This post was originally published on Medium.
I’m writing this sitting on a British Airways flight from Warsaw to London, drinking what’s probably the worst-tasting coffee I’ve ever had. But I don’t mind its dire taste as my mind is swirling with ideas fighting for my attention.
Ink is a distributed company,
one with people working out of the comfort of their homes or one of our offices in half a dozen different cities. We use Folders to stay in touch, GitHub to stay on track and a handful of other tools which make this feat possible in this digital world we live in. Working remotely has never been easier.
And yet, this weekend has reinforced that working remotely is not all it’s cracked up to be. Me and my two co–founders (each living in cities miles apart) locked ourselves in a hotel room for two days and looked into every nook and cranny of our business. We thought, we talked, we laughed. We built and refined our product and hiring roadmaps for 2013. We got shit done. We bonded. None of this would’ve been even remotely (excuse the pun) possible over Skype.
In this connected world, we’re increasingly more disconnected from each other. We work together, but we are alone. As a distributed company, our greatest challenge is aligning ourselves towards common goals. And that’s not something that technology can solve just yet.
Working remotely has never been easier. It’s choosing what to work on that’s hard.