Hey Ambition & Balancers,
You may (or may not) have noticed the cadence of newsletters has slowed down of late. That's because we've been quietly working on something new behind-the-scenes.
I'll tell you all about it next month, but if you're bullish about asynchronous collaboration and want to be a part of making it the default way of working, I would love to give you early access. Reply to this email and let me know.
This being Women's History Month, I wanted to share the remarkable story of remote work pioneer and general business badass Dame Stephanie "Steve" Shirley:
"In the realm of computing pioneers, Dame Stephanie “Steve” Shirley is one of the most celebrated, not only for building a $3 billion tech empire in 1960s England, but for doing it with an all-female, work-from-home staff of professionally qualified women who had left the work force after marrying and having children."
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Born of Jewish descendant in Nazi Germany, Shirley came to England at the age of five as one of 10,000 unaccompanied child refugees. In grade school, she fought to be taught mathematics, eventually transferring to an all-boys school ("science wasn't really taught at the girls' school"). After graduating, she joined the Post Office Research Station, a prestigious public research institute, where she fell in love with computer programming.
When Shirley found herself hitting the glass ceiling in the male-dominated workplace, she struck out on her own founding one of the UK's first software startups. She soon started signing her business development letters with her childhood nickname Steve, "so I could get my foot in the door before they realized 'he' was a 'she'".
Founded in 1962, Shirley's company, Freelance Programmers, gave career opportunities to hundreds and then thousands of women, particularly mothers, who had been largely shut out of the work force. She gave them the flexibility to work from home, shaping work around their lives and not the other way around. (When Britain passed equal rights legislation in the 1970s, the company did start hiring men as long as they were, in Shirley's wry words, "good enough".)
At its peak, the company employed 8,500 people. When it went public in 1996, it was valued at $3 billion. 70 of its still largely female staff became millionaires.
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Today many CEOs are forcing workers back to the office in the name of serendipity, innovation, team culture, productivity, or some combination thereof. At the end of the day, they lack the vision and guts to imagine a new way of doing things.
Dame Shirley's example puts them to shame. She's an inspiring reminder that innovation doesn't just take the form of revolutionary products, but also in revolutionary ways of working.
If you're interested in hearing more about Shirley's story, this video spotlight is well worth six minutes of your time.
Productively,
Becky and the Doist team
P.S. Is your company a remote trailblazer? Let the world know! Submissions for Quartz at Work's Best Companies for Remote Workers 2022 list close on March 14.
Want to share this newsletter? Here's an online version. We appreciate you spreading the word!
Photos via steveshirley.com and The Times, respectively.
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At the end of last year, time management expert Carl Pullein shared the latest iteration of his impressively organized Todoist setup including a custom Today view, how he keeps his routines separate from other tasks, and his unique time-based approach to projects.
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An essay from The Atlantic on why we should all stop saying "sorry for the delay" and start normalizing non-speedy response times:
"Granted, there can be real consequences to responding slowly in a culture that considers idleness, or even just the appearance of it, to be a moral shortcoming. This is especially true at work: Even if being responsive at all hours has no bearing on an employee’s actual productivity, many bosses lazily use it as a proxy for gauging workers’ value."
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One of the biggest concerns about remote work is that there's no more chance encounters. But is that really what drives innovation?
Read the article →
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Ambition & Balance
