The Hawthorne Effect

It seems like everyone else is amazin’, because when I hear discussion about working remotely vs. at an office, I never hear the admission that I’m about to make.

I am a disgusting, lazy degenerate and I can’t and won’t do any work unless there’s someone around me vaguely watching me, vaguely expecting me to do work. In the absence of that, I will sit around without pants on and watch /r/JusticePorn or play Starcraft for hours.

I blame my dad.

My dad’s the hardest working guy I know. One of my dad’s college friends told me, “If everyone worked as hard as your dad, everyone could be a math professor.” I didn’t take it literally, but I took it as a statement of just how hard my dad worked–because math is hard and super boring actually.

My dad tried to make me into a hard worker, and that’s where he failed. Every summer growing up as a kid, my dad made me do math problems. He had me doing differential equations in 7th grade. In the morning, he’d assign me a problem set I’d have to get done by the time he got home. I’d do them, and this is where I learned the art of looking up the answers for the odd-numbered problems in the back of the book and working backwards from there.

But, if for some reason my dad didn’t assign me any problems to do, I felt like it was my responsibility, my obligation, to do absolutely nothing that day, you know, to really savor the moment. The problem with adult life without a proper job is that every day is a day where dad forgets to assign you a math problem set.

Law school was the time of my life where I worked most diligently, and I forced myself to go to the library every day from 8am till dinnertime. If I ever went home, I would take a nap and watch reality TV until it was time for bed. That’s where I learned that if I was going to accomplish anything in this life, I could never go home.

When I became a lawyer, my law firm mentor made a critical mistake in advising me. See, after I finished my clerkship, I started work at the law firm in September as a 2nd year attorney. The thing is that the first 3 months, from September to December, are referred to as your stub year, and in most law firms, that’s the adjustment period and you won’t receive a bonus so there’s no point in maxing out your billable hours. My mentor told me–and this isn’t bad advice to most people–“Take it easy during your stub year because it won’t count to your bonus.” Then, she advised, “Pick it up when the New Year starts.”

It felt like 3 months with no math homework from dad. Other people might’ve done marginally less work, but I did absolutely nothing for 3 months. By the time January rolled around, it was incredibly hard to get in the swing of things. I ended up doing some work, getting mono, and then quitting my job in September.

The twist is that now that I have some real responsibility as a small business owner, the obligation to freeride and do nothing has transformed itself into a raging fire of guilt in the face of people who are actually counting on me. So I guess dad won, kinda.

I know this is just me, but I also know that this isn’t just me–and we aren’t just talking about the lowest performers. I bring this up because in the debate over distributed work, we can’t think of optimistically–imagining ourselves on our best day.

The tendency towards doing nothing, though, is omnipresent, and the risk of remote work is in a lack of day-to-day consistency trending towards repeatable excellence. What gets me excited about the best distributed teams is how thoughtful and deliberate they are about remote work, even if the marketing copy occasionally elides the messiness of our motivations and habits.