Remote work is one of the sacred pillars of the modern tech world. To challenge it is to risk exile.
This is not a challenge to remote work. I understand the lifestyle benefits as the parent who does most of the carting around of kids to extracurricular activities and does most of the cooking. I despise commutes unless biking or walking. I am an introvert’s introvert.
Now that the credentials are out of the way, it would be dishonest to not recognize remote work as a tool that brings its unique set of benefits and challenges. And the first step in overcoming a challenge is recognizing the challenge.
In a remote environment, our shared space with our colleagues is generally a single screen. The space we use to see our colleagues is the same space we have to see our work. Switching screens isn’t time consuming, but small cost times high frequency can end up equaling large cost.
When we’re sitting in a room together, I can see your face and glance at a wall to see our information radiators. Information flow occurs at a higher bandwidth.
Most work tracking tools are terrible, providing one-dimensional lists of text tasks that offer no insight into a team’s broader context and thus aborting the formation of alignment and shared understanding. To have information radiators available to everyone means adding a lot of duplicate hardware to each team member’s individual location. And some of us don’t have the luxury of ample wall space where we could mount extra monitors.
I’ve found a tool that can help—Discord, the chat/streaming app developed for gamers.
A Discord setup with voice channels for each team brings a lot of the benefit that team rooms do in meatspace. You can find your colleagues, and it reduces the friction of talking to one another. Remember, we’re focused on the flow of work from idea to production rather than individual efficiency.
In those voice channels, everyone can share their screens at the same time making it easier to share ideas. Compare this to the “is it okay if I take the screen share?” dance common in Zoom calls. If you’re pairing or mobbing on something, one person can have an editor up for when it’s time to focus on code, and another can have the work tracker up for when it’s time to focus on work tracking.
If there’s an urgent situation, you can have a dedicated voice room set up as a “War Room” as it’s called. This gives a fast way for the folks diffusing the situation to get together, while simultaneously signaling that those folks are unavailable for less urgent things.
It’s the closest I’ve found to bridging the high-bandwidth nature of shared space with the perks of remote work.
How do you radiate information in a remote setting?
