In early 2020, as the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic spread, many companies were forced to try working online for the first time.
Social media was full of excited voices: “Finally I can work from home!” “No commute is such a blessing!” “Remote work is the trend of the future!”
Seeing all this, only one thought crossed my mind: you’re all too naïve.
Not because I’m pessimistic, but because I’ve been there. Ten years ago, I took part in a publishing project completed entirely through online collaboration. The team was spread across the world, and online was the only option. Over three years, I gained 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 hard at work while actually goofing off? Keep your camera on during a video meeting while scrolling your phone off to the side. Make trivial little edits in a shared document so the logs make it look like you’re “doing something.”
How to talk a big game with utter solemnity and yet produce nothing? Drop plenty of “great questions” and “this direction is really interesting” into the discussion group, while never producing anything concrete.
How to skillfully blame everything on “an unstable connection”? “Sorry, I just got disconnected and missed the earlier discussion—could you say that again?”—in remote collaboration, this line is a universal fig leaf.
How to collect the company’s paycheck while maximizing your own personal time? Time your gaps in replying to messages to land in the gray zone between “reasonably busy” and “obviously slacking off.”
Put plainly: pretending skillfully, and not getting caught.
I write these out not because I’m proud of them—quite the opposite—but because if even someone like me, who holds himself to high standards, could find this many ways to slack off, what about those with even less self-discipline?
Don’t Underestimate Human Nature
Some will say: isn’t remote work all about flexibility and trust? Doesn’t managing too tightly backfire?
That’s true. But it rests on one premise: that every member of your team possesses a high degree of self-discipline and a sense of responsibility.
Out of a hundred people, fewer than one percent truly have that level of self-discipline and self-demand.
This isn’t a criticism of people. Diligence is human nature, but the desire to take it easy is an even stronger part of human nature. In the office, environmental constraints help you fight off most of your laziness—your manager is right there, your colleagues can see what you’re doing, and the physical space itself reminds you that “you’re at work.”
Remote work strips all these constraints away. What remains is only you and your self-discipline.
Let’s stop pretending to be pure. It’s not that we don’t trust people—it’s that we shouldn’t underestimate human nature. The absence of management isn’t democracy; it’s a dereliction of the manager’s duty.
In “Breaking the Silo Effect”, I discussed how the failure of information to flow within an organization is often not because people are malicious, but because the structure was poorly designed. Slacking off in remote work is the same—not because human nature is inherently evil, but because the structure of remote work naturally leaves too much room for laziness.
The Four Pillars of Remote Management
Because I’m so familiar with how to muddle along, cracking it isn’t hard either. Over my years leading remote teams, I’ve worked out four basic management mechanisms:
Work logs. Every day’s work must leave a record. Not a daily report—daily reports are formalistic garbage—but a record in a shared tool (whether Notion, Asana, or a simple Google Sheet) of “what I did today, what problems I ran into, and what I plan to do tomorrow.” Only what is recorded can be managed. Work without a record might as well not exist.
Clear progress milestones. “Done by the end of the month” is too vague. “First draft done by Wednesday, revisions done by Friday, final version submitted by next Monday”—that’s progress you can track. The clearer the milestones, the smaller the room for ambiguity.
Project minimization. Large projects are breeding grounds for slacking off, because progress is hard to measure and responsibility easily dilutes. Break projects into small pieces, with each task’s granularity small enough that “done or not done” is plain at a glance. The smaller the project, the fewer things can be hidden.
Flexible task assignment. A manager must divide work wisely. It’s not about tossing out a task and walking away—after every meeting, there must be a clear deadline, owner, and acceptance criteria. The “flexibility” of assignment doesn’t mean looseness; it means dynamically adjusting the division of labor according to each person’s strengths and state.
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. Those management functions that operate automatically in an office (the manager’s gaze, the pressure of colleagues, the cues of the space) must be replaced in a remote environment by explicit mechanisms.
The Price of Freedom
In “The Brutal Test of Learning Without Classrooms”, I wrote that online learning faces the same problem—once you remove the school’s structure, the quality of learning depends entirely on the discipline and resources of the family. Remote work is the same: once you remove the office’s structure, the quality of work depends entirely on individual discipline and organizational management.
Remote work isn’t bad. It’s wonderful. It saves you the commute, gives you more flexible scheduling, and lets you work anywhere.
But these benefits come at a price: you must support this seemingly free mode of operation with extremely strict self-discipline and extremely clear management.
Everything has a cost. Freedom and ease must come with the price of extreme self-discipline. Those who think remote work means “working from home in your pajamas” will be the first to be weeded out.
And those who can still maintain high-quality output even when no one is watching—they are the true winners of the remote era. Not because they are naturally disciplined, but because they have built their own structures to fight against their own human nature.
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