There’s always more to do than I’ll ever have time for. I’m sure you face similar choices in life and at work. I take a detour today, to explain why I’m doing less than I possibly can with this website and my professional presence on the web.

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.

Survivorship, or selection bias when telling company stories, promotes an echo chamber, where the organisation becomes blind to its inadequacies.

In many teams, distributed leadership is a neglected capability. People have unproductive experiences, because no one pays attention to the design of their distributed workplace.

While tools aren’t the end-all and be-all for distributed collaboration and knowledge sharing, they’re hardly trivial. Companies cannot allow their collaboration tool stack to languish. They must aim for a world-class user experience.

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

All’s not well in remote work paradise. For many employees a remote work arrangement is a Faustian bargain. They have to endure the dark side of remote work.

Sabbatical policies can benefit both employers and employees. But these extended leave arrangements need careful design and inspection.

Tech proliferates into our lives with the promise of improving communication and giving us access to information. But it’s also left us more disconnected and busier than ever. In this post, I reflect on my years growing up and whether a subtractive approach to using tech, may lead to a more enriching outcomes in life and at work.

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

It’s the holiday season of 2023, so I want to share a few goodies with you.

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.

We wrongly apologise for switching off from work or work related communication, when we have enough reason to do so. Such apologies undermine our professional contracts and set us back in our attempts to achieve work-life balance.

When we leave cultural characteristics open to interpretation, we run the risk of creating toxic cultures. The loudest voices usually undermine diversity. It makes more sense for distributed organisations to do the boring work of defining culture. It isn’t as sexy as a secret sauce, but writing things up fosters a consistent and healthy culture.

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

In the corporate world we often reach for training as silver bullet solution to performance problems. But building and practicing new skills is hard and if we don’t recognise the real-world difficulties people face, it’s likely that many skill-building initiatives will fail.

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.