I am a person who runs an “all remote” company and you might already know my opinion on so-called “open offices.” Exactly! I hate them. I think they’re great for socializing but really bad if you want your team members to perform at their best. However, many smart people defend these setups with the premise of “better collaboration” and “openness” and my favorite one: “keeping people on the same page.” Well, let me explain why this kind of attitude is anything but helpful for keeping your people productive, focused and doing their best work. People shouldn’t be “on the same page” with their entire team all of the time. Here’s why:

Originally posted on my personal blog

When I talk to people about the way we work at [Nozbe,][] that we have a team of 30+ people (core team and collaborators) working from homes, I get mixed reactions.

Very often, people think we will “grow up at some point” and get a “real office.” This is quite funny, taking into account that we’ve been working like this for the past nine years.

Others think I’m just stingy or that the business is not doing so well if we cannot afford “a real office,” which is also not true, because our business is very healthy. Selling subscription-based software, we enjoy really nice profit margins which we can then re-invest into the team, sales and marketing.

Originally posted on my personal blog

Running a business has become synonymous with owning an office. While planning to start a company, almost every entrepreneur’s main concern is where to set up the office. The question is: will our clients visit us there? Most likely not but we mainly need the office for ourselves. To have a sense that our new company is “serious”. But in reality, it’s not the office that gets the work done, it’s you!

Originally posted on my personal blog

Exactly 9 years ago today, I launched my productivity startup: Nozbe. I wrote this web application to help me get things done and decided to show it to the world. Back then, I was a one-man-shop. I did all the coding in Javascript+PHP+MySQL, I wrote the website copy, I designed most of the graphics… and I was the one responding to emails in case someone actually tried it and had a question. When I launched premium plans, I was the one to write the payment system and automate accepting money. And for the rest of 2007, I was doing all of that. Part time!

Originally posted on my personal blog

I’m a big fan of the movie Matrix. It has quite a few memorable scenes. One of the best is when a boy is “bending” the spoon. In this article I’d like to explain how this scene has everything to do with how we get things done every single day:

Originally posted on my personal blog

If Facebook, the $300B company is building the “biggest open space in the world”, they have to be doing something right? Right? Wrong… Why? Because productivity.

In January of 2010 I was traveling to Silicon Valley. It was my second trip to this “Mecca” of startups. I was just about to celebrate my third year running my own small productivity company, Nozbe, and my friends from Codility invited me to join them on a trip to the Valley and visit some of the best companies in the world. It was so great. To me personally, visiting different offices was so much fun. Just seeing how the best of the best organize their work and get stuff done was eye-opening. But my eyes really popped out when I finally visited the offices of Facebook. I saw this:

Originally posted on my personal blog

At Nozbe we all work from our homes. We’re really a “No Office” company. And as the CEO I usually work from my home office. I really love my home office. It’s the best place for me to work. But not this November. We have a renovation going on at the house and we had to move to a rented apartment for a month. And because of the works at the house, my home office has no electricity at the moment, so I can’t work there. So I took a month off… right? Nope. No I did not. I couldn’t. November is usually our busiest time at Nozbe so I had to work even more than usual… and I had to make it happen in these unusual circumstances. What I noticed over the last month was that I was working at different places depending on my tasks. I was living a remote worker’s dream: “if there is a specific task, there is an office for that”. Here’s how it went down:

Originally posted on my personal blog

In the 18th episode of The Podcast with Radek we talked about how we use different tools for different types of communication. The credit for this idea goes to Radek (just listen to the episode and him explaining the thing) but the credit to the way we’ve developed it goes to the entire Nozbe team. And I strongly believe companies NOT working remotely should also pay attention to this because this is how you get meetings done efficiently. And when you’re located in the same place, you might be abusing one form of communication and under-using another one. OK, I’m getting confusing now. Anyway, this advice below is good for both, remotely and non-remotely working teams. Here goes:

Originally posted on my personal blog

In Nozbe we’re a small team of 24 people in the core team and 10+ cooperating people and companies. Altogether a bunch of more than 30 people. And we all work from home. Yet many “management gurus” still find it hard to embrace this kind of working arrangement and that’s why articles with titles like this one are being written every now and then: it’s official, working from home is the worst. At first I totally dismissed that article but then I found it quite inspiring as it represents most of the urban legends about working from home so in this post I’d like to go through that very article and give arguments for future discussion about working remotely. Something Silicon Valley still has to embrace. Here are a few typical remote working myths I found in the above mentioned article:

Originally posted on my personal blog

Recently Peter Thiel’s book “Zero To One” was translated to Polish and my friends started commenting on it on Facebook. I read the book a year ago and while I enjoyed it, one thing that stood out to me was the author’s take on “remote work”:

Peter Thiel writes that “Even working remotely should be avoided, because misalignment can creep in whenever colleagues aren’t together full-time, in the same place, every day”.

So sad. That’s just so sad.

Originally posted on my personal blog