Hello, my name is Tim Teege
and this is my blog.

This book about creating a company based on remote working was first published in 2013. Now, that the COVID-19 pandemic has hit so many companies with the necessity to suddenly work remotely, it’s even more relevant. I have run my own company remotely for a few years and in general it‘s been going well. But, of course, some challenges present themselves from time to time, which made me look for answers. Answers from people with lots more of experience with that sort of thing. 

This book spends a good percentage of it explaining why remote working is the future and just the reasonable thing to do. I didn’t need that, I’m already convinced. But in between there was a good dozen of little tips and tricks I have written down and will try to implement in my own company now, in order to make the remote working go even better. Never stop to optimize! Also a plus: it’s a quick read containing condensed information.

I’ve always been fascinated by the story of Facebook, the product. Shortly before the company was in its infancy, a bunch of friends and I made our first steps at coding something reminding of an online social network of that sort and ran into similar problems that Zuckerberg had at the beginning. Obviously, the paths quickly diverged enormously. While the first half of the book is recounting basic facts like “and then Zuckerberg put person x into position y, then he bought company z”, the second half of this extensive book is captivating. 

I’m glad I didn’t discard the book after a months long break stuck between both parts. The main point we can observe when looking at what happened in the world since Facebook hosts a third of the world’s communications, is the question: Is it worth it? How many live streamed massacres, how much foreign interference into world leader elections, how many millions of leaked personal profiles fallen into the hands of shady people – did you know Steve Bannon was part of the Cambridge Analytica disaster? –, how much abuse of our trust for the gains of ultra-capitalists, how much daily viral News Feed negativity does humankind want to endure in exchange for being “truly connected”?

Right now, my answer is: How about we just write down the phone numbers and email addresses of our friends to stay connected.

[German] I accidentally ordered the translated german version. These four British middle-aged ladies actually rowed across the Atlantic from La Gomera to Antigua, as part of the Talisker Whisky Atlantic Challenge. I’ve had that trip on my bucketlist for some years and always wanted to read a book about it, and now I have. The whole things seems a lot more doable to me, now. Adventure books mostly have that effect, because the authors tend to have survived. Note to self: do more research on failed attempts. 

The book itself is a quick read. A real page turner for me. The ladies aren’t gifted authors, but they had help. They describe a lot of details surrounding the whole endeavor, probably because the journey itself wasn’t as interesting. Water and rowing all day for two and a half months. The structure of the book is therefore quite good and the content is entertaining and informative. But from time to time they described events that made me think these women were actually naïve teenage girls. Starting from being late to so many important events, sleeping through safety training as if that was cool behavior, killing the boat’s battery during a Christmas party and having to go on without it, packing lots of food they didn’t like and then threw overboard, all the way to severely burning their hands with celebratory torches during the arrival in Antigua. How lucky it all worked out in the end.

Wow, that was unusual. I can’t remember the last time I’ve read fiction, but this was a strong recommendation from a good friend so I gave it a try. It sucked me in and was hard to put down. Finding the time for it has been a struggle though, so it took a few months to finish. Glad I did, though.

The book details a full Saturday (ah!) of a middle-aged upper-middle-class neurosurgeon living in London. Surely it’s not a usual Saturday and a lot happens, but big parts are just him running errands and reflecting on it all. Henry Perowne is a richly written character with a colorful and interesting family (wife, two artistic kids, demented mother, alcoholic poet father-in-law). Good parts of his day reminded me of my own life, running errand after errand on a free Saturday to make sure everyone in the family is happy. It did not bore me at all. I felt reminded of the American Beauty movie and projected a sort of depressed state (midlife crisis?) onto him which I later realized wasn’t really there at all. Worth reading.