You won’t hear from me for the next few weeks, because I’ll be out practicing my hobby; i.e. photography. I believe everyone needs a hobby that they practice for its intrinsic value.

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.

It’s easy to look at headlines and imagine that all tech workers are headed back to the office. While some part of this assumption may be true, the narrative deserves more nuance.

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.

We must soon retire the word “hybrid”. It does less to clarify work patterns and more to confuse people.

When people can identify themselves in all their interactions with each other, it reflects a high psychological safety. But just like a failing test can be invaluable in coding, you need the test of “anonymous contributions allowed” to test if your psychological safety is indeed as high as you’d like it to be.

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.

Audio and video can add a new dimension to asynchronous communication. In this article I explain how we can be effective at communicating with audio and video.

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.

The agile manifesto is an excellent document that marks a generational shift from rigid development practices, to more lightweight, maker-centric principles. The idea was to restore balance balance and be less Dilbertesque. But the 2020s bring their own baggage that impedes knowledge work. And so, I explain why we need a new statement to reclaim balance for knowledge working teams.

Writing the book about “async-first” collaboration doesn’t mean that I’m immune to the status quo. I screwed up on my own rules recently, by taking a “sync-first” approach instead. And boy, did that hurt!

Many decisions execs take for their employees, ignore externalised costs. Mike Hopkins of Amazon claims their RTO policy has “no data” to back it. Lyft CEO, David Risher can only advocate for snacks in the office, while batting for RTO. Meanwhile, employees and other stakeholders pay for such decisions through costs to their health, productivity and happiness.

The async-first manifesto is a work-in-progress. This post explains the five values of the first draft. This should help everyone who wishes to help shape the draft, understand the initial thought process.

We pay too much attention to the idea of skill and talent. Often, time on task, trumps talent. Could this be the secret to doing excellent work, having a resilient career and building excellent teams? We explore that question in this article.

Teams needn’t be groups of BFFs. Trust and cohesion are far more important attributes. You don’t build trust and cohesion by accident though. Leaders must employ attentive design and intentional actions.

Workplace friendships have value for businesses, and arguably for employees as well. But it’s should also be perfectly OK, if employees wish to keep work and friendships separate.

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.

The “CEO test” is when you ask yourself “Would I do that to my CEO?”. That can often help you spot behavioural anti-patterns you must correct, when interacting with your coworkers.

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.