I’ve now been working from home for 20 months. It’s been a learning experience, but overall I vastly prefer it to working in an office. Mark Seemann’s article on latency vs throughput was highly inflential in my approach. My big takeaway is the concept of oral culture vs written culture.
My counter-move was to begin to write things down. When people would call a meeting, I’d ask for an agenda. That alone filtered away more than half of the meetings. … Notice what I did. I changed the communication structure - at least locally around me.
Write It Down
The one simple habit that to accelerate your career: Write it down.
It really is that simple. The hardest part is just remembering to do it.
The Daily Log
One of the most effective places to start this habit is with yourself. Every day take notes on what you worked on and how you spent your time. This naturally leads to accountability. You want to have something to put in the daily journal so that forces you to find important things to work on. Furthermore, these notes are extremely useful for times of retrospective. So perhaps every week or two review the journal to see how things are progressing. Ask yourself what you can change to reduce friction or what repetitive tasks could be automated. It’s pretty common to have some sort of 6 month or yearly review with your manager. Writing up a summary is so much easier when you just need to review your daily notes.
Meetings
If you schedule a meeting, write down the agenda beforehand. After the meeting, write a summary of what information was gathered, decisions that were made, and any follow up tasks. This drives consensus, clarity, and accountability between the people you are collaborating with.
Conclusion
It may feel tedious at first but the cumulative payoffs are enormous. If you start writing things down I guarantee you’ll notice a huge difference.