In early 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic spread, many companies were forced to try online work for the first time.

Social media was full of excited voices: “Finally we can work from home!” “No commuting is so blissful!” “Remote work is the future!”

Seeing all this, I had only one thought: you’re all too naive.

Not because I’m pessimistic, but because I’ve been there. Ten years ago, I participated in a publishing project completed entirely through online collaboration. The team was spread across the globe, and online was the only option. After three years, I came away with one profound insight—

I had thoroughly mastered a thousand ways to slack off in online work.

A Thousand Ways to Slack Off

Not other people’s methods—my own.

How to look busy while actually goofing off? Keep your camera on during video meetings but scroll your phone on the side. Make trivial edits to shared documents so the record shows you’re “doing something.”

How to earnestly spout nonsense without producing anything? Drop lots of “good questions” and “this direction is interesting” in discussion groups, but never produce anything concrete.

How to skillfully blame problems on “unstable connection”? “Sorry, I just got disconnected, I missed the earlier discussion, could you repeat that?”—this phrase is the universal excuse in remote collaboration.

How to collect company pay while maximizing personal time? Time your response delays to hit the gray zone between “reasonably busy” and “obviously slacking.”

In short: being fake with skill, without getting caught.

I’m writing this not because I’m proud of it—quite the opposite. But because if even someone like me with self-discipline could find so many ways to slack off, what about those with even lower self-control?

Don’t Underestimate Human Nature

Some might say: isn’t remote work supposed to be about flexibility and trust? Wouldn’t managing too tightly be counterproductive?

That’s not wrong. But there’s a prerequisite: your team members all have high levels of self-discipline and sense of responsibility.

Out of a hundred people, fewer than one percent truly have this level of self-discipline and self-demand.

This isn’t criticizing people. Being proactive is human nature, but wanting to coast through life is an even stronger human nature. In the office, environmental constraints help you fight off most laziness—the boss is nearby, colleagues can see what you’re doing, the physical space itself reminds you “you’re at work.”

Remote work removes all these constraints. What’s left is just you and your self-control.

Let’s stop pretending to be pure. It’s not that we don’t trust people, but that we shouldn’t underestimate human nature. Without management, that’s not democracy—that’s management dereliction of duty.

In “Breaking Silo Effect” I discussed how information flow problems in organizations often aren’t due to malicious intent, but because the structure wasn’t designed well. Remote work slacking is the same—not because human nature is evil, but because remote structures naturally give laziness too much space.

Four Pillars of Remote Management

Because I’m so familiar with how to slack off, the solutions aren’t hard to figure out. Through my years of managing remote teams, I’ve developed four basic management mechanisms:

Work Records. Daily work content must be documented. Not writing reports—reports are formalistic garbage. But leaving records in shared tools (whether Notion, Asana, or simple Google Sheets) of “what I did today, what problems I encountered, what I plan to do tomorrow.” Only recorded work can be managed. Work without records doesn’t exist.

Clear Progress Milestones. “Complete by end of month” is too vague. “Complete first draft by Wednesday, finish revisions by Friday, submit final version by next Monday”—that’s trackable progress. The clearer the milestones, the smaller the ambiguous space.

Project Minimization. Large projects are breeding grounds for slacking because progress is hard to measure and responsibility easily diluted. Break projects small, with each task granular enough that “done or not done” is obvious. The smaller the project, the less there is to hide.

Flexible Assignment. Managers must assign work wisely. Not just throwing out tasks and ignoring them—after every meeting, there must be clear deadlines, responsible parties, and acceptance criteria. Assignment “flexibility” doesn’t mean loose, but dynamically adjusting division of labor based on each person’s strengths and status.

These four pillars aren’t meant to turn remote work into a surveillance factory. Their purpose is to use structure to compensate for the environmental constraints that remote work lacks. The management functions that operate automatically in offices (boss’s gaze, colleague pressure, spatial cues) must be replaced by explicit mechanisms in remote environments.

The Price of Freedom

In “The Brutal Test of Remote Learning” I wrote that online learning faces the same problem—once you remove school structure, learning quality depends entirely on family discipline and resources. Remote work is the same: once you remove office structure, work quality depends entirely on personal discipline and organizational management.

Remote work isn’t bad. It’s good. It saves you commuting, gives you flexible scheduling, lets you work anywhere.

But these benefits have a price: you must use extremely strict discipline and extremely clear management to support this seemingly free operating model.

Everything has a cost. Freedom and ease must be accompanied by the price of extreme self-discipline. Those who think remote work means “working from home in pajamas” will be the first to be eliminated.

And those who can maintain high-quality output when no one’s watching—they’re the real winners in the remote era. Not because they’re naturally disciplined, but because they’ve built their own structures to fight against their own human nature.