A must read by the ever inspirational Al Monk. Worth the while of anyone working in a remote team, but even more for studio based teams in the same time zone. TL;DR: Be strict, consistent and communicative.
Having 8-10 hours per day where you think you can work with your colleagues makes you all disorganised and messy. The cognitive load alone of managing a calendar where meetings, chats, 1:1s, work and breaks could, and can occur any time between 9am and 6pm is enormously wasteful. I’m not saying that sharing physical time and space is bad, just that the enforced lessons that have emerged from the working environments like these at Heroku, point out the lazy inefficiencies in studio teams.
It reminds me a little of an idea from when we were lucky enough to have Al at With Associates many moons ago. After producing countless CMSs for clients over the years, we found that almost none were very organised with actually updating their own sites, in comparison to how organised they were when they had a print deadline. Having a CMS with a strict publishing window, one hour or so per week we though, might help prevent procrastination born out of the CMS being accessible 24/7.
I still like the idea, and after missing my daily post yesterday, I reckon it would work for me too. Having to post between 11am and 1pm each day would I bet, force me to post more consistently. A personally enforced version of this illustration from Al:
Documenteering 