The Real Future of Remote Work is Asynchronous

I’ve been working remotely for over a decade – well before the days of tools like Slack or Zoom. In some ways, it was easier back then: you worked from wherever you were and had the space to manage your workload however you wanted. If you desired to go hardcore creative mode at night, sleep in, then leisurely read fiction over brunch, you could.

Now, in the age of the “green dot” or “presence prison,” as Jason Fried calls it, working remotely can be more suffocating than in-person work. The freedom that we worked hard to create — escaping the 9-to-5 — has now turned into constant monitoring, with the expectation that we are on, accessible, productive, and communicative 24/7.

I see this in job positions for remote roles. Companies frequently champion remote, proudly advertising their flexible cultures to only then list that candidates must be based within 60 minutes of Pacific Time Zone, that the hours are set, and standup is at 8:30am daily. One of the benefits of remote work is that it brings the world closer together and creates a level-playing field for the world’s best talent. Whether you were in Bengaluru or Berlin, you could still work with a VC-backed, cash-rich startup in San Francisco earning a solid hourly rate. If remote slowly turns into a way of working in real-time with frequent face-time, we will see less of this.

And let’s not forget trust: the crux of remote culture. Companies create tools that automatically record your screen at intervals to show management or clients you’re delivering. I founded a freelance marketplace called CloudPeeps and not recording your screen, as Upwork does, is one way we attract a different caliber of indie professional.

You can have more freedom in an office. From my beige cubicle at one of my first roles, I witnessed a colleague plan a wedding over the course of many months, including numerous calls to vendors and 20 tabs open for research. Most of the team was none the wiser – this wouldn’t be the case with remote today.

At the heart of this friction is the demand for real-time, synchronous communication. If we champion asynchronous as the heart of remote, what does the future of remote look like?

The post The Real Future of Remote Work is Asynchronous appeared first on SitePoint.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Visual Studio Code: A Power User’s Guide

Image
In this guide, you’ll learn how to take advantage of Visual Studio Code to supercharge your development workflow. This article is written for beginners who may be using Visual Studio Code for the first time. VS Code, as it’s commonly known, is considered a "lightweight" code editor. In comparison with full integrated development environment (IDE) editors which occupy gigabytes of disk space, VS Code only uses less than 200MB when installed. Despite the "lightweight" term, VS Code offers a massive number of features which keep increasing and improving with every new update. For this guide, we'll cover the most popularly used features. Every programmer has their own tool set which they keep updating whenever new workflows are discovered. If you want to learn every tool and feature VS Code has to offer, check out their official documentation . In addition, you may want to keep track of updates for new and improved features. Prerequisites In order to follow alo
Read more

6+ Best Websites for Free Fonts in 2020

Image
I firmly believe that, in order to strike the optimal balance between minimalism and visual appeal, a user interface should display no more than what’s absolutely necessary while making those necessary elements look visually appealing. Keep it simple, but make the simple look amazing. But, what does simple look like exactly? Well, strip away all of the over-the-top marketing gimmicks, redundant features, and cluttering visuals, and most of what’s left is the UI copy and text content. As boring as this sounds, let’s be honest: this is the most important aspect of any app or website. Information and the ability to navigate it is the entire reason users are using our app or website. So with the right typeface coupled with the right font styles (see “ Font vs typeface: the ultimate guide ”), we can create designs that are quite simple and yet visually appealing at the same time. This emphasizes the most important aspects of the design while usin
Read more

How to Contribute to Open Source TypeScript Projects

Image
If you think of the ideas of open source applied to information in an encyclopedia, you get to Wikipedia – lots and lots of small contributions that bubble up to something that’s meaningful. – Matt Mullenweg One of my favorite aspects of open source is the fact that anyone can contribute! It’s like “productive volunteering” (if you’ll humor me). It’s a fantastic way to build something bigger than you, give back to the community, and level up your skills. In this article, we’re going to talk about practical ways for you to get involved in open source TypeScript projects. We’ll first cover assessing your level then jump into how you can find opportunities. Assessing Your Level Before you get started contributing to open source, you want to find your comfort level. Where are you at skill-wise? What level of complexity are you wanting to solve? How much time do you want to spend? These are important questions to consider before diving in. This
Read more