I have been working remotely for more than twenty years.

It started as a home office with frequent travel. Airports, client sites, hotel desks, and early video calls before anyone called it “remote work.” Over time, that evolved into fully distributed teams, asynchronous collaboration, and leading people I rarely saw in the same room.

Because of that, I have watched management habits change slowly, and sometimes not at all.

For a long time, I believed good leadership meant being available.

Available on Slack.
Available in meetings.
Available to respond quickly so no one questioned my commitment.

I was not tracking timecards, but I was measuring effort by presence. Green dots. Fast replies. Full calendars. That quiet pressure to always be on.

This past year made something clear in a way no book ever could. Presence is not performance. Effort is not the same thing as progress.

When leaders fixate on hours, activity, or responsiveness, it is rarely about productivity. It is usually about uncertainty.

When outcomes are unclear, control fills the gap.

Peter Drucker wrote about this decades ago with Management by Objectives. The idea was simple. People perform better when expectations are clear and success is defined up front. Andy Grove later turned that thinking into more measurable systems at Intel, which evolved into what many teams now know as OKRs.

The lesson holds. Clarity beats hovering.

If you feel the urge to monitor activity, pause and ask a better question. Is the work unclear, or is trust breaking down?

Then solve the right problem.

I do not believe in measuring contribution by time spent. I believe in measuring it by results created.

After two decades of remote and hybrid work, this is the single biggest difference between teams that thrive and teams that burn out.

Clear outcomes change everything.
They reward efficiency.
They encourage ownership.
They reduce anxiety on both sides.

If you lead a team, define two things clearly:

Once those are clear, step out of the how. Most capable people do not need minute by minute oversight. They need trust and room to think.

If you are managing up, do not wait to be asked. Share your priorities and your deliverables. Make progress visible. When results are clear, scrutiny usually fades.

Another lesson that took years to fully appreciate: not everything needs to happen in real time.

Constant meetings and instant response expectations fracture attention. Research on deep work and cognitive load shows that context switching is one of the fastest ways to drain productivity without realizing it.

Asynchronous communication is not a remote perk. It is a performance strategy.

Written updates, shared documents, and short recorded explanations allow people to engage when their focus is strongest.

Two practical shifts:

Less noise almost always leads to better thinking.

A common fear I hear from leaders is, “How do I know work is getting done if I cannot see it?”

The answer is not monitoring. It is visibility.

Healthy accountability looks like a scoreboard, not a spotlight. When priorities and progress live in a shared system, trust becomes practical instead of emotional.

After twenty plus years of remote work, one truth stands out. People do their best work when they are trusted, not watched.

Stop counting hours.
Start counting wins.

The goal is not working less.
It is working cleaner.

And that shift benefits everyone.