Hell might be other people, but isolation sure ain’t heaven. Even the most introverted are still part of Homeous Socialitus Erectus, which is why prisoners fear The Hole more than living with other inmates. We’re simply not designed for a life of total solitude.

The occasional drawback of working remotely is that it can feel like you’re surrounded by plenty of people. You have your coworkers on instant messenger or in Campfire, you receive a constant deluge of emails, and you enjoy letting the trolls rile you up on Reddit. But as good as all that is, it’s not a complete substitute for real, live human interaction.

Fortunately, one of the key insights we’ve gained through many years of remote work is that human interaction does not have to come from either coworkers or others in your industry. Sometimes, even more satisfying interaction comes from spending time with your spouse, your children, your family, your friends, your neighbors: people who can all be thousands of miles away from your office, but right next to you.

But even if you don’t have friends or family nearby, you can still make it work; you’ll just have to exert a little more effort. For example, find a co-working facility and share desks with others in your situation. Such facilities can now be found in most larger cities, and even some smaller ones.

Another idea is to occasionally wander out into the real world. Every city, no matter how small, offers social activities to keep you sane and human, whether it’s playing chess in the park, finding a pickup basketball game, or volunteering at a school or library on your lunch break.

Cabin fever is real, and remote workers are more susceptible to it than those forced into an office. Fortunately, it’s an easy problem to address. Remote work doesn’t mean being chained to your home-office desk.

This essay comes from the Beware The Dragons chapter in our new book REMOTE: Office Not Required. The book is being released October 29, 2013.

We talk a lot about working remotely. Over 70% of our employees work remotely. They work out of homes, coffee shops, and co-working spaces. They play music, garden, and spend time with their families. We dig working remotely so much we wrote a book about it.
Meet some of the fantastic people who make working remotely for 37signals such a success.

When we redesigned Signal vs. Noise last year, we tried to make commenting a bit more of a conscious process by placing the link to the comment form at the top of the post rather than the bottom, hiding existing comments by default, and removing the URL field to cut back on spamming. We continued to require an email address, as well as warn commenters that “We’d rather not moderate, but off-topic, blatantly inflammatory, inappropriate or vapid comments may be removed. Repeat offenders will be banned. Let’s add value. Thank you.”

“We want readers to focus on the article, spend some time thinking about it, and reflect,” says 37signals designer Mig Reyes, who championed the redesign. “… the way books and magazines let you do that, because there’s no comments section that allows you to spit knee-jerk reactions publicly. If you really, really want to share something, you’ll put in the effort to dig for our comments form.”

Comments on SvN are generally more civil compared to those on other blogs in its peer group, and certainly elsewhere on the Internet. But the vitriol about the redesign itself was so extreme we very nearly pulled them — but most of it boiled down to good old-fashioned fear of change, so we waited. Eventually most of the haters moved on.

Still, it remains a problem. We’ve talked about the possibility of preemptively disabling comments for specific posts, but it’s tricky to anticipate which posts are going to incite trolling, and we don’t want to punish the readers who would otherwise add insight. Some of us have (only half-jokingly) proposed making would-be commenters click an “agree” button promising their intention to add value, or forcing them to wait five minutes before being allowed to post — you’d arrive on the page and a timer would start, and you earn the right to comment by waiting it out.

Other forums have begun addressing the breakdown in civil discourse by making it more cumbersome to join the conversation. The Huffington Post announced it would no longer allow anonymous comments, and ESPN.com requires commenters to have a Facebook account to add a comment on certain sections of the site. To combat the trolliest of the trolls, YouTube is rolling out a new system that forces commenters to use their Google+ profiles, and also moves more relevant comments (i.e., those from the original poster, people you know and “popular personalities”) to the top. And Popular Science has shut down the conversation altogether, arguing that trolls are “bad for science.”

We ultimately retained comments because there’s no denying the value of a true dialogue. There’s a lot to be said for a post serving as the starting point of a fruitful discussion, and for connecting authors and readers. Plus, you told us you want them: We polled SvN readers in 2012, and learned folks appreciate having comments in general (although some complained, understandably, about their quality).

Another possibility is moving the conversation elsewhere — tools like Branch exist for that very purpose. Mig purposefully built Twitter into SvN’s redesign to encourage offsite dialogue — if you read an article and have something to say to the author, tweet her. Mat Honan’s Wired piece highlights some of alternatives to hosting a conversation right under the post itself — a convention it’s past time we reevaluate.

When comment sections are deliberately downplayed, moved elsewhere or abolished, they’re no longer the most accurate measure of “engagement,” although that’s a popular misconception. One SvN reader recently commented:

“I find it interesting how few comments any of these blog posts get on the topic of company spotlight on remote working.

It must not interest anyone. Or at least, it doesn’t to me and frankly 37svn has jumped the shark long ago (as seen by the low engagement on all posts lately).”

(I tried to reach out to him to apologize for failing to meet his expectations and to ask what kind of posts he’d like to see more of, but he’d left a fake email address. I wrote to the next commenter, who’d agreed with him — no reply. So much for taking the conversation elsewhere.)

It’s true commenting is down since the makeover, but that’s by design — total comment volume has fallen by about 30 percent, while traffic has more or less held steady. Unique visitors to SvN have increased, as has the amount of time people spend on the site and the number of pages people visit. “Engagement” has less to do with the number of comments on a particular post, and more to do with page views, shares on Twitter and elsewhere, personal contact between authors and readers, and so on.

We’re not concerned about having jumped the shark, in other words — but we of course want to be conscious about the kinds of content readers want to see. That commenter was sort of right, in that we don’t get as many hits on profile posts like those in the “Bootstrapped, Profitable, & Proud” series — people like those stories, but they’re not as popular as the posts that highlight how 37signals works as a company, for instance, or posts that share our ideas on design and business.

For my part, I’m resolving to take those preferences more into account, and to do a better job engaging within the comments section, if that’s where people prefer to have a dialogue. The more present writers are post-publication, the more respectful the conversation tends to be, and the more value everyone gets out of the exchange.

I will say that writing more frequently for SvN has toughened my skin, and that’s not a bad thing. Trolling is never personal, for one. Rudeness says far more about the commenter’s character than about the author’s skill as a writer. Two, it helps to recognize that people are rarely inspired to leave a comment just to agree or say thanks. My coworker Jonas likes to think of comments as “The opposite of the thing you just read.” Since people generally only comment to disagree, “articles read like ‘Here’s a point.’ Comments -> ‘The opposite point.’” If you’re braced for it and accept that counterpoint as part of the anatomy of a blog post, it doesn’t sting — it’s expected behavior.

Name: Jorge Gómez Sancha
Title: Founder and Managing Director
Company: BeBanjo
Based in: Madrid, Spain
Established: 2008

What does BeBanjo do?
We build software for the video-on-demand industry. Basically, a video-on-demand service is something like Netflix. All of the operations that need to take place — from the moment that Netflix acquires content from the Hollywood studios, for instance, until that content is available for a user to watch — all those operations can be managed and tracked with our tools.
How many people work for the company, and of those, how many work remotely?

It goes up and down, but right now, around 16 people. Pretty much everyone works remotely in some fashion or other, but only two people, including myself, go consistently to the office. Some of them have an office to go to if they want; some don’t have an office in the city they’re working from. The main offices are in Madrid and in London. There are also people in the North and South of Spain. They can come to Madrid but they don’t regularly.

Why did you make the decision to go remote?
From the beginning, we realized we didn’t want to limit ourselves to working with local people. Also, we wanted it to be an international company because most of our customers, we knew, would likely be outside of Spain, which is the case. We only have one customer in Spain; the rest are all in the UK, France, the U.S., various countries. We made a point of making sure everyone felt OK with working remotely and very soon we were hiring foreign people.
My cofounder is Dutch. He was living in Madrid as well. Our language was always English; every communication is English. So it’s been in our DNA from the beginning, working remotely and being an international company.
What tools do you use to collaborate remotely?
For our code repositories for our software we use GitHub. For communications or for chat we use Campfire — we always have a Campfire room open. We use Basecamp when we work with customers. We use an internally built tool, a digital kanban board, to have a place where anyone can look and see exactly what development stage each feature is in. That’s become the heart of our day-to-day. All our infrastructure is virtual, so we use Amazon web services. There are no physical servers or anything, just our laptops.
What challenges did you face in setting up as a remote company?
One thing we realized very quickly is that not everybody is cut out to work remotely. It became obvious that we needed to find self-motivated, responsible, professional guys who like what they do, and it’s not a problem for them to sit in front of their computers at home. There’s no easy way to micromanage someone remotely, and we didn’t want to. We wanted to work with guys who would raise the bar. We find that good, self-motivated, responsible guys are also perfectly capable and willing to work remotely as well. Maybe not everyone we worked with initially was perfectly suited for that. Soon that stopped being a problem because everybody we hired was aware that this was the case.
Working remotely also requires an extra effort in terms of communication. If someone is sitting in the office, I pretty much know what he’s doing. If we’re not in the same office, I sometimes lose track. It requires them to be proactive in providing information. The same goes for me — if I don’t communicate, then no one knows what’s going on with me, whether we’re signing new customers or things like that.
What do you think are the major benefits of being remote for your team?
They feel like grown-ups, if you know what I mean. Normally in Spain, people are used to working a specific number of hours and being watched in terms of what time you come in, what time you leave. For us, the focus has always been: what can you do? What are you giving back? That’s the agreement. You do whatever you need to do — you want to wake up at noon, and start working then? Fine with us, but why are you doing this — does it make you more productive? Basically, people get more and more responsible with their time, because they are given a vote of confidence, and they return that greatly. That’s something people appreciate a lot, being treated as a grown-up.
I don’t even count vacation days or how many hours you work. I expect you to do what you need to do and be responsible, and the moment you aren’t, it’s immediately obvious to everybody. If you’re doing your work, it’s clear to everybody. If you’re not, then it’s also clear — even working remotely, just by the output. That’s one big benefit. They know they’re hired because they’re experts at what they do and they’re not treated like children.
That doesn’t mean that everybody’s left on their own and no one cares about them. We are very conscious about how people are feeling, whether they’re happy or frustrated. We make it a point to manage that. But no one cares about times, vacations, things like that. And people are super responsible in general.
Any advice for other companies who are considering going remote?
If you find the right people, it’s incredibly easy to do. Start with the people you think can manage it — who are responsible, self-motivated, enthusiastic about their work and so on. And also try with the people who request it — they will make a bigger effort to make this work than anyone else, because it’s in their interest.

Another thing is to communicate a lot — try to get in the habit of writing an email every other week or so sharing what’s going on, whether you’re the boss or whether you are just a guy working there. It’s super interesting to everybody to know what’s going on in the company, and just generate a sense of community and team. That is hugely important.
Find a place where people can go to virtually and feel they’re being seen as well. Although people are comfortable working remotely, maybe you’re hacking away at your software for hours, and you’re not talking to anybody because you’re concentrating. People start feeling anxious: “they’re going to be thinking that I’m not doing anything,” when actually they are working very hard. It’s important they have somewhere they can go to get rid of that stress factor, like a chatroom or something they can check into and say “I’m around if you need me; I’m just busy doing something else.” It’s a detail, but we’ve seen that helps.
It should be a big incentive for any company to get into working remotely: good people, good developers, good designers — they are all over the world. They are not just in your local town. Working remotely — opening the door to doing that — just opens the door to finding great people all over the place. If you’re used to working remotely and it’s easy to bring people onboard because everybody works like that, you’ll be able to hire anyone if your project is interesting and you pay good money. This kind of work is attractive to the sort of people you might be looking for: self-motivated, intelligent, and active people are attracted to this way of working.
Visit BeBanjo.

HP has joined Best Buy and Yahoo! in an attempt to turn back the clock on remote working. Like the other two wounded, flailing giants, HP undoubtedly yearn for the late 90s, when they all were flying high. But reenacting the work principles of decades past is not likely to make mana rain from the sky again.

Neither is the hilarious corporate doublespeak that’s being enlisted to make the case. Here’s a choice bit on just how important employees are to the Vapid Corporate Slogan of The Day.. uhm, I mean HP Way Now:

Belief in the power of our people is a core principle of the HP Way Now. Employees are at the center of what we do, we achieve competitive advantages through our people. HP has amazing employees who are driving great change.

So we have great people, but we can’t trust them to get anything done unless we see butts in seats from 9-5? Who cares whether all these great people have designed a lifestyle around not having to commute long hours or live in a given city. That’s all acceptable collateral damage in the “all hands on deck” playbook for sinking companies.

Here’s a few thoughts: Perhaps HP isn’t sinking because Jane works from home, avoids the commute, and has more time to spend on hobbies and family? Perhaps HP is sinking because of strategic and managerial mismanagement? Perhaps morale won’t actually improve until the beatings stop?

It’s sad when you see once-great companies reduced to this smoldering mess of mistrust and cargo culting. But hey, at least we know now the pitch of the whistle that says its time to abandon ship. It’s “all hands on deck”.

Today we introduce a new miniseries: “Remote Works,” a collection of short interviews with folks at companies who made the switch from office to remote work. If you’d like to share your story, get in touch.

Name: Abhishek Rai
Title: Founder
Company: Shack Co.
Based in: New Delhi, India
Established: 2007
Employees: 7 (4 local; 3 remote)

What does Shack do?
We build and maintain community knowledge tools. We just launched Beanbuffs, a community of coffee lovers focussing on coffee, music and food. We also run a knowledge games platform called KnowQout.
Why did you make the transition to remote work?
We didn’t start out as a remote company — in fact, we started based out of New Delhi, in the northern part of the country. Then last year we transitioned from a web services company to a product and content company.
One of the inspirations (to transition to remote work) was Getting Real and Rework. 37signals has been a huge inspiration for us. Another was Bo Burlingham’s Small Giants: Companies That Choose To Be Great Instead of Big. A few of my favorites from the list are Clif Bar & Co., Union Square Hospitality Group, Zingerman’s and Anchor Brewing. 
When we first thought of developing a tool for ourselves, we hired a consultant who worked on the tool for nearly a year. What we got in the end was a disjointed software which had all the features in the world, but it was useless. I spent time reading and soul searching and came to the conclusion that it’s only us who can develop a tool for ourselves, not a consultant. This is when remote working as a concept helped me. I managed to get the right people to work with. 

Did the transition to remote work coincide with your transition from web services to products and content?
We decided we’ll build our own product, and I started looking for designers and writers for the platform, and we could not find them here. We found someone who was located in western India, and someone who was based in the southern part of the country. We met them; we liked what they were doing. But we were scared because we’d never worked like that before. We just gave it a try, and somehow it worked for us.
Why were you scared?
The kind of work I’ve been doing, I always supervised people. They used to sit in the same place. We used to hold morning scrum meetings where I would assign tasks to everyone, and they would report back to me in the evening with the end of the day report. You had to sit and show that you’re working. I also believed that if you’re not sitting there, staring at your screen, then you’re not working. If I hired someone somewhere else, I don’t know if that guy is texting throughout the day or spending time on Facebook. Most of the bigger companies in India block Facebook; they block Twitter. I’m against that; I’ve never done it, but I did have this fear that if people are not in front of my eyes that they’re not working.
So that was one big reason, because I was used to supervising. But I had to give that up, and I’m very happy that I don’t have to supervise; it just worked. I don’t care if they’re watching movies, if they’re listening to music, if they’re going out — as long as they get my work done I’m very happy.
What do you see as the major benefits of being a remote company, and of letting employees work offsite?
Number one is less supervision — things are set out very clearly. You have to say things so clearly that others understand it and finish the job. Everyone knows what needs to be done when.
Number two is the availability of professionals. Now the world is open to me. There is a very interesting agency in London called Rule of Three, and they write very interesting copy. So I approached them; I would like to work with them. Earlier I was not willing to do that. That’s the flexibility I have now.
Number three: Things get done on time.
Any advice for other companies who are considering going remote?
They must — it’s as simple as that! They should. That’s the way forward, as long as you have connectivity, which is still an issue in smaller cities in India. For a country like us, it will take a lot more time. Nearly 60 percent of our population have mobile phones in their hands, but not even 10 percent have broadband connection in their homes. For something like this, you need broadband connectivity. Phones are very cheap, but connectivity is very costly in India right now and that’s something that needs to change.
Visit Shack Co.

Pitchfork Media encompasses the award winning online music publication Pitchfork.com, the Pitchfork Music Festival, Nothing Major: a journal of visual culture, and their newest cinematic sibling: The Dissolve.

I recently sat down with Pitchfork Creative Director and friend Mike Renaud to chat about being part of the company as it’s grown organically, nourishing his analog roots, and his experience using Basecamp.

Tell me a bit about the team. Are you all centralized or spread out across multiple offices? How do you communicate?

The Pitchfork team is made up of about 45 employees, now about 54 including The Dissolve staff. Twenty of us are located in Chicago, with editorial and Pitchfork.tv split across two different offices in Brooklyn. The Chicago office is our headquarters where our design and development teams, management, and advertising staff work.

A few team members go out to New York a couple of times each month for meetings, shoots, etc. Because the offices are located in different cities we use a lot of Basecamp to communicate and help keep everything together. Probably one of the main reasons Basecamp works for us is because of the distance.

Within the company we have kind of an IM culture. Everyone is on IM every day. For communicating with the New York office it really helps, but in Chicago it kind of annoys me when someone sitting next to you IMs for something. I always prefer talking and facetime. I can see the argument about avoiding distraction from work but in its own way I really think it becomes distracting to have people IMing you constantly; it makes people feel like they can approach you more than they otherwise would. And I still feel like I need to stop everything and answer.

What types of projects do you use Basecamp for?

We fucking use Basecamp all the time. “The Dissolve” Basecamp project is insane. We have a project going with the development and design teams around building the website, and without Basecamp I don’t know if we could have done it.

We also have projects for all the different parts of the music festival – the festival website, the merch booth, the stage flags, etc. Outside of the festival it’s been great having a project for each cover story and we also make a project for every major advertising campaign.

Getting a whole team on board with embracing a new system like Basecamp can sometimes be a challenge at first. What was this like for you and your team?

My favorite moment with that was for the festival. Pitchfork proper has been on board with it for a while, and there was a little bit of resistance here and there, but pretty quickly everyone was like, “OK, cool, I understand why this is a good thing and I’m into it and it works.”

For the festival, we were introducing it to people who have never used Basecamp before and I introduced them to Basecamp for the festival website like, “OK guys, here’s what Basecamp is, we’re a lot about it, here’s why it’s good, here’s why you should use it.” The next day I’m still getting emails from them, and I’m just like, “Can we do this in Basecamp?” Just for weeks this went on—“I know this is annoying but can we please just do this on Basecamp? ... It’s just as easy, please just do it this way. You’ll see.” It was so rewarding a month later to get an email that was like, “OK, Mike, Basecamp is fucking awesome and I get it now! This makes sense. I’m loving it.” It just kinda clicks and you’re like, “I get it.”

I think for you guys it’s probably designers and developers who would be the ones promoting Basecamp and trying to get other people to use it, but it’s actually more useful for the clients or other partners than the designers themselves because it gives other people constant access to all these files and other things that they wouldn’t otherwise have. We love it.

I wonder how many people stop themselves short of making something new in fear of it failing.

Failure, sigh. It’s (still) overrated, and it’s given everyone the wrong lens to look at their craft. Why dissect post-mortem when we can imagine possibility? Why review mistakes when we can consider play?

The makers of our world would be better off mimicking scientists with their work. Harp on deliberate practice. Reinvent their processes daily. Share every discovery. And most importantly, try new things often.
All of a sudden punting on ideas—no matter how silly—seem like the real mistake. They’re lessons you didn’t learn, skills you didn’t exercise.
When everything’s an experiment, you shed the fear that comes with trying new things. And that sounds like a better way to grow and learn. Plus, no one has to even mention the f-word.

Smart people in white coats have extensively studied commuting — this supposedly necessary part of our days — and the verdict is in: Long commutes make you fat, stressed, and miserable. Even short commutes will stab at your happiness.
— from REMOTE: Office Not Required, in bookstores Oct. 29

Are you commuting your life away? Email us with your sob story — we’ll publish the best (worst?) of them here on SvN. The winner (loser?) will receive a $100 gas card and a signed copy of REMOTE, to be mailed directly to your CEO!

The latest version of Android was released in July—a little over 3 months ago. Yet the popular HBO Go app is not compatible! You can’t watch HBO Go on your brand new Nexus 7. You can’t watch HBO on any Android device that was updated to Android 4.3.

Can you imagine if HBO didn’t make its app compatible with Apple’s iOS 7? Nope, I can’t.