Open Vacation Policy? Does that mean Unlimited Vacation?

The company I work for, Automattic, has an open vacation policy. What does an “open vacation policy” even mean? Before I started at Automattic, I had no idea what to expect. I had heard about how some open vacation policies end up with employees taking very little vacation time out of peer pressure. My friends thought…

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A Remote Company Retreat with Buffer

I wrote the following post last year when I was tagging along on Buffer’s Remote Retreat in Madrid, Spain with my sister. It was an amazing experience getting to see another remote company so up close. Enjoy! It is completely insane to me, that I’m writing this while sitting in Madrid, Spain tagging along on…

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Celebrating 2 years at Automattic

Today is a really cool day because it marks my 2 year anniversary at Automattic. In many many ways… it still feels like I just started a few months ago. I still feel so new in that I’m always learning and have brilliant challenges ahead of me. In other ways, I feel like I’ve grown…

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Video Calls in Remote Work: Does hiding your own video make you more effective?

I was recently listening to this podcast called what Virtual CoWorking can teach virtual teams. One of the points that I found completely fascinating was that a small study was done, and showed that by hiding your own video on your display- makes you more effective/less distracted in video calls. If you’ve never done a video…

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