Remote Work is Coming
For you, for me.
A Brief History 🕰
Jack Nilles, a NASA employee, coined the term ‘telecommute’ in the early 70s, long before the advent of the internet. We’d gone to the moon, and were on the back end of a scientific-technical revolution. How hard could it be to work somewhere other than the office? Remote work was seen as part of a bright, modern, unavoidable future.
Telework could save the planet.
In 1979 Frank W. Schiff wrote a piece for the Washington Post titled “Working at Home Can Save Gasoline”, where he argued for the huge environmental and social benefits of ‘teleworking’. Schiff might have been the first to argue against the ‘deeply ingrained’ idea that work must be done away from home.
Even manufacturing work was typically carried out at home in the “cottage industry” system before the Industrial Revolution concentrated work in factories and introduced the rigid disciplines of the factory process — disciplines that were widely applied to office workers as well.
It seems that very few people had drawn this parallel up until that point, a shift which might be explained by the proliferation of the home computer. In today’s fast-paced, always-connected world, it seems far fetched to think that you could work remotely without an internet connection. This was, however, the goal among workers from the very beginning of the technological revolution.
It’s 2017– our internet connections are faster than ever before. Each day, working remotely becomes easier thanks to some new tool or technology. In the public space we have things like VR and AR and AI inundating us with efforts to integrate our digital and physical worlds. In the corporate environment, our digital spaces are our product management tools, which have taken on a role above and beyond that of simply handling who owns which task.
Today, these tools are sophisticated extensions of the physical office space — encouraging collaboration, sharing, and general office camaraderie at a distance. They strive to integrate as much of the physical experience as possible into a digital platform. Chat (both public and private), task management, whiteboard style collaboration and discussion, and general company administration all occur from the expanses of the web. For some, these tools have already made 100% remote work a reality
Looking ahead.
Remote work still feels like an inevitability for most of us, as it did in the 70s, and it’s a reality for more of us than ever before(20–25% of workers today work at least some of their time remotely). It’s not a stretch to assume that number will only increase.
What will the future have in store?
