One-on-one meetings are a great way for managers to connect and manage their remote team members. Here’s a guide to run these meetings effectively.

Personal user manuals are a way for distributed workers to broadcast information about themselves to their colleagues. While they aren’t without their pitfalls, they can be an effective way to achieve some personal and team objectives.

When screens mediate our work relationships, we must consciously show empathy towards our coworkers. I describe opportunities for digital empathy in this article.

Forcing functions are constraints that nudge people towards desirable behaviours. In this article, I discuss five forcing functions to promote effective meetings.

Middle-level and people managers play a crucial role in companies, but they also model many corporate dysfunctions. It’s time for people managers to get back in service of the people they lead.

The agile movement was about freeing developers from the baggage of Dilbertesque corporations. But in the 2020s, “doing agile” often comes at the cost of agility. Teams and companies sacrifice common-sense at the altar of a hustle culture, that looks agile, but is far from the spirit of the movement.

Our time is a zero-sum game. We don’t want shallow work commitments to steal our deep work time. Shallow work is unavoidable, but we can control it. In this article I explain four ways to do so.

Copy-pasting office-centric practices rarely works for remote and distributed teams. Three such practices suck, when you attempt them remotely.

Cal Newport’s “slow productivity” philosophy advocates for multi-scale planning at the quarterly, weekly and daily levels. While Cal recommends his excellent time-block planner, I’ve found my humble calendar to be an effective tool for this way of working.

The “whiteboard effect” refers to a deep work phenomenon that occurs when two or more people problem solve together in spells of intense focus. The presence of this effect doesn’t mean, however, that we must always be in whiteboard mode.

For remote workers the boundaries between work and life can often feel blurred. In this article I discuss seven strategies to achieve work life balance.

The sooner a new team can norm, the sooner it delivers value to its stakeholders. This article provides a recipe for leaders of distributed teams to accelerate team norming.

Most tech companies want to run well-leveraged teams; i.e a few senior people and a bunch of junior people. But many of us lack the process discipline to do this well. How do you design a team environment that’s inclusive of junior people? That’s the million dollar question I address in this article.

If you adopt asynchronous work, everyone should be able to work on a schedule that’s convenient to them. But that may not be the case from day one. You must first build your deep-work muscle.

Group chat can be both a helpful tool and a distraction in the workplace. While suitable for quick exchanges and simple information sharing, it falls short for more important discussions and tasks.

Well intentioned, busy people want to be collaborative. But they often end up as bottlenecks. I argue that busy people must change their model of collaboration.

I think sending meeting recordings instead of meeting minutes is inefficient and insensitive. You can do much better.

It’s tempting to extract the last bit of productivity from our work schedules. However, busyness isn’t the same thing as productiivity. Let me explain why cutting yourself some slack, is a better idea.

Wait, what? Write in slides? Well, yes. And I’m sure you’ve seen this yourself. Heck, I’ve done it myself as well. Guilty as charged!

If you’ve normalised this approach to writing and sharing information, then I’m here to tell you that you should write differently. That’s what this post is about.

The agile manifesto claims that the best way of communicating in a team, is face-to-face. Does that claim hold up to scrutiny? 21 years after the manifesto came to life, have technology, the nature of our projects and our ways of organising and working taught us something different? I explore all these questions and more.