[foxbarrington]

Remote work and async comms means that latency tends to be high. Latency issues can be overcome by not stopping to wait at each decision point.

For example, low latency this is ok: “do you want to go to dinner or a movie?” Movie. ”Do you want to see Barbie or Oppenheimer?” Oppenheimer. “Do you want to go at 6:00, 7:00, or 8:00?” 8:00.

Instead for high latency, this will cut down on a lot of dead time in back and forth: “Do you want to dinner or see a movie? If you want dinner do you prefer to go to Il Capricio (Italian) or Sushi Go 55? I can make reservations at 6, 6:30, or 7. If you’d rather see a movie, do you want to see Barbie or Oppenheimer? Barbie is at 6:15, 7:20, and 8:15. Oppenheimer is at 6:00, 7:00, and 8:00.” Let’s do Oppenheimer at 8

It’s more work up front and any unchosen paths are “wasted effort”, but for work there’s usually value in fully exploring the alternate paths anyway.

[bee_rider]

I feel socially uncomfortable asking a bunch of questions which have lots of dependencies, somehow it feels presumptuous and overwhelming. I’m not saying it actually is presumptuous, there’s every possibility that there’s a defect in my social skills.

Somehow I’ve become more comfortable just proposing a complete plan, but also explicitly calling out the fact that it is actually totally up for discussion. So instead I’ll say something like:

Want to see Oppenheimer at 5:30 on Sunday (n.b. I pulled that time completely out of my ass just to get the ball rolling, any time this weekend is fine on my end, and Barbie also looks good).

Somehow it just feels more natural to me, I don’t know why. I like that it presents the person with a default-path, but also leaves everything up for discussion if necessary.