The Quirks About Remote Work

Our team is 100% remote. It's a conscious choice, and one we relish. Remote work allows us to escape the oft soul-crushing confines of an office in exchange for the purported comforts of our home.

There's no commute, which can take an average of 55 minutes a day. That equates to 23 hours a month or 12 days a year in saved time. A frigging vacation!

For some, avoiding long-winded stories about their colleagues' kids, weekends, or pets, is a bonus too. What about office politics you say? Well, the jury's still out on that one. Damned #watercooler channel in Slack.

Nevertheless, there are a bunch of pros and cons of remote work depending on your situation, and learning how to manage time when working remotely is a must.

Woof woof, waah waah, honey!?

For so many self-employed professionals, working from home is a default setting. The thinking goes that productivity is going to thrive and we're going to magically get our entire backlog of work done.

Well, yes and no. Because at home, inevitably, life kicks in. It can be hard to find an interlude.

For us, the key to effective remote work is a system. We each need our own because this isn't a one-size-fits-all kind of thing. Yours has to help you find the right balance between flow, never-ending video calls, and the joy of being interrupted every 5 minutes.

Not to mention keeping our ADHD tendencies at bay.

Our remote work time management hacks

• We schedule our priorities
• We (try to) set external meetings on Monday mornings
• We find comfortable overlap times between time zones
• We check-in with each other on a stand-up call
• We collaborate extensively throughout the day
• We use a productivity management system
• We document everything to pass on Legos

Our remote stack

• Asana for productivity/task management
• Slack for collaboration
• Coda for centralizing documents and gathering our thoughts
• Google Docs for stuff like spreadsheets etc.

These tools have both free and premium tiers. What's your productivity stack?