data.day
remote-work / culture / async / mental-health

Myth: Remote Means Everyone Must Be Always Online

The green dot on Slack is a lie. It measures anxiety, not productivity. We are dismantling the 'Always-On' culture to build meaningful Async Lanes.

Marta Clarity Marta Clarity

The Green Dot is a Lie

We need to talk about “Response Time.”

Somewhere along the line, we decided that a good remote employee is one who replies instantly. We reward the person who lives in the inbox. We punish the person who closes the tab to actually write the code or design the strategy.

This is a Chaos metric. It measures how anxious you are, not how valuable you are.

The Chaos: The Interrupt-Driven Day

If your team operates on “ASAP,” you have no priorities. If everything is urgent, nothing is urgent.

  • The Ping: “Hey, quick question.”
  • The Reaction: You drop your thought process. You answer.
  • The Cost: It takes 23 minutes to regain focus after an interruption.

If this happens 10 times a day, you are functionally illiterate for 4 hours. You are not working remotely; you are just typing in a chat room.

The System: Designing Async Lanes

To fix this, we must separate Communication from Presence. I use a system of “Lanes” to organize urgency.

Lane 1: The Deep Work Lane (Async Default)

Tool: Project Board (Jira/Asana) or Documents. SLA (Service Level Agreement): 24 Hours. Most work lives here. Comments on tickets. Reviews of docs.

  • Rule: You check this twice a day. Not constantly.
  • Mindset: “I will get to this when I clear my block.”

Lane 2: The Triage Lane (Semi-Sync)

Tool: Slack/Teams Channels (Public). SLA: 4 Hours. This is for coordination. “I pushed the build.” “The client replied.”

  • Rule: Notifications are OFF by default. You check the channel between tasks.
  • Mindset: “I am informative, but I am not waiting.”

Lane 3: The Emergency Lane (Sync)

Tool: Phone Call or PagerDuty. SLA: Immediate. Definition of Emergency: Financial loss, data breach, or site down.

  • Rule: If you use this lane for a non-emergency, you lose the right to use it.
  • Mindset: “The house is burning.”

Implementation: The “Heads Down” Protocol

I coach teams to use a status emoji.

  • 🛑 Red Stop Sign: “I am in Deep Work. I will not reply until 2 PM.”
  • 🟢 Green Circle: “I am doing admin work. Open for chat.”

When I see a Red Stop Sign, I respect it. I do not ping. I do not “just check in.” I write my query in the Async Lane (Lane 1) and I wait.

This is Self-Defense. We automate the boring work, and we defend the deep work. You cannot do deep work if you are terrified of missing a notification.

Turn off the sound. Close the tab. Do the work.

FAQs

What if there is an emergency?

Define emergency. If the server is on fire, call my phone. If you just can't find a file, wait.

My boss expects instant replies.

Then your boss is a micromanager. Send them this article. Or set expectations: 'I am going heads-down for 2 hours'.

Async feels slow.

It feels slow, but it is deep. Constant pinging feels fast, but it is just frantic.