We originally came up with this document because once every few months someone would say, "Hey, I've got this [reunion|wedding|dealie] that's built around a four-day weekend and is going to take a lot of travel time to get to. I'd like to figure out how to spend some more time with my family. Can I work remotely from my dad's house for a few days?"
Saying "no" seems hard-hearted, but saying "yes" was somewhat problematic. A few people were not as productive as they could've been, usually due to unforeseen circumstances that seemed obvious after the fact. We learned some things about getting productive fast and we'd like to share them with you.
So, it turns out that almost everything we'd recommend to the reunion people applies to people working remotely permanently or for extended stints. I think this is because the reunion folks were showing high relative fixed costs around getting productive. Regular remote folks have a lot of the same fixed costs, but the ratio was not high enough to be problematic.
So, this document is intended to give you the guidelines for an appropriate remote work environment, whether that environment be your uncle's study or your own. If you learn something while setting up your environment, or while working remotely, that you wish you'd known earlier, please let us know.
The point of these goals is not for you to figure out how to go work in exotic places. If you do want to become a vagabond remote worker and go around the world setting up 4G LTE connections in Borneo and Jackson Hole, that's a different thing. We're not against Borneo, per se. It's just not the topic of discussion. If you want to go to Borneo, talk to your manager. If enough people want to go to Borneo, we'll come up with a Borneo policy.
By the same token, we shouldn't assume that just because someone is working from a place that sounds exotic to us (e.g., Hawaii, Cape Cod, Hilton Head), that they are somehow trying to game the system. People work in these places, too.