Hey Insiders, Happy Monday, hope you had an epic weekend and are ready to crush this week, no matter where you’re working from! We have a fun one for you today…

Today’s email is a 4min 55sec read:

• 👀 What do modern workers do all day?

• 🇵🇹 Portugal’s golden visa ban is getting backlash

• ➕ PLUS: Bitcoin Manifesto is on all MacOS copies, and no one knows why

But first, today’s Deep Dive is focused on the ultimate version of remote work - async 👇

🔬 DEEP DIVE

Async Work Is On The Rise

Remote work brings a lot of benefits - no commute, more time with family, and the ability to live where you want, but perhaps one of the benefits more and more people are looking for is an asynchronous workflow, or simply async.

Async workflows focus on uncoupling your job from a scheduled work time by building a vast supporting structure of documentation that is available to all 24/7.

This way, if you have a question you can consult the documentation, instead of having to wait on a coworking to provide an answer.

Async brings many benefits for both employees and employers. Workers can work whenever works best for them without having to worry about regular working hours. This also unlocks the ability to truly work from anywhere in the world since time zone issues are no longer a worry.

For employers, this means being able to hire the best person for the job, no matter what part of the world they live in, and brings a boost in productivity since workers become more self-sufficient.

A recent study on async work by Miro found that nearly half (42%) of knowledge workers wanted to work more async compared to only 14% who said they wanted to work less async.

Of course async doesn’t work for all positions or situations.

Negatives of async work

An obvious place where async is not a good fit is in customer-facing roles like customer support or sales.

In addition, synchronous work (when everyone works at the same time) excels in situations like:

• project launches

• new team member introductions

• problem brainstorms, etc

A great async strategy is one that knows when to lean into synchronous work, and when to leave workers to do their job when it works best for them.

In order for a company to successfully function asynchronously requires the creation of a central repository of information, or as many async companies call it, a “handbook”

While this can be a time-intensive project, several async companies have built their handbooks open source, so anyone can copy their structure.

GitLab is perhaps the most famous async company with an open-source handbook and they’ve even created multiple courses and certifications to guide other companies in building their own handbooks and async operations.

👀 HIGHLIGHT

What Do People Do All Day? A Look At The Diverse Lives Of 21st-Century Workers

The New York Times asked 9 different people to keep a video journal for 24 hours in order to show all the different ways people make a living today and the difference in their life experiences.

🚨 WORD ON THE WEB

📦 Amazon CEO doubling down on return to office, even though offices aren’t ready

• Amazon remote employees are supposed to return to the office at least 3 days a week starting in May

• However, leaked internal documents say that offices in NYC & Austin won’t be ready to receive workers until September, offices in Tempe & Atlanta will be ready in July, and those in Cupertino & Palo Alto are still in question

• This raises a lot of questions and confusion about CEO Andy Jassy’s plan to bring people back to the office after saying last year that there were no such plans.

• Jassy announced RTO plans in February and soon after a 28,000-person Slack channel titled “Remote Advocacy” was launched to support Amazon’s pro-remote work position.

🇵🇹 Portugal’s golden visa ban has received mixed responses

• Portugal proposed to close down its popular Golden Visa in February citing inflated housing prices due to foreigners buying property

• Opposers to the ban say that this will only stop investments in low-population areas since an amendment was passed to the Golden Visa rules in 2022 which excluded properties in densely populated areas like Lisbon

• In addition, last year Portugal generated over €530 million from golden visas - a revenue stream the country would lose if the ban is passed.

🏦 JPMorgan Chase ends remote work for senior bankers

• Wall Street giants like JPMorgan have always been some of the most anty-remote work companies, even proposing a back-to-office plan in late 2020

• The company is now forcing its senior staff to return to offices at least 3 days a week in order to “be visible on the floor,… meet with clients, and they should always be accessible for immediate feedback and impromptu meetings.”

• Another reason for JPMorgan to be so focused on a return to office - the company last year unveiled plans for a brand new 60-story skyscraper in NYC which will be completed in 2025

📆 UPCOMING EVENTS:

April 25-26: Running Remote [📍 Lisbon, Portugal] - Largest remote work conference in the world for enterprises and SMEs

May 24-28: Vivel [📍 Multiple Locations, Turkey] - networking meets music at this one-of-a-kind conference for location-independent professionals

June 16-19: Camp Indie [📍 Kent, Connecticut] - adult summer camp & conference for digital nomads & those living an unconventional life

June 25-July 2: Bansko Nomad Fest [📍 Bansko, Bulgaria] - for digital nomads, freelancers, and founders in the mountains of Bulgaria

💾 TECH

The Bitcoin Manifesto is Hidden in Every Copy of MacOS, And No One Knows Why

Developer and veteran blogger Andy Baio discovered the Bitcoin Manifesto on his Macbook while trying to fix his printer, even though he never downloaded it… and he’s not alone. It seems that the Manifesto is secretly embedded in every modern copy of MacOS!

If you have a Macbook, here is how to pull it up:

Open your terminal (press Command + Space and search for terminal) then paste this into the terminal:

open /System/Library/Image\ Capture/Devices/VirtualScanner.app/Contents/Resources/simpledoc.pdf

And press Enter… this will open a document called “simpledoc.pdf” which is the original Bitcoin Manifesto.

Weird!

⭐️ WFA JOBS

I've teamed up with THE remote job coach Jordan Carroll to provide you with handpicked work-from-anywhere jobs right here in this newsletter:

⭐️ Community Leader @ Remote Year

⭐️ Accounting Manager @ Clipboard Health

⭐️ Senior Manager, Finance @ InVisionApp

Want help finding the right remote job for you? Join the Remote Collective and get introductions to dozens of remote companies looking to hire people like you!

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👋 That's it from us today, see you Wednesday morning!