Comment by notacoward
5 years ago
It doesn't work that way, because most work is at least somewhat collaborative and that means the remote worker is not solely in control of the pace. As a remote worker I can't meet with someone in the office who doesn't respond to my pings. I can't commit my code if reviewers only respond once per day. If people have an across-the-desk conversation without me that invalidates what I just spent a day implementing, I'm screwed - either by losing that work or by having to spend time (and become The Bad Guy) by persuading them back to the right path. The only way around these issues is to multitask more, which we should all know by now creates its own productivity problems. If you think deadlines alone work, you can't have tried it for any but the most trivially separable kinds of work.
What you've described are symptoms of an office who doesn't know how how to scale distributed work loads with remote workers. Across-the-desk conversations for instance don't scale to large workforce numbers.
Yes, they are symptoms, but the point is that "just give people deadlines" does nothing to address either the symptoms or the underlying problem. It's facile advice that doesn't lead to actual improvement.