The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Remote, Inc.: How to Thrive at Work . . . Wherever You Are by Robert C. Pozen, Alexandra Samuel

Episode Date: April 21, 2021

Remote, Inc.: How to Thrive at Work . . . Wherever You Are by Robert C. Pozen, Alexandra Samuel You can thrive and excel when you’re working remotely, if you adopt the mindset, habits and tech tools of professionals who are even more productive outside the office: Learn to think like a “business of one,” and that entrepreneurial mindset will transform your experience of remote work. Remote work can be satisfying and productive—once you craft a strategy that taps into the unique advantages of working from home. After a year in which many of us plunged into remote work overnight, we finally have a chance to make thoughtful choices about how to combine remote and office work, and how to make the most of our days at home. Remote, Inc. gives you the strategies and tools you need to make remote work a valuable part of your renewed working life. Learn how to... Gain control over how and when you work by focusing on objectives, not the 9-to-5 workday. Wow your managers by treating them like valued clients. Beat information overload by prioritizing important emails and messages. Make online meetings purposeful, focused and engaging. Build great relationships with your colleagues—whether at the next desk, or another city. Find a balance between work from home, and life at home. Make a remote work plan that lets you get the best from time at the office—and the best of home. Remote, Inc. takes you inside the mindset and habits of people who flourish while working outside the office some or all of the time: people who function like a “business of one”. That’s how productivity experts Robert C. Pozen and Alexandra Samuel describe the mindset that lets people thrive when they’re working remotely, whether full-time or in combination with time at the office. You can follow their lead by embracing the work habits and independence of a small business owner—while also tapping into the benefits of collegiality and online collaboration.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain now here's your host chris voss hi folks this is voss here from the chris voss show.com the chris voss show.com hey oh my gosh we're coming here with another great podcast we certainly appreciate you guys tuning in thanks for being here and my gosh we put in the google machine to uh find brilliant authors you're just gonna be mind blown to see what we

have for you today the deus the people the brilliance the intelligence you're gonna end up so smart that like you're gonna have a glow after this podcast i totally guarantee it maybe i don't know there's probably an asterisk there from the attorneys. But in the meantime, to see the video of this, go to youtube.com forward slash Chris Voss. Hit the bell notification. It's a little ding button there. When you press it, you're going to get this special wave of feeling that's going to come over you. It's going to make you feel like you're part of something much larger than yourself, and you'll feel fulfillment that you might not have felt in at least five minutes. Anyway, also go to goodreads.com forward slash Chris Voss, and you can go to all of our minutes. Anyway, also go to goodreads.com, fortunately, that's Chris Voss,

and you can go to all of our groups on Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and all that good stuff to check it out. Today we have two brilliant authors that have written an amazing new book that's going to be coming out on April 27th, 2021, Remote Incorporated, How to thrive at work wherever you are. And this episode is brought to you by our sponsor, ifi-audio.com, and their Micro-iDSD Signature. It's a top-of-the-range desktop transportable DAC and headphone app that will supercharge your headphones. It has two Brown-Burr DAC chips in it and will decode high-res audio and MQA files.

We're using it in the studio right now. I've loved my experience with it so far. It just makes everything sound so much more richer and better and takes things to the next level. IFI Audio is an award-winning audio tech company with one aim in mind, to improve your music enjoyment of quality sound, eradicate noise, noise distortion and hiss from your listening experience check out their new incredible lineup of dax and audio enhancement devices at ifi-audio.com the two authors are robert c posen and alexandra samuel and robert or bob i think is we're going to be referring to him today, teaches at the MIT

Sloan School of Management, where he offers courses to executives on personal productivity. He was the president of Fidelity Investments and executive chair of MFS Investment Management and served as a senior official in federal and state government. His seven books include Extreme Productivity, a top-rated business title. He graduated Summa Cum Laude. Did I say that right? I don't know. Summa Cum Laude, Harvard College, and he was on the editorial board of Yale Law Journal. He lives in Boston, Massachusetts. Alexandra Samuel is a tech speaker and data journalist who has worked remotely for most of her 25-year career. The co-founder of the pioneering social media agency, Social Signal, Samuel creates digital content and workshops for companies such as Twitter,

Discovery, and Sprinklr. Her writing on digital productivity appears frequently on the Wall Street Journal and the Harvard Business Review. she holds a phd from harvard university and lives in vancouver canada welcome the show robert and alexandra thank you for being with us great to be with you awesome so give us you guys as plugs where people can find you guys on those interwebs going across the sky the best place to find the book is on our website which is remote inkinkbook.com. And you can also find the book on Amazon, IndieBound, and just about any other bookseller. There you go, guys. And the book will be coming out April 27th. You guys are really excited. I thought it was cute that you guys hadn't seen the book on the show yet. So it was fun to be able to show you your own book, but congratulations. Look at

this. It's a nice thick tome and beautiful. What motivated you guys to write this book? We started thinking about the book in the summer. I had written this best-selling business book called Extreme Productivity about your own personal productivity, how to be more productive. And I had been in discussions with Harper Collins about trying to do a sequel. And then I teach this course at MIT for executives on personal productivity. I saw the great stuff that Alex had been writing in the Wall Street Journal. I called her up and asked her to be a guest lecturer at my course. And she did a really great job. So I wanted to work with her and we decided

that we should really tackle the question of remote work and the transition back to the office. We put together a proposal at the end of July and HarperCollins was very enthused. They wanted us to do it and they wanted us to do it like within a few weeks, which means that wasn't possible. But we did it within a few months, and we showed that we were really productive when working remotely. And that's how the book came about. There you go. And this is the new kind of normal to last, especially a year and a half with working remote, isn't it? Yeah. year and a half with working remote, isn't it? Yeah, there is no going back where I mean,

RV was the new workplace of the future is hybrid, partially remote, and partially in the office. And each organization is going to have to figure out what's the optimal combination. There you go. Now, that's probably a good leading question I have for you guys, because this question I've been having over the last year and a half is, number one, I'm glad I don't own a commercial real estate. But number two, is everyone going to go back to work? Is it going to remain a hybrid? What is your guys' thoughts on it? I was really grateful that Bob drew my attention to the prospects for hybrid work when we were working on the book, because I've been primarily remote for the past more than 20 years. And so I had this very bullish attitude when everybody

went remote that this was the new normal. Finally, everyone was going to live their lives just like me and my weird work from home homeschooling family. And Bob, being a man of the world, was a little more cautious and pointed out that there's a reason people have offices and predicted, and it now turns out quite rightly, that what we were going to end up with was a post-pandemic world where people take some of what they have come to really appreciate about remote work, which is not just the flexibility, but the productivity you can get when you have time at home where you can concentrate and focus, but also enjoy the benefits of being in the office, connecting with people face-to-face and collaborating. And of course, Bob was right. That's exactly what we're starting to see now is companies reopening their

offices, but in a really different form from what we might recall two years ago. There you go. Give us an arcing overview of the book. Either one of you that wants to jump onto it, jump on that one. workday is over. So instead, think about what you're going to get accomplished. And we try to operationalize that by saying, set up with your boss or with your company, a set of success metrics so that you'll all know over whatever time period, a week, a month, what you're going to get accomplished. And so that gives you a way to get away from hours and to some objective, tangible measures of success that can make you happy and make your organization happy. And we talk about some general principles about that, about how you can thrive at work and how your teams can get managed. And then we get

more and more granular as the book goes on. I'll let Alex take it from there. What Bob explains is exactly the overarching picture of the book, which is a new approach to how you think about remote work. But what we recognized as we were digging into, well, what is it that people really struggle with on a day-to-day basis with remote work? We realized that people need not just the big picture of how do you think differently about your work, but how do you translate that into the fundamental skills of productivity. So we get into these really crucial skills that anybody needs in order to be effective, like presenting, like writing, like knowing how to read and absorb

information. All of those work differently when you are remote. And so we look at how to rethink your fundamental strategies around work for a remote context. Then you can bring those skills back to the office and be more effective there as well. And we also look at some of the nuts and bolts challenges people have working remotely. Things like how do I make the most of online meetings? How do I handle what can be a really overwhelming volume of email and messaging? And so the book, essentially, the further you get, the more granular we get in helping you through those day-to-day challenges and giving you the tips that can really make your everyday work more effective.

And then at the end, we get broader again, go back to this question about how do you design There you go. that needs lots of concentration? What's the level of your commute? And we concentrate a lot on teams because people are working on teams together and what you have to do to coordinate the team. And a lot of people feel socially isolated if they're remote all the time. So we talk about the different ways in which they can overcome that, both coming into the office and see their team,

and also to meet people outside work, outside the office. So we deal with all those subjects toward the end. Okay. So is the direction focused for managers and people who are managing people, or for workers to understand better ways to engage their thing or both? It's primarily oriented towards an individual working from home or combining work at home with work at the office. But we recognize that for some individuals, a big part of their work is managing other people. So we look at some of the challenges that are specific to management, but really wherever you are in your career, if you're a new person starting out with no direct reports, you're gonna find this book really helpful

in navigating this workplace. And if you're a manager with 10,000 direct reports, you're gonna find this useful in managing your workload and thinking about what that means for managing your team. But I should say, Chris, that this is not a broad conceptual and macroeconomic study. What's the implication for commercial real estate? What's the implications for movies and all this? This is a very practical

book. It's a how-to book. How-to for, as Alex says, people who are working remotely or working partly remotely and partly in the office, and also managers who are trying to get the most productive workforce that they can. So it's filled with practical suggestions. And at the end of each chapter, we have takeaways that say, here are the specific free suggestions and tactics that you can take away and make use of right now. One thing that's really interesting about your book is I'm reading some of the introduction here.

Read this book with your colleagues or teams, power up remote with a new mindset. You really help people re-gear or rethink or retool what they should be doing and what they should think about. And I think that's really interesting to share it not only with the management, but with your team so that you can get everyone on the same page and everyone isn't feeling like no one's on the same page. Is that a good analogy? Absolutely. And in fact, one of the things that we've heard from a number of our early readers is that our advice on setting expectations as a team is incredibly helpful for people who even a year into remote work in many organizations are still struggling

because if you were planning to onboard 50 million people to a new workplace, which is essentially what happened when all of these organizations went remote a year ago, you probably wouldn't do it with no planning and in a 24 hour period. That's what happened. And so the result is that people just took their office lives on to Zoom and onto the internet without really thinking through whether that was a sensible way to work when everybody is in different places. And so what we encourage people to do is to sit down, ideally led by a manager, but if your manager isn't taking the initiative, you can do this yourself and say, as a team, how are we going to communicate? Are we going to be email first?

Are we going to be Slack first? Are we going to call each other? Are we going to have a daily Zoom meeting? These are things we should talk through. And both collectively and individually, we need to set expectations for like, when do we expect you to be at your desk? Do you have to be available to take a call anytime between nine and five? Or can you say my afternoons are the time that I set aside to be more productive on my own? And there's no necessary right answer to those questions, but that's exactly why every team needs to come to those guidelines and set expectations so that everybody's on the same page and knows how to make use of one another and protect their own time. That's definitely a factor that people are doing. In fact, I'm hearing a lot of my friends that are

talking. I, like you, Alexandra, I've worked for home since 2004. And so I'm used to this whole lifestyle. I'm used to doing Skype and Zoom in my underwear, and I'm sitting here with the suit up top and being like, hey, whatever, man. And then I'm nursing a hangover. So I'm like, ah, the video's not working today because my eyes are bloodshot. No, those are the old days. But I think a lot of people have anxiety because they're so used to now living the way that you and I have lived for so long where you can run around in your pajamas and do a Zoom meeting. And now they might have to start going back to work, either full-time or hybrid. Do you guys have some advice on how to make that transition? I think that the key is to think about the

nature of your work and to think about where you're going to do it in the optimal way. I think the second thing is some people really thrive on the social interaction of being in the office and other people don't. Third thing is how much structure and routine you like. There are people who want the routine and want the structure. So I think there's no like magic formula. What you got to really do is look at all these factors that impact you and then look at organizations. What's interesting is that executives on average think that employees should come back three days a week, but employees on average think they should be at home three days a week. So there's a bit of

disconnect there. And I think we're going to have to work through that and see how that's going to pan out. But I think most employees will wind up being back in the office two or three days a week. Most of them will be coordinating with members of their team. So if you have a team, it makes sense for all of you to be back in the office on the same two days. If you can do it, it then helps the company because they can rotate through. That reduces rental costs and it promotes a good environment for everybody. There will be a few companies that will be all remote, but I think most companies will try to figure out a mix. We call the mix the Goldilocks plan. Not too much remote work and not too little.

That's a jazzy enough term for you. You should push it. Goldilocks plan. That works with my braided blonde hair. So there you go. You might be called the Goldilocks kid. I don't know. I think I'm more referred to as the bears, the three bears. Ah, there you go. There you go. Alexander, did you want to jump in on that? Yeah. One thing I want to add is just, and Chris is somebody who's been working remote for longer, you can probably attest to this, is that as people think about their combination of home work, home-based or

remote work and office work, it's worth remembering that the past 13 months of remote work are not really very much what remote work is like when there isn't a pandemic. I've been super lonely and bored and tired of staring at my four walls and my children and sometimes even my husband over the course of the past year. Before the pandemic, I spent a lot of my remote work days working out of coffee shops. I made co-working dates with other remote workers so that we wouldn't be too isolated. I made dates with my colleagues, but outside the office. not all of the collaboration has to happen at the office. But of course, all of that has been really limited by the pandemic.

And we talk about this in the book, right, that you can build a self-care plan for yourself as a remote worker, where you have a schedule, you have structure, you have routine, and you have social contact, not all of that has to be provided for you by the workplace. So even as you start to embrace some of the opportunities that come out of being able to return to the workplace, it's just as important to take a second look at how your remote days are organized, because you can probably do better once the vaccine picture changes the context of what you're able to do in the course of your days at home. There you go. I can see with hybrid working those, there might be some people that get confused where they show up hungover and then

in their pajamas. So that's interesting. Why do you say remote workers should have a different mindset than office workers? I think that in the typical office situation, the manager is sort of going around and people become somewhat dependent on instructions, maybe even daily directions from the manager. But once people move to the remote situation that they did in the pandemic, so that whole myth is totally exploded. And the manager can't expect to be seeing what's going on. You need a whole different way of relating. And that's what we call the business of one. We encourage people to think of themselves like they're running a small business. And in that context, the boss

isn't the great figure on high who's delivering commands. The boss is your client, someone that you need to please. And you get direction from your boss, you get objectives, and then that's when you negotiate success metrics so that you and your boss get on the same wavelength as to what you're going to accomplish at the end of the week or the month. And then that frees you up. That frees you up to work when and how you want so you can be more productive and you can be happier. So it's a win-win for both sides.

That's brilliant. Alexandra, did you want to chime in on anything on that? We saw both in our data-driven research and in our interviews is how that kind of business of one mindset really pays off for people, not just at home, actually. It also pays off for people in the workplace. One thing, we did a survey of 2,000 people who were working remotely at the beginning of the pandemic, and it was quite clear that people who worked in organizations that were super controlling, were not as productive at home, because they didn't have, they had all the downsides of being out of the office without the benefit of being able to work in a way that actually makes them more productive. Whereas people who had more autonomy,

more ability to structure their own work, their schedule, figure out how to get their work done, found that being remote made them more productive. And then when we talked to people who were working remotely, I think of somebody like a Dean Miller who runs a community foundation. His team was really lucky that he had a lot of experience working remotely himself. And so he didn't try and micromanage his remote team. He said, here are the things you need to get done. Please, let's check in every day so that we stay connected as a team. But I'm not going to hover over you virtually by Zoom to see how you're working. I'm going to trust you to get your own work done. And as a result, his team was able to figure out solutions to some of the problems that

came up around how the organization transitioned to, you know, remote work suddenly during the pandemic. And of course, when your team does that, they're building their skills, they're building their own capacity as professionals, and you end up with a stronger workforce, even when people come back to the office. Here's a good idea. I don't know, you can tell me if this is a good idea or not. What if you just installed like zoom monitoring cameras in people's home office to see what they're doing people do that that's the crazy thing they're doing that there are companies that that was a joke where that unfortunately it's not a joke there are companies that put software on your computer and on your phone so that they're tracking exactly what's

going on they don't have zoom cameras they're trying to replicate what they view as the command and control structure that they have in the office. And what we're saying in our book is that's a total mistake. That's the wrong way to go. The key is what you get accomplished, not how many hours you put in or the number of minutes that you're on your computer. All of us are knowledge workers. So journalists often ask me about this point, and I say, I bet you you've spent three days

on a story, and it's not very good. And you probably spent three hours on a story, and it was really a great success. Your readers don't care how many hours you put in. They care whether the article or the story is good. So that's what we're trying to preach. Yeah, I think we can leave their computer open for a while. Jump in here, I'm sorry. Yeah, I think part of the reason that's such an important shift is people,

many people report incredible productivity gains when they're working remotely because you can work on your own schedule, right? If you're the kind of person whose most productive hours are like 6am, you can work at 6am. If your most productive hours are at 2am, you can work at 2am. And then also offices are full of distractions, interruptions, unnecessary meetings. Some of those unnecessary meetings have followed us via Zoom. But in organizations that really embrace the opportunity of remote work, people become much more productive. And, but the flip side of that is you can't sustain that productivity for 10 hours or maybe even eight hours. And one of the things that I think actually the way Bob, Bob and I met was

through this journal piece that I'd written about my own experiences working from home. And when I first started working from home, I was working for a company in a different time zone. And I would get up at 7am Pacific, start working and work straight through for eight hours. And I was a wreck because working straight through at your desk by yourself for eight hours, you get two or three times as much done as you would do at the office. And you get none of the movement that you get in the office by getting up and going to the washroom or going across the hall or going out for lunch. You don't get any of the social interaction that you get from your colleagues and you become it's really hard on your mental health and eventually on your productivity. So you actually have to revisit your idea of a workday when you're remote so that you don't burn yourself out. And if you're the kind of person who can really put your head down and focus and go for it for five hours straight, you're probably still

going to outperform people who are at the office for eight hours a day. And then you have to let yourself off the hook and say, you know what? I've done my day's work. I've delivered everything I was expected to do today and more. And now I'm going to go out for a walk with another human being and restore myself so I can do the same thing tomorrow. There you go. There you go. You don't have Gossip Sally at the office there. You don't have Office Mike, who's always making those hour-long meetings that you could put in an email. You're saving some time there at the water cooler and all that stuff. I used to have to always go out to the water cooler and show my employees, get back to work, knock it off. No one cares about what the Kardashians did this week.

So there's a, there is a lot of time loss at offices that I don't know. I don't know if it's been improved at home. I let people do that. I've been fortunate where I don't have kids. So I just have two dogs that hurrying me every now and then about doing stuff and wanting to play. But if you have kids, that's a whole new challenge. So what do managers need to do to make remote teams more effective or effective? That's interesting is what we found is that managers have to work a lot harder at managing people remotely than they did in the office because they don't have the sort of walk-around technique that they used to use. So first is what Alex says is to set ground rules for the team so that everybody knows what hours people are going to work, how they're going

to work, when they're expected to respond to emails and calls and these sorts of things. Second of all, they need to have a weekly meeting, but not just one that reports on what they did last week. They can do that by email. They can have an activity report. What they need is a meeting where they're discussing what they're going to do in the week that's coming up and asking for suggestions and help for members of the team.

And that's a very productive sort of forward-looking meeting. Third thing is that we encourage managers to have a one-on-one on all of their direct reports every week so that they can really understand what's really going on in that person's life, deal with their, if they have any personal problems, their work problems, and really make the worker feel like the manager cares about them, which is probably the most important thing. Wait, I have to care about them too? Yep. Yep. You think you should have one-on-ones with your dogs? There was one just here actually trying to have one-on-one with me. Then our next idea is performance review. So we're against the idea that a lot of companies have

where they do this formal performance review once a year. It's very boilerplate. Nothing really gets said and then it gets filed in the circular file. So we're of the view that you ought to have more periodic feedback on your performance. And that's especially true when people are remote and really give them some feedback and then the sorts of things that they will feel like will really help them improve the way they're working. And every once in a while, talk to them about what's the path of their career, maybe give them some advice on that. So those are the sorts of things that really proactive managers can do. There you go. Alexandria?

The one thing I was just going to add is that I think this is exactly why managers need to invest in improving and reflecting on their own productivity and well-being when they're working from home. You can run yourself into the ground if you want to, but you are not going to be very effective at coaching your team members in how to sustain a healthy remote work office balance if you aren't living that balance yourself. So if you're managing people who are working partly from home, you need to spend some of your own time at home. And more importantly, really think about how to make good use of that time so that you can relate to your employees and help them make better choices about their own remote working lives.

You mentioned what we said in the introduction about going through this book together. So you can think of two different groups. One is you can think of members of your team reading the book together and discussing what works for them and what's useful for them. I've also talked to companies about having seminars for their managers where the managers can get together

and talk about the challenges they're facing and what sorts of tactics they have been developing to deal with them. So I think the book really lends itself, because it's such a practical book, to either of those two types of group learning sessions. That's awesome. So let me ask you this. Is it wrong that I put in the Chris Foss Show annual performance report for employees

where we now have some new metrics that we use. We give a scoring to their background on their zoom, kind of like room Raider. We do that. We score that. And then we score like how cool the pajama sort of flower pattern is on your thing and how original maybe it is or artsy. And so we value that and, and make that a part of their annual. Is that a good thing that a part of their annual is that a good thing that we should have done or is that bad you should also evaluate their dogs so the dogs if the dogs are going to be you know in the house they should be expected to make regular appearances and they should have at least some tricks that they can do on camera in my you know in my view

bob we forgot to do we did have quite a few dog references in the books, but I don't think we ever discussed the seven best tricks your dog should be able to do for a zoom call. Maybe we need to add it. That's an important ad. Yeah. You guys might want to put that in the back. That'll be in the paperback. The actually my dogs do get an annual performance report. Yeah. We're against annual performance reports. We think you've got to have feedback to your dog. Oh, and the dog is a great example. If I might say so, speaking of somebody who has a dog, you just turn one.

It is a really good reminder of why an annual performance review is just not often enough. Because I'm telling you, the things that are wrong with this dog needed to get fixed months ago. And you really need to get in there, fix the problems sooner and address the opportunity

sooner. Bob, you're the person who convinced me performance reviews should be more often. Yeah. I think the other thing about your performance reviews is, so if you're grading your staff on their pajamas, you've got to give them advanced notice that this is, these are the criteria so that people will then become very creative about their PJs. You can't just bring that on them at the end. You've got to have a little time to plan and respond to these things. There you go. That's what we're all shopping for. The best zoom outfit really at this point. Awesome. What are the key factors for organizations trying to decide the,

or design the hybrid workspace workplace of the future? Let me just read that over again. What are the key factors for organizations trying to design the hybrid workplace of the future? It's clearly mundane. We have a little acronym called FLOCS, F-L-O-C-S. Yeah, we're both working on it. Per acronym. We've been looking quite a lot at the research that has come out during the pandemic and some of the research that we now realize is relevant after the pandemic on what helps teams work together when they spend some time in the office and some sometime remote, collaborating online. And what we found is that there are really five factors that determine how well a team can work together. Function, which is what are the jobs? What is it people actually do? Are they really interdependent and they need to work

closely together? Does everybody have their own tasks? Location matters. Are people in the same city and seeing each other regularly or in different countries, maybe only seeing each other a couple of times a year? O is organization. How is this organization structured? Is it really hierarchical where you feel like you're out of the loop if you aren't seeing the boss? Or is it pretty flat so that everybody feels connected like a team? And then we have, uh-oh, what's our C?

Culture. The organizational, how could I forget that one? Because Bob and I have had a million conversations about how the culture of the organization affects the way people work together. And of course, in diverse organizations, you really, you may have multiple cultures. And so you need to think about how people are going to connect. And the last piece is often the only piece people actually think about, which is schedule. Are we going to ask people to work at the same time, maybe come into the office and have FaceTime during the workday? Or are people going to be able to keep their own schedules? And again, connecting people and getting them on the same page and also have enough latitude for each person to be able to make

the most of the time they are remote. There you go. There you go. So as we go out, guys, anything more you want to plug about the book or tease out to readers to get them out there to pick out that book? We have a concept in the book called Ohio, and it has nothing to do with the bucket. No, it only handle it once. So our view is that if you get a message or someone calls you or someone sends you an email and it's really important, then you ought to respond to it right then and there if you can.

Because if you don't, you put it aside before you wind up with 100 or 200 urgent messages that are in your to-do box. And then maybe you'll forget them. Or if you remember them, you spend another half an hour doing them. So we have, that's a concept. And then we have some really good time management issues like how to set up your schedule, how to set up your routine. And I think those will be very useful to people. And I'm going to let Alex talk about the software tools that we suggest. What I really appreciate about Bob flagging those two pieces is I think it really speaks to what is both unique and universal about the book, which is we start from the basic

productivity practices and principles that work in any context. So things like only handle it once. And Bob is, there's a reason his last book on productivity was the bestseller. He's got an incredible track record of really making excellent use of his time. And what we've done here is we've taken those fundamental practices and we've done here is we've taken those fundamental practices and we've translated them to the remote workplace because that's where I think a lot of people have ended up struggling is not being sure what this means when you're talking about only handling electronic correspondence, for example, once. And we've got a very specific tech advice for people on how to make those time management and productivity practices work in the

remote context. So for example, it's easier to only handle things once, if not everything goes into the same giant inbox that can be so overwhelming, where you then might miss things that are really important. And so we have a set of very practical tips on how to set up your email so that different messages go to different folders and you pay attention to things at the time you have set aside to action those specific types of items. You look at your calendar items and what part in one portion of the day your client emails and another portion of the day your newsletters may be on the commute home and that helps people stick to that plan. And our hope is that people will find both these fundamental principles that can support them, frankly, throughout their whole

career, as well as some of the just nuts and bolts like problem solvers of, gosh, my boss keeps booking me into too many Zoom meetings. How can I have fewer Zoom meetings? We have very practical answers to those kinds of questions. That's awesome. Everybody's going to buy the book just on that point alone, because I've heard so many friends that work for corporate things are like, eight hours of Zoom meetings, the kids Zoom anymore. I feel for them. Thank you guys for coming on the show and spending some time with us. Give us your guys plugs so that people can find you and learn more about you guys on the interwebs. And of course, order the book. The best place to find the book is on our website at remoteincbook.com. That's remoteincbook.com.

And you can also find us on Twitter as Remote Inc Book. And I'm awsamuel on Twitter. And hosen on Twitter. And thanks very much, Chris, for having us. It's been a lot of fun. And we're very impressed by your background and your PJs and your dogs. We'll make a big pitch for your show in our next book.

Thank you very much. We'd love to have you on. We'll have you on as many times as you want to come on and share all this stuff. Thank you both for coming on and spending some time with us. It's been wonderful. Thanks so much. Thank you.

Thanks for connecting. And continued success it's my audience be sure to check out the book remote incorporated how to thrive at work wherever you are you can pick this up you can pre-order right now april 27th is going to be coming out which i believe would be about next week as it's recording and that way you can be your first on your block to get to know what's going on and hey you might have some really good tips to tell your boss to help you get out of those Zoom meetings. Buy the book alone. Buy five of them.

Buy them for all your friends. Or buy them for everyone in your office, and then you can get the manager going the way you want him to go. Hey, that's smart right there. And you can buy the book hardback. You can buy an e-book, and then there'll be an audio version if you want to walk through your neighborhood listening to it. There you go. That's good to have.

All right, guys, so thank you for tuning in. Be sure to subscribe to the Chris Foss Show podcast. Refer to your friends, neighbors, relatives, dogs, cats. Get everybody who wants to listen to the show. Go to goodreads.com, Fortisense, Chris Foss, all of our groups on Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and all that good stuff. Wear your mask, stay safe, and we'll see you guys

next time.