Episode Details

In this episode, Maya and Pilar call for a halt to some of the remote madness! Where's that 'reset' button...

But first to follow up on the ongoing Twitter conversation from our last episode, about whether remote is suitable for everyone - thank you Bart and everybody who joined in, and do check out Maya's recent article about this idea of challenging your own assumptions, on Medium - because it all relates to today's theme on the flipside: while some people cannot imagine working out of the regular office, those of us who love remote work are in danger of becoming so evangelical about the benefits that we can risk losing sight of the potential downsides. So we need to talk about some of the pitfalls out there. Don't forget to check out our book Thinking Remote or sign up for the email series https://www.virtualnotdistant.com/books

Starting with conversations -

5.50 Synchronous and Asynchronous Conversations

Most of the tools and apps we use in remote collaboration offer us the ability to communicate in a wide range of modes, and this can increase confusion about whether a conversation is happening in real-time, or encouraging response over a longer time period.

We can have lots of different kinds of conversation in our online teams - check out also Jason Fried's new book "It Doesn't Have to be Crazy at Work", https://www.amazon.co.uk/Doesnt-Have-Be-Crazy-Work/dp/0008323445 from which we draw the insightful quote, that we want to go towards 'a culture of eventual response, rather than immediate response' - regardless of what the tool itself can do, this culture respects the time management and thought processes of the correspondent.

If we frame our communications with that intent, we'll remove the pressure to reply straight away, whether our colleagues are head down in deep work, or fast asleep in another continent. And it will help us make our communications purposeful and deliberate… there's a place for chit-chat, a place for talking about the work, another for actually doing the work. What are you putting out there?

14.45 And what about the tools themselves?

Back to basics! The tool shouldn't be leading you into an expectation of how to use it… Even email can get used as a real-time conversation, in a ghastly chain of reply-alls, but that doesn't mean we should. We have so many apps to choose from, so choose well. If you master your own notifications on your various devices you can take back control… This blog post from 2 years ago, Your Notification Settings are Your Friends will help you, as will this great suggestion from regular listener Teresa The productivity pit: how Slack is ruining work (with a fabulous gif summing up the whole problem).

And don't forget that a lot the business tools we use can share richer content like audio or video, all of which can be asynchronous. A great way to share an idea, or a screencast, and if you want considered feedback it might be best to give people a chance to think about it, rather than gathering people into a meeting where they're expected to respond immediately.

If you have a clear communications strategy you won't be searching for that remark or file wondering whether it was on email or Slack or in a document… and this includes being unafraid to say 'I'm moving this conversation over to its channel on XXX' - managing the conversation, so it continues to serve