For the past year or so, I’ve been working with Eric Dye on revamping a theme that he’s been selling for sometime. The gist of the theme is content for another post, but one of the things that has been the most important, in my opinion, in our collaboration is making sure that we’re balancing our discussions via text and chat with voice and/or video calls.

This is me “collaborating.”

This is also true for how I balance my time with Envato, and how I balance my time with my team at Pressware. Some of the time, we use tools like Slack to stay in touch, other times we use tools like Google Hangouts or Skype or conference calls via cell phones to have our voice chats.

The point that I’m trying to make is that for as much of a fan as I am of distributed teams, and as much as I believe that they can – and do – work (though I think it requires a certain personality type to make it work successfully), I think it’s important for those who are considering doing any kind of remote work to distinguish when it’s best to chat – which is using text – when it’s best to use voice  which is obviously using the phone or something similar – and when it’s best to use a hybrid such as Hangouts or Skype.

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No one would argue that for those of us who spend the majority of our working day on the Internet that there’s a proverbial firehose of information that we have to keep up with. Some of the things by necessity, some of the things are by desire, but I think that sometimes we convolute the two.

That is to say that sometimes we think we need to keep up with things when in reality we just want to keep up with them. This ends up creating a weird trend where we feel as if we’re missing out on something if we aren’t keeping up with everything.

This makes it tough to stay productive during the work day because we’re not particularly great at multitasking (at least not as good as we’d like to think we are), and our attention is pulled in n-different directions.

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