It’s easy to believe that just because people look close to each other on a Powerpoint slide, they’re setup to collaborate with each other. Real life is more complex than slideware.

If a new hire can join your team and start contributing asynchronously in a short time, it shows that you’re running a tight ship. This article, a repost from reworked.co, shares three patterns for effective onboarding to distributed teams.

A meeting-centric way of working on distributed teams can undermine deep work and flow, inclusion, flexible work and in the long run knowledge sharing. It also doesn’t lend itself to scale. Choosing asynchronous ways to collaborate can be an effective alternative to this meeting-centric approach. This is a repost of my article on InfoQ.

Our time is a zero-sum game. We don’t want shallow work commitments to steal our deep work time. Shallow work is unavoidable, but we can control it. In this article I explain four ways to do so.

For remote workers the boundaries between work and life can often feel blurred. In this article I discuss seven strategies to achieve work life balance.

Audio and video can add a new dimension to asynchronous communication. In this article I explain how we can be effective at communicating with audio and video.

Want to be a better async worker? Check out this guide on how to read effectively and provide feedback. It's shorter than the writing guide, but just as helpful!

If writing is the number one remote working superpower, then we must all get better at it. Here’s how to level up your writing game.

When you’re in a remote setup, think of your retro not as a meeting, but as a process. That process has two parts - asynchronous and synchronous. How much you do asynchronously is totally up to you and how adept you feel with working this way. This post will tell you how to run effective retros distributed team, with a solid sprinkling of asynchronous methods.

In today’s post, we’ll dive into the agile sprint - a time-box of approximately two weeks, when development teams work on a set of user stories they’ve prioritised to deliver. We’ll examine two synchronous collaboration practices - story kick-offs and dev-box tests or desk checks and how we can adapt them to a remote-native; async-first way of working.

Distributed standups are painful, period. With modern tools there are better ways of getting the value you’d expect from such a meeting. As an individual, you’ll get back a few minutes of your life every day. The bigger benefit? You can share updates continuously, and at your own pace. From a team perspective, you’ll be able to create an audit trail of communication and, of course, plough back the time savings into deep work.