[LeifCarrotson]

> We even promote email as one of the best ways to communicate because it's less disruptive and let's people stay focused until they're ready to come up for air and respond.

Those are some of the advantages of email. It also has virtues of being searchable, transactional, naturally organizeable, recorded, and shared.

But how do you respond to the issues of its much higher latency and lower bandwidth? A 5-minute in-person conversation can communicate a whole lot more than 5 minutes writing an email. And while documentation and detail are great, a long, thorough, technical email can cost a lot of money. How do you control for these problems?

Does the loss from writing long emails offset the loss of productivity from disruptive and focus-breaking in-person communication?

[ianleeclark]

Not OP, but the first 3 months of my current job were remote. It was mostly on our backend and frontend teams to realize that meaning/nuance might be lost in an email or slack message and to hop over on google hangouts (what we personally used, but replace that with phone, skype, &c.). Maybe if there's immaculate documentation and tests, then fully asynchronous communications can be achieved, but, from my experience, there's hiccups where synchronous communications need to be taken to overcome something that's blocking.

[garrettdimon]

We don't hesitate to use chat or video if it makes sense. In fact, we use it frequently. We all trust each other to think about what medium makes sense for a given discussion. That way, people don't just reach for what's in front of them. It makes everything much more deliberate, and it helps reduce interruptions.