If you’re a rookie project manager, maintaining a calm and productive team environment should be one of your primary goals. I recommend three important practices that’ll help you in that quest.

Super managers, i.e. managers of managers must monitor if their direct reports demonstrate care for their team members. In this post, I discuss three techniques for super managers to hear directly from their direct reports' direct reports.

Efficient work rituals lead to predictable, high-quality results. As part of my depth rituals, I setup a clean workbench before I begin any work. The inspiration? Elite sport and master chefs!

It’s easy to believe that just because people look close to each other on a Powerpoint slide, they’re setup to collaborate with each other. Real life is more complex than slideware.

If a new hire can join your team and start contributing asynchronously in a short time, it shows that you’re running a tight ship. This article, a repost from reworked.co, shares three patterns for effective onboarding to distributed teams.

A meeting-centric way of working on distributed teams can undermine deep work and flow, inclusion, flexible work and in the long run knowledge sharing. It also doesn’t lend itself to scale. Choosing asynchronous ways to collaborate can be an effective alternative to this meeting-centric approach. This is a repost of my article on InfoQ.

One-on-one meetings are a great way for managers to connect and manage their remote team members. Here’s a guide to run these meetings effectively.

Personal user manuals are a way for distributed workers to broadcast information about themselves to their colleagues. While they aren’t without their pitfalls, they can be an effective way to achieve some personal and team objectives.

When screens mediate our work relationships, we must consciously show empathy towards our coworkers. I describe opportunities for digital empathy in this article.

Forcing functions are constraints that nudge people towards desirable behaviours. In this article, I discuss five forcing functions to promote effective meetings.

Middle-level and people managers play a crucial role in companies, but they also model many corporate dysfunctions. It’s time for people managers to get back in service of the people they lead.

The agile movement was about freeing developers from the baggage of Dilbertesque corporations. But in the 2020s, “doing agile” often comes at the cost of agility. Teams and companies sacrifice common-sense at the altar of a hustle culture, that looks agile, but is far from the spirit of the movement.

Our time is a zero-sum game. We don’t want shallow work commitments to steal our deep work time. Shallow work is unavoidable, but we can control it. In this article I explain four ways to do so.

Copy-pasting office-centric practices rarely works for remote and distributed teams. Three such practices suck, when you attempt them remotely.

Cal Newport’s “slow productivity” philosophy advocates for multi-scale planning at the quarterly, weekly and daily levels. While Cal recommends his excellent time-block planner, I’ve found my humble calendar to be an effective tool for this way of working.

The “whiteboard effect” refers to a deep work phenomenon that occurs when two or more people problem solve together in spells of intense focus. The presence of this effect doesn’t mean, however, that we must always be in whiteboard mode.

For remote workers the boundaries between work and life can often feel blurred. In this article I discuss seven strategies to achieve work life balance.

The sooner a new team can norm, the sooner it delivers value to its stakeholders. This article provides a recipe for leaders of distributed teams to accelerate team norming.

Most tech companies want to run well-leveraged teams; i.e a few senior people and a bunch of junior people. But many of us lack the process discipline to do this well. How do you design a team environment that’s inclusive of junior people? That’s the million dollar question I address in this article.

If you adopt asynchronous work, everyone should be able to work on a schedule that’s convenient to them. But that may not be the case from day one. You must first build your deep-work muscle.