I left Bangkok just after sunrise, heading south toward Sam Roi Yot. Black Forza, black linen shirt, blue jeans, backpack on the pillion seat. That backpack holds my entire office.
Nobody was expecting me at the other end. No client, no team, no room I needed to be in. I was riding four hours to a quiet beach in the low season to work for a few days, and the only thing waiting for me there was a balcony and enough bandwidth to sync documents.
Next month I will get on a plane to a room where everybody is expecting me.
Both of those are travel. Only one of them is presence. Most companies I have worked with have never separated the two, and it costs them every single week.
Rama 2 in the rain
About an hour in, the sky went from bright to metallic grey. The first drops were light, then heavy, then sheets. Within minutes parts of the road were under water, that familiar patchwork of standing water you only really see from a motorbike seat.
I have ridden Rama 2 enough times to know where it floods. I slowed, moved out of the truck spray, and kept going.
A quiet stop at Porto Go
When the rain got too dense, I pulled off at Porto Go. Gas, restrooms, a Starbucks, a few food options. A functional little node on a long highway.
I filled up and walked in. The default picture of a working CTO would have me ordering a double espresso. I ordered a hot matcha green tea latte, which is what I almost always order there. Their coffee is not my favourite and I do not drink things because they fit a photograph.
Corner seat, back to the wall, soft light. iPad out. I looked at what was actually on for the day.
Three architecture decisions. One product scope argument that needed settling. One conversation with an engineer about what he owns and what he does not.
Not one of those would have gone better with my body in a room.
The flights I do not argue about
I want to be precise, because the easy version of this argument is dishonest and everyone has read it already.
I fly. Budget meetings. Board meetings. C-level workshops where four people have to leave the room agreeing on something they did not agree on when they walked in.
I do not argue about those flights. I book them.
Because a room buys things a call does not. It buys commitment. Somebody says a number out loud in front of the people who will have to live with it, and afterwards it is hard to quietly become a different number. It buys the small hesitation on someone’s face when they say yes and mean no. It buys the twenty minutes in the corridor afterwards, which is often where the actual decision gets made.
That is real. I have never been able to get it from a video call and I have stopped pretending otherwise.
What a room has never bought me is better architecture. A whiteboard and two people arguing can untangle something quickly, and I have used it that way. But the thinking that decides the outcome happens before and after, and it needs quiet, time, and something written down at the end. Being in the building on a Wednesday does not produce any of that.
A week in the same place
There is a third thing, and it is not hybrid.
Once in a while I go and spend a week with a team, wherever most of them actually live. Europe, the US, wherever the centre of gravity happens to be. A hotel, a room with a table, and a week of being in the same place.
That week buys something specific. It buys the density of relationship that makes the next six months of writing to each other work. People will tell you things on day four of being in the same room that they will never type into Slack.
It is deliberate, it is dated, it has a purpose, and when it is done everybody goes home. That is a different animal from three days a week, forever, regardless of what is happening that week.
Three days a week, regardless
Here is the thing I keep running into.
Most companies do not decide about presence. They schedule it. Three days in the office, every week, applied evenly across every kind of work, forever, because that is the policy.
A decision produces presence. A policy produces attendance.
Ask a leadership team what last quarter’s office days actually bought them. They will tell you it is about culture, or collaboration, or serendipity. Push a little further and ask which decision was made better, which problem was caught earlier, which person stayed because of a Tuesday. Almost nobody has an answer.
That is not because they are lazy or stupid. It is because they never sorted the work in the first place. When you do not know which of your work actually needs a room, the safe move is to put everybody in a room for all of it. Presence becomes insurance against a question nobody has asked.
And it is expensive insurance. It is paid in commutes, in the engineers who leave, in the senior hire in another city you cannot make, and in a quiet ceiling on who will ever work for you.
I am not going to tell you your office days are waste. Some of them are the most valuable hours of your quarter. I am telling you that you do not know which ones, and that you could.
Sam Roi Yot
By the time I reached Sam Roi Yot the sky had cleared. Low season, so the beach was mostly empty. A few local dogs. Two fishermen. Some chairs nobody was using.
I dropped the backpack, brewed a coffee on the balcony with the small travel machine, opened the window to hear the water, and sat down with the iPad.
From the outside this can look like digital nomad theatre. From the inside it is the opposite. It only works because the systems I build do not depend on me being anywhere.
The teams know what they are doing and why. The flow is clear enough that a few hours of written input keeps everything moving. The architecture is simple enough that a decision does not detonate into ten new dependencies.
That is not a lifestyle. It is a test, and I run it on myself.
Which is the part I would actually like you to sit with. If your product and your organisation only move when the CTO is in the building, unblocking things by hand, that is not a fact about remote work.
It is a finding about your system.