This is not a productivity essay. I have read those. They are usually written by people whose calendar is a personality.
I have spent a large part of my career working with people who were not in the same timezone, sometimes not on the same continent, often not awake at the same time I was debugging a queue. A few notes I trust.
Asynchronous is a design constraint
If your process requires four people in a room to make a decision, remote work will make you look disorganised. The work was always that coupled. The office was hiding it.
I try to leave behind:
- the decision
- the alternatives we rejected
- where the logs live
- what “done” means in one sentence
That is not documentation culture. That is courtesy to the person who will read this at 07:00 while I am asleep.
Overlap is a scarce resource
When you have two overlapping hours, they are not for status. They are for the things that do not survive a thread: disagreement, architecture, anything with a diagram.
I used to fill overlap with standups. I was wasting the only time we could actually interrupt each other.
Presence is not the same as progress
It is easy, remotely, to perform being online. Green dots. Quick replies. I have done it. It is a way of being afraid.
The more honest metric, for backend work, is still: did the system get easier to operate, and did anyone else have to guess?
Moving between countries
I will not turn this into a travel blog. I will say this: changing countries does not change how PHP-FPM fails. It does change the shape of your day, the silence you debug in, and how late a “quick question” actually is.
The Mediterranean shows up in the footer of this site because it is true, not because it is branding. Some of this work has been done with a window open. Some of it has been done at 1am because production does not respect latitude.
Still debugging. Still trying to write the note I wish I had found earlier.