Attention: What Is Remote Work? Not This.

In May 2020, two months into lockdown, I kept hearing the same thing from colleagues. Remote work is exhausting, I can't wait to get back to the office.

They weren't wrong about being exhausted. They were wrong about what was exhausting them.

What everyone was experiencing wasn't remote work. It was crisis work-from-home, during a global pandemic, with no preparation, no equipment, no childcare, and managers who had never led a distributed team. Calling that "remote work" was like judging swimming by the experience of falling off a boat.

I wrote this because I watched an entire category of work get dismissed on the basis of the worst possible sample. Remote work done well is intentional. It's designed. It has infrastructure behind it, including the right tools, clear norms, managers trained for it, and people who chose it. Almost none of that existed in spring 2020. Most people had no home office, no headset, no desk, and bandwidth being fought over by everyone else in the house.

Years on, the argument has aged in a way I didn't anticipate. The debate has moved from whether remote work works to how much of it, and for whom. But the underlying error still shows up everywhere. Judging a new way of working by how it felt during the least representative moment imaginable.

If you're still having that argument in your organization, this is the piece I'd hand you.