Writing as a remote worker

[00:00:00] You are listening to the Daily Five, an experimental podcast by Aurooba, where I talk about something for five minutes. So let's get to it, shall we?

[00:00:18] Have you ever thought about what makes a remote worker a good remote worker? I don't spend a lot of time thinking about it, but I probably spend a lot of time trying to be a good one. Mostly because I think, you know, the better I am as a remote worker, the more time I get back for myself in the rest of my life.

[00:00:45] And I've been thinking a lot about the times when I have been a good remote worker and the times when I have, and it always comes down to communication, but more so [00:01:00] written communication. I think that if you are a remote worker in any capacity, that's a software dev or project manager, anyone, how well you write, how empathetically you write makes a really big difference to.

[00:01:23] not only your success probably, but also how you are perceived and how well things go in an environment where you're not the only person who is responsible or has to like do stuff, we are all inevitably part of some kind of team or having to deal with someone else who is not us. Whether that is a client, a team member, or you know, a person that is [00:02:00] your direct report in some way and

[00:02:07] I've noticed that a lot of people do what I call, or what I have heard being called low res writing versus high res writing, which I think is like a fantastic term, although I don't know where I heard it. And the example I would give here is think about like a project where you are a software dev and there is maybe.

[00:02:36] the project manager on the team and another software dev, and you've identified a bug or some, the client has come with an issue and now you have to look at it and you identify that there is a bug. A quick slack message might be 'there is a bug, I'm working on it', and a better slack [00:03:00] message might be:

[00:03:01] there's a bug. I think it's in here and I think that it probably is related to this, but I'm gonna check on that and I'll get back to you. And when you do that, you have not only been a more effective communicator, you have made the project manager's job a little easier because now the PM has a little bit more information and can think about how they want to communicate this to the client.

[00:03:33] You have provided detail, which the other software dev on the team might have some ideas about and can maybe offer up suggestions for, making your job a little easier and if they know that you have somewhere that you're looking, like you're diagnosing and you've been clear about it, you're probably gonna get less antsy requests for updates from the rest of your team [00:04:00] because they're not feeling left outta the loop, right?

[00:04:04] So it saves you time because you spent maybe an extra couple minutes crafting a better message in the first place, and it saves frustration for everyone. And leaves people feeling better with their experience of interacting with you. And writing is the primary form of communication as a remote worker.

[00:04:27] So I mean, context matters, but whenever you can lean towards high res writing rather than low risk writing, be empathetic. Think about how the reader will feel, you know? Thanks for listening. Talk to you tomorrow.