I got my first job with a distributed company in 2012. We had about a 25 person team across three continents. It was the first time I had worked for a company where everyone wasn’t in the same office.

Overall, it was a great experience, I had a lot more flexibility with how I used my time - no more worrying about asking to come in late because of a dentist appointment and it was easy to pop off for a few hours to go work at a coffee shop or do a quick workout.

But distributed work also comes with unique challenges. Working with people in very different time zones often leads to not being able to shut off since someone is always online.

Though many companies fear that letting their people go distributed will lead to people slacking off, the far more common problem is overwork and burn out. The people that slack off were already slacking off in the office anyway and the people that were working hard will work even harder to make sure that they don’t seem like they are slacking off.

Regular readers will have heard me say that I think we are in the very early stage of distributed work, a phase akin to the very first factories being built using electricity as the main source of power rather than steam.

These sorts of technological innovations tend to require social innovations to get the most out of them, a process that typically takes up to a century as technology historian Carlotta Perez researched in her excellent book Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital.

In the case of the move from steam to electricity, the first electric factories were built just like steam-powered factories with everything crammed as close to the central turbine where the steam came out.

For a steam-powered factory, this was necessary. You lost too much energy moving the energy far away from the turbine so most steam-powered factories had all the machinery placed in a circle around the central turbine, sometimes on multiple floors.

With an electric factory, it was much cheaper to move energy around. It took a few decades, but eventually, factories were radically redesigned and the birth of the “production line” emerged. This was a set up that only became possible once the move from steam power to electricity happened and you could get power to the sub-stations along the line in an energy-efficient way using electricity.

To capitalize on the technological innovation of electricity required an improvement of the social technology around how we designed factories. The history of technology is the history of the co-evolution of technological and social innovation.

The same is no less true as it relates to distributed work. Zoom, a critical piece of distributed team infrastructure only IPO’d in 2019, so we are in the very early days of figuring out the social innovation needed to make the most of what the internet has made possible. We still have a lot to learn about how distributed teams best work effectively, but the importance is no less than that of the production line in the 20th century and the companies which are earliest on this shift will stand to benefit quite a lot.

I have experimented with many different approaches over the last nine years to how to work with distributed teams so I wanted to share my current approach to how I try to work with a distributed team.

The below is an annotated version of my current best practices approach.


General Guidelines

Take spatial context seriously: If we're discussing a specific task, we discuss it in the comment section below the task itself. If we're talking about a specific document, we discuss it in the comments attached to the document.

Communications stay attached to the thing we're discussing. This provides the full story in one reliable place. The alternative is communication detached from the original source material, discussions all over the place, fragmented conversations missing entire chunks of time and detail leading to confusion, extra work, and frustration.


Poor communication creates more work. Getting in sync with your team and communicating to help your team stay in sync with you is not something annoying you have to do in addition to your job, it is a core and central part of your job.

Much of the issues from people new to distributed work (and even many that have been doing it for years) is a lack of appreciation about how much “bandwidth” is lost. Though we tend to focus on just the words people say, the body language, facial expressions, smells and all other sensory inputs you have in an office do a lot of the communication. Where this is the “default” in an office, it requires deliberate attention and focus for a distributed team.

In general, everyone should probably feel that they are “wasting” a lot of time keeping everyone updated. Once you account for the reduced miscommunication and truly wasted work this prevents, it ends up being an extremely productive use of time.



Communication Happens in These Places:

• Internal Knowledge Base (E.g. Google Docs, Notion)
• Messaging Apps (E.g. Slack, Teams)
• Task Management System (E.g. Asana, ClickUp, Trello, ToDoist)
• Video Chat (E.g. Zoom, Google Meet)

Communication Prioritization

Non-urgent but Important - Draft a longform explanation of the issue, relevant background, and proposed steps forward. Share it with all relevant parties and give them a date by which you need feedback and when a decision is going to be made (e.g. by creating a task for them in our task management system to review and respond). If appropriate, it can be added to the discussion notes to discuss on the next call for a final decision after everyone has read and responded.

Please try to send at least 1 business day in advance of a call to give everyone time to read and review. Speaking only helps who’s in the room, writing helps everyone. This includes people who couldn't make it, or future employees who join years from now.

• Examples: Proposed New Marketing Strategy, updating outhe organization of our internal system
• Once a decision is made on any issue, write a conclusion for future reference.
• Guidelines
• Be conscious that if your words can be perceived in different ways, they'll be understood in the way which does the most harm and seems the most hurtful. Words matter, choose them carefully.