fact, I do read significantly more.
But I did quit physical books.
There are no bookshelves, stacks of first editions nor walls covered by volumes.
Almost all my reading happens on a Kindle, precisely because it does not have to happen in a library. And replacing the whole room for this device has several benefits.
⚖ Weight
I bought my first Kindle when I started traveling a lot. The books I read tend to be on the thick side, and they were taking too much damn space inside the carry-on. Kindle Paperwhite weighs 205 grams. Hardcover version of „Song of Ice and Fire” volume 1 is 970. That means that the first part weights as much as five kindle readers.
? You don’t have to decide
Or take books „Just in case.” What if you finish that first part? Seven volumes of George R.R. Martin’s finest work weigh as much as 14 kindles.
? Any book in the world at your fingertips
Let’s imagine you are traveling through Africa and you just heard about a fantastic book that would complement your understanding of the culture. Chances, that you can stumble upon that title in a country that uses a different language are very slim.
But Kindle can instantly turn into ( almost ) any book in Amazon’s offering. You can buy a book on a whim and start reading it 2. MINUTES. LATER.
In fact, in our house books are the biggest „impulse spend.” We had to delete a Credit Card from the Amazon account since we used to buy any book recommended to us.
Some of the books on my reading list I have not bought yet
Books are not like cars (in many aspects). It mostly does not matter what you drive. It will still get you there. On the other hand, the difference between the best book on the topic and the 5th best is sometimes immense.
The friction of paper books means that sometimes you read what is available – and not what is the best reading choice.
Of course, chance encounters of hidden literary gems that serendipity put in our laps should be cherished. But being stuck with a terrible book and the responsibility of finishing it is a waste of time life What you read matters. Much more than How Much.
Amazon has the best selection and arguably the best electronic reading device. That is why I don’t bother with any other brands. They may be technically better or cheaper, but removing the hassle from procuring a book works out to my advantage.
The highlights, OH MY GOD – the highlights
I believe that concrete takeaways are more important than reading more books. Recollection or even reflection upon the concepts, thoughts or mental models can further my understanding of the world. My reading list contains a lot of non-fiction, sometimes called „self – help.” This is a dubious term because they usually are about the workings of the world. Topics like psychology, randomness, organizational design, business or innovation are sometimes dense, but biographies or history books are an excellent example of non-fiction that can teach you a lot about reality.
This is a topic for a whole another blog post, but in essence – taking lessons from books is the single most valuable activity I can imagine.
Inspired by the amazing Derek Sivers, I started a practice of summarising every book that I read. While I’m reading, I do highlight a lot, sometimes even make notes on the kindle touch keyboard (clumsy but doable). After finishing the book, I will fashion some posts about the book.
Having it in public forces me to be more verbose and explicit in my notes. All the posts are written only for the audience of 1 – future me. The external accountability motivates me to put a little more effort into my writing. And future me is grateful for that.
Before Kindle, I was very reluctant to highlight stuff in the book itself. I grew up in a family that was not rich by any means and we cherished books. Highlighting anything feels to me like destroying something valuable. Even if I hesitate only a bit before marking a passage – that has an impact on the lessons I can remember.
But on the Kindle, I can highlight very generously. What’s more, I can also find these highlights with minimal effort. These two aspects of Kindle highlights fundamentally changed how I read.
Here is what I do after finishing a non-fiction book:
- Copy my-clippings.txt file from my Kindle to my laptop
- Run a simple script to generate bullet points with highlights from a particular book
- Use that as a stub to write a book summary post
- Publish that, enjoy a wild success on the Internets, be famous, profit from my fame, start attracting the wrong crowd and have paparazzi publish my shameful deeds.
- In the meantime, review my posts periodically to refresh the takeaways.
Currently, I am experimenting with Twitter threads (like 1, 2, 3 ) WHILE I am reading a book. Join me!
My fiancee uses the service called Readwise that will send her emails with the highlights.
While automation is particularly appealing to me, I like the responsibility of having to summarise the takeaways myself. It makes me more focused during the reading.
Kindle Paperwhite backlight.
The paperwhite model features an ambient backlight. There are diodes on the sides that make the entire screen reflect a bit of light. It works differently from your smartphone – the light is reflected and does not interfere with your sleep.
But it means that you don’t need a reading light, which is a GAMECHANGER.
It opens an entire world of bedroom entertainment with your partner.
Particularly a sleeping partner you don’t want to wake up.
But the…
Yes, smell, feel… All that is nice. It’s nice to have something to put on your shelf as well. I know. The passageway…
In the world that turns everything into digital ephemera, having a hard copy of a book is lovely, grounding and tactile.
But in the end, it’s about reading. And if I did not have my Kindle, I would do significantly less of that.
And I will never give up on that secret passageway. Just watch me.