Remote Work Should Be The Default

For a season, every workday started with the same silly ritual.

I left my home each morning to sit in traffic, fight for a parking spot, and walk into a building so I could try to use locked-down software on hardware that was 10x worse than what I had at home to do my job. The main purpose of showing up? So I could look busy in front of my boss. Then when that was over with, I would drive home at rush hour like everyone else, wondering “did I actually get everything done I needed to today?” Meanwhile, my ideal work station with a mechanical keyboard, an ergonomic mouse, and multiple monitors collected dust at home.

My experience might seem like an exaggeration, but it was roughly the case, especially as things shifted to be automated and digital-first instead of physical and manual.

Most debates about remote work start with the wrong question. People ask, “is remote work actually viable?” as if it’s the thing on trial. The frame should be flipped; what we should really be asking is, “what does an office building actually give us that justifies the overhead?” Once you start asking that question, a lot of the mandatory-return-to-office angst stops making sense.

The Burden of Proof Belongs on the Office

For those of you who still go into an office building by force: how many times do you send a Slack message or join a Zoom meeting with someone who was physically in the same building as you? How many minutes (or hours?) a day do you lose to a commute¹? How often does the open-concept office deliver the promised team synergy opportunities versus just getting interrupted in the middle of the one thing you actually need to finish?

It turns out that “serendipitous collaboration” pitch was always a fantasy. When Harvard researchers put sociometric badges on employees at two Fortune 500 companies transitioning to open-plan offices, face-to-face interaction dropped by roughly 70%, and email and instant messaging went up to fill the gap. The buildings didn’t make people collaborate more, they actually made people hide harder.

Cal Newport’s Deep Work puts it well: the ability to focus on one hard problem for a long stretch has become rare and valuable, and the traditional office is openly hostile to it. In-person has a role, but it should be reserved for the novel, the experiential, and the deliberate, not for Tuesday afternoon spreadsheet work. The default should be flipped.

How I Got Here

I started working remotely in 2018 following a short-lived “hybrid” model (if you could even call it that). I was at a staffing company in Tacoma, and most of our marketing department roles had shifted to Chicago. Four of us or so were still local, and we eventually looked around and asked ourselves why we were driving to a building every day. Every Monday a small band of us would grab lunch and build some team camaraderie, which was time well spent, but it had nothing to do with getting our actual work done.

Since then, I’ve worked at an indie game startup, then a software development company, then a cloud optimization company, and now lilAgents, which were each fully remote organizations. I’ve never looked back, and I’ve never heard a compelling argument for the 20th century status quo.

Async Is Where the Needle Moves

When you think about the work that actually matters, whether it’s deep thinking, writing, building, or critical housekeeping tasks, it’s mostly asynchronous, solo, heads-down execution. A traditional office environment is optimized for interruption, which means it’s optimized against the work that actually moves the business.

I want to be careful here, because async is not the whole story. Synchronous meetings still have a place, and I’ll get to that in a minute. But for most knowledge work in most organizations, the vast majority of valuable output you produce is done asynchronously. Microsoft’s Work Trend Index found that weekly meetings are up 153% globally since 2020, overlapping meetings are up 46% per person year over year, and 42% of people are already multitasking during meetings just to keep up. The office inverts the async-sync ratio, and people wonder why they feel unproductive or weary from too many meetings and not enough time to actually do the work.

My own hybrid experiment made this hilariously clear. At home, I delivered better work more quickly. In the office, my efficiency cratered because I was too busy managing appearances, getting interrupted², and balancing the “look busy so nobody bothers me” theater. Same person, same job, wildly different outputs depending on the environment.

The Football Team Analogy

Andy Tryba, who I worked under at Gigster, used an analogy that stuck with me. If you assemble the best possible football team from just one city, let’s say in this case, Tacoma, Washington, you’d have a formidable group against anyone in your area. If you assembled the best team from all of Washington state, they’d crush the Tacoma team. Best team from the entire United States? Crushes the Washington team easily. By extension, a football team assembled from the best talent in the entire world would be unbeatable.

So why are we capping our hiring pool at commuting distance? Thankfully at lilAgents, we’ve never had to think in those arbitrarily limiting terms. Our team spans Thailand, Toronto, New York, and the Pacific Northwest (and likely soon the Philippines as well), not because these areas matter to us specifically, but because the talent we needed for the team we wanted to build happened to reside there, at least for a moment in time. The locations of our team members can change again in the future.

Work Ethic Without Someone Standing Over Your Shoulder

This is the part that comes up in every remote work conversation. “Doesn’t remote require more self-discipline? Aren’t people just coasting at home?”

The Self-Discipline Myth

Remote work only requires more self-discipline because of the flexibility it affords, like managing a personal and work calendar well so they don’t conflict. When it comes to actual work output? I’d flip the question back on itself: what were you doing before remote? If you needed someone physically standing over you to do the job well, you weren’t doing the job well in the first place. The in-office model gave managers a false sense of control. You saw the body at the desk. That checked a box, but it told you nothing about the work that was actually getting done. Measuring outputs has been the actual job all along, it’s just that remote forces you to articulate and actualize those measures more clearly and deliberately.

The 4DX Framework

At lilAgents, we run on The Four Disciplines of Execution. Here’s how it works for us:

1. One Wildly Important Goal for the quarter. The whole team knows what it is, and everything else is secondary.
2. Act on the lead measures and validate with lag measures. Department heads own the behaviors that drive the outcomes.
3. A compelling scoreboard that everyone can see. One source of truth, zero ambiguity, and clearly visible to the entire team.
4. A cadence of accountability, which for us is a synchronous weekly virtual meeting where we review the scoreboard and make new commitments.

That fourth piece is the one people miss: async is not the whole answer. The cadence of accountability is synchronous on purpose, because this is the moment where alignment happens, problems get surfaced, and commitments get made in front of the team.

Commitments, Not Statuses

One small language shift changes the whole feel of these meetings: we talk about commitments, not statuses. Instead of “the current status of X is Y,” it’s “I’m committed to X this week.” That reframe pushes people from passive reporting to proactive ownership, and it tends to enable creative problem solving and cross-department collaboration that status updates just don’t. Your scoreboard tells the story the rest of the week, and nobody has room to coast, or you’ll have to explain yourself again the following week.

Culture Is Solvable, Even Without a Breakroom

Humans are social creatures, and anyone who tells you remote work has zero loneliness risk is not being honest. You do have to be intentional about connection, because it won’t happen by accident.

Weekly water cooler chats, for us, are non-negotiable. That can be a standing call on the team calendar, a dedicated Slack channel for non-work stuff, or both. Once or twice a year, if the budget supports it, bring everyone together in person for something experiential. That’s where in-person really earns its keep and can be irreplaceable.

If you’re just looking to get out of the house, that’s fine. Co-working spaces and coffee shops aren’t going anywhere.

Your Calendar Is Your Superpower

If I had to pick one tool that makes remote work actually work, it’s a solid calendar plus a scheduling link. Your personal calendar and your work calendar need to talk to each other so there are no blind spots. Protected blocks for deep work get treated as sacred, and a scheduling link kills the “what times work for you?” email chain forever.

What’s Next: Remote Plus AI Agents

Remote work unlocked the global human talent pool. AI agents are unlocking something stranger, which is specialized skillsets curated over time that you could not have hired for in any city, state, country, or even on this planet. You can now install a Claude skill for a very specific thing and get expert-level output from it, consistently.

That’s the next layer, and it’s why we named our company lilAgents. The hard part going forward is not figuring out what to automate, it’s figuring out what not to automate. A good balance is likely using agents for the monotonous/repeatable work, while we save human effort for strategy, judgment, and relationships. Remote work was the first draft of distributed teams - distributed human-plus-AI-agent teams are the next one.

The Quiet Part Out Loud

The question was never whether remote work is viable. It clearly is, and has been for years. Stanford’s Nicholas Bloom has been publishing on this since 2013, and his most recent landmark study at Trip.com, published in Nature, found that hybrid workers were just as productive and just as likely to be promoted as full-time office workers, with resignations dropping by 33%. The data has been in for a long time, the question is what the office is actually for, and when it’s worth the cost.

Any serious knowledge workers and employers alike should be pushing for a remote-first approach for getting work done. Geolocation-based restrictions seem so silly to consider when there are plenty of factors to consider like skill, competence, culture fit, adaptability, work ethic, and aptitude for learning. Keep working towards your goals by leveraging deep work and reserve in-person for moments that actually deserve it.

If you’re running a team this way, or trying to, I’d genuinely love to hear what’s working and what isn’t. We built lilAgents around this philosophy. Even if you disagree and want to offer an alternative point of view, I’m always happy to compare notes.