Literacy
I got my first full time remote job in 2004. I’ve been remote ever since. I’ve read or heard so many different techniques for making remote successful, whatever the composition of the team. But there’s no magic to it.
The technique that matters is simple to understand and hard to implement: Everyone on the team must read. Everyone on the team must write.
If you have collaborative tools that are supposed to help, the help that matters is helping you read and helping you write.
The type of writing that matters is not little blurbs like this tweet, short slack messages, or emoji acks like 👍. It’s narrative. Interpretation and summation of what’s happened, happening, going to happen.
If you want to be remote, learn to be literate. If you want your team to support remote workers, make time for literature.
Stories help to create and verify the shared language and understanding that are the prerequisites for shared goals and shared actions.
FND’s collection reveals similar sentiments from others and provides further evidence on why literacy is important in general:
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Writing is the process by which you realize that you do not understand what you are talking about. Importantly, writing is also the process by which you figure it out.
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Writing and publishing forces you to solidify and clarify your thoughts.
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writing is for thinking first, communication last
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Creativity is the byproduct of work
You are not creative and then create something, you become creative by working on something, creativity is a byproduct of work.
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Amazon Staff Meetings: “No Powerpoint”
When you have to write your ideas out in complete sentences, complete paragraphs it forces a deeper clarity.
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“think complex, speak simple”. It is hard work to prepare well enough to be able to speak simple. Most presenters are figuring out what they really want to say as they are presenting. This is a terrible waste of an audience.
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I hate the Gemini “Dear Sydney” ad more every passing moment
All of the buffoons excited by the prospect of AI taking over all our writing […] are missing the point in a spectacular manner. Do you know what writing is?
It is thinking in a form that you can share with other people. It is a method for taking thoughts and images and stories out of your brain and putting them into someone else’s brain. E.M. Forster quotes a woman saying, “How can I tell what I think until I see what I say?” To take away the ability to write for yourself is to take away the ability to think for yourself.