Dr. Cal Newport

It's very clear what you're working on.

The collaboration is much more defined and much less frequent.

You probably need to be freed from the sort of hyperactive hive mind dance of we're just emailing each other all day and in Zoom meetings all day.

You have to sort of reconstitute what a remote work job is, I think, before it works.

And we know this in part because software developers pre-pandemic were one of the only knowledge sectors to have a really successful track record with remote work.

That is the only sector within knowledge work where we had large companies fully remote.

They did that because their jobs, they had really structured them.

around these agile workload management systems where, okay, here's when we talk about work.

Here's how long it takes.

Here's how we assign you new work.

You work on one thing at a time.

You sprint until it's done.

They had all this structure around work, which then it didn't really matter if you were in the office or not.

So the less structured work is, the more free-for-all, the more you need, we have to be in the office.

So like I'm a huge fan of full-time remote work, but I think those jobs have to look very different than like a standard 2019 job.

That was the bigger problem.

I mean, so there is data that says, for example, a hybrid meeting, some people are online, some people aren't.

These are less effective meetings.

They don't work as well.

But the bigger problem with Zoom, I think, was the quantity.