Remote work requires communicating more, but less frequently

> Remote work requires communicating more, less frequently, because asynchronous communication involves less frequent, but richer communication, meaning there is less time talking about the work and more time doing it, allowing the system to optimize for throughput and flow.

This whole thing seems to be what people struggle with about remote work. Communication is way, way more important, and being an effective communicator doubly so. There's nobody's desk to go stop by, so noting things down and making sure we understand each-other is vital to accomplishing anything.

This sounds great for experienced engineers, but in my experience junior workers often require bite-sized guidance in order to avoid going down rabbit holes. A 10 second conversation could easily save hours of head-banging-into-wall type work for a junior SWE (not even exaggerating).

Accordingly, during the pandemic I think it was mostly the less experienced engineers suffering from low productivity and lack of confidence (which feed into each other).

Currently in crisis because I simply can't handle communication in remote work. For something I do for the majority of my working day, I feel devoid of human interaction to such an extent that it's massively affecting my mental health.

I regularly find myself clock-watching until the next time I can talk to someone because everyone is always busy - there are no water coolers or coffee breaks to stitch in between.

Even if you create the virtual coffee break and have a chat with people, often we're pushed to abandon it - presumably because it's flipped from an opportunistic (oh, we're all of the phone, let's go grab a coffee) to a scheduled event which a) gets dropped and b) doesn't naturally recur.

There's a bit of a challenge today with chat, though. I work 4 timezones away from most of my team and we all prefer to swap e-mails, but chat seems to have stripped away some folks' ability to methodically go through topics, explain options and summarise next steps, leading to the usual "let's set up a call [to actually discuss everything in the e-mail thread]".

Reading through old mailing-lists (and even older e-mails from the same company, but from seven years ago) shows a markedly different communication style - you could pretty much take the last two e-mails in a thread and paste them into a memo that would neatly encompass all of the scope.

Not so today--there's a constant chattering of people who just can't prioritise or discuss more than a couple of topics in tow.

Do more 1:1s. You'll have to chase some things piecemeal across two to three people, but you'll soon figure out who actually owns a topic and be able to have more in-depth conversations.