A review by ameya88
Remote: Office Not Required by Jason Fried

4.0

This is a good book if your expectations are set right.

I'm giving it an extra star because this is exactly the perfect length all books in the categories of management, self-help & co. need to follow. Short blog post like chapters where you make your point and move on and less than 100 pages in-toto always. (I have an hypothesis that every management book could be an HBR article, but publishers pay more than HBR so they get milked into a book. But that's another story...)

I breezed through it in an hour and half when I stumbled upon it while on some related work-related reading - this classified as 'work' so... :-) So even though it's not GREAT i didn't quite feel as cheated out of it as I would had I spent a longer amount of time.

Go into this expecting some myth-busting around common excuses remote work and occasionally some best practices. Anything more detailed or nuanced is not to be found here. This is more Malcom Gladwell than Mikhail Csikszentmihalyi (yes, I googled his name).

As someone who works from home regularly, I'd say maybe 20% of this was new to me (or at least framed in a different manner). It's a good conversation starter and eye opener for teams and organizations who are considering exploring remote working.

However with the COVID scare, we've pretty much had a global pilot project of remote working so many of the explanations here will have been experienced by people reading it. So perhaps preaching to the choir in 2020.