Devon Zuegel on togetherness

When we come out of this, I expect people will value in-person even more, but not in the sense that we’ll spend more time with each other in-person but rather that we put it on more of a pedestal. It’ll be treated with a lot more reverence and importance, which means it’ll be a strong signal to choose to spend time physically with someone when you could more easily spend time virtually. It’ll feel more important but also more scarce and special.

I’ve seen a preview of this with my team, which was already almost all remote before this anyways. We spend less time physically with each other since we’re all working from different cities, but when we are together we are more focused on “making the most of it”. The one week every six months we’re together, we’re very careful to use the time to get to know each other, choosing to deprioritize real work those weeks. This means that the way we relate to each other is very intentional and self-conscious, rather than more of an organic growth of the relationship that happens by just having each other ambiently in the background all the time. It works well, and over the course of working with them over time I’ve come to feel extremely close to them. But it means that everything had to be much more explicit, and that we’ve had to do extra work to develop our own new norms rather than getting to default to what’s normal. That said, this has major perks too, because we get to reinvent as we go along!

Those are two paragraph from my email.