Most of the advice for working at a remote-first company seems to boil down to: write stuff down, a lot. This is good advice and also terribly frustrating because it doesn’t work for most people without significant behavior and mental shifts.

We need better tools to help us communicate asynchronously in a more fluid way. Creating an internal Wikipedia and have everyone writing all the time works but feels massively inefficient.

Amongst these tools we need are:
- Automated meeting recordings that parse our decisions, deliverables, and timelines
- Bots that work as glue between systems and people, flagging things proactively that you should get involved in or be aware of

And
- better threading and tracking of async comments, decisions, and disagreements
- smarter inboxes to manage alerts in a single place from many tools that also dedupe and don’t overwhelm

When collaborating, we need to be able to replay the progress for others so they can understand not just the destination but the journey. So many times I feel like we rehash the same stuff with time gaps between; we can’t remember that we already discussed and decided against.

Also we need a new class of software assistants to just help us as individuals fight through this mud: aids to deal with the regular onslaught of notifications, new messages, new comments, or conversations and decisions being made in real time.

We need a universal standard for integrating and cross posting information from one tool to another. Like the open graph standard, but for internal tools. It sucks to constantly switch between tools and have 20% of what you need in each tool. It’s a big mental tax.

We need calendars that are fluid and flexible instead of rigid and static. We should be able to block time but have it also move if something more important comes up.

We need to make these tools, systems, and processes more enjoyable to use and more fun to interact with. So many times the tedium of async communication sucks the life out of the message. How do you help people smile when doing async work?