Written communication is remote work super power

I have a day where everyone else in on flex (basically their day off every two weeks).

I have already cleared two large tickets because I can address the comments they left when I am done another task (because they wrote out their entire thought instead of waiting for a conversation).

I would bet I am 2-3x as productive as I now have hours of uninterrupted time.

Yep, this article rings true on a number of levels, particularly regarding asynchronous work and lack of interrupts.

Anecdotally, I'm working on a software project at the moment with a small team of volunteers.

To explain some context: I'm the sole developer currently, and I'm treating communications to the team as high-value for us, now and in future - the same way that I'd like to think that I treat the code (I write this with the awareness I've recently cut some corners; but cleanup is on the cards).

One observation is that I'm really enjoying only using email for that communication.

Sometimes I code for a couple of days before checking or answering emails, simply based on what feels most productive or compelling at the time.

As a result I never get distracted by pings while working, and feel much more comfortable taking time while writing messages and replies, generally allowing me to be a bit more thoughtful.

And there's only one communication platform. My attention's not split between instant messages, emails, and other organizational tools.

This situation's probably an edge case based on the small team size and my personal preferences, but it's been an interesting experience.

I don't know how well this approach would scale* -- and an open question based on my experience and also raised by the article is: how and where do you organize that content so that it can be discovered by newcomers to the team?

*Example: crisis moments, such as technical outages, would be tricky to manage for a multi-person operations team

Not everyone finds written comms as easy as everyone else.

absolutely +1 to keeping records, but as a form of communication it's not terribly equal.

I like flow as much as anyone but find the thought of working multiple days without speaking to my team to be crazy, I'd feel like none of us would be able to move as fast alone as we do together, and half the time would end up following rabbitholes, or spending too much time on the wrong things because we'd never check in for an opinion. The only way I'd see a full or more days of work without communicating working well is if we'd work on larger amounts of releasable code at once, but then there's more chances of conflicts, reviews get longer and harder to do and there's more risk releasing.

I think having a team with 1 rotating person responsible to handle all external requests per week, and everyone else being focused on their work but still being able to pair when needed, ask questions provide guidance, etc to be really cool. All of this remote, of course.

Thanks, yep, those are all legitimate concerns about whether this would scale.

It's occurred to me that Stripe's email transparency[1] could help (although they discovered limitations with that approach too, and have been good about publishing those).

We're lucky (in some ways) not to have a large inbound feedback load, which is surely also a factor. Thanks for the external-request rotation suggestion; that's a good idea to provide a refresher from focus work when the burden starts to affect the team.

Honestly though, I have to re-state that it's been so refreshing and enabling to work this way that I wonder whether there'd be ways to scale up and solve the consensus, conflict and opinion problems you mention.

Despite that, I'd add another problem to the pile: not everyone is going to be able to contribute at equal pace at all times (for various completely valid reasons) in a large enough team - and there needs to be genuine cultural understanding and acceptance of that which I believe is frequently absent from high-intensity startup environments.

[1] - https://stripe.com/blog/email-transparency