I have taken a full-time role as a design director, and I am doing it from here — which is to say from about three thousand kilometres away from the people I work with.
The company is headquartered in New York. I am in Edmonton. It has come to feel ordinary to me, and it still surprises most people I explain it to.
Remote work is not, as I once assumed, the same work performed in a nicer room. It is a different discipline, and the thing it asks for most is not self-motivation. It is writing.
In an office, a shaky idea can be carried a long way by charisma. You lean over a desk, you gesture at a screen, you talk someone through it. Remotely, none of that is there to lean on. The thinking has to survive being read, alone, by a tired person in another time zone, with no tone of voice to soften it. If the argument is not clear on the page, it is not clear.
That has made me a better designer, which I did not expect. Presenting in a room lets you cover the gaps with performance. Writing out the reason for a decision, in a document, where it will be read slowly and turned over, does not.
The other thing remote asks for is a kind of trust earned in the open. No one can watch me work. All they see is what arrives. So what arrives has to be good, and it has to arrive when I said it would. There is a quiet freedom in a job where the only thing that speaks for you is the work.
I think a lot of companies are about to learn this, and some will reach for the wrong version of it — trying to rebuild the office through a webcam. But the office was never really the point.