We co-founded Fattelo! remotely on 2011 and we keep up to work like this because of living in different cities. We are lucky, we are in a similar time zone so we can avoid the difficulties of a very different time zones.

Since I moved to Berlin I extended this method of work to my italian clients and I learned more about how to manage a “virtual” work relationship especially collaborating with someone who is used to work in your same room.

It’s harder when you start but I think in the future there will be more professionals that will work so. Not every team are ready for that because it involve a strong sense of group and some aspects that if one of them fails, even for one component, the entire projects will be affected. I write down some keywords that can be helpful.

Planning

Planning and organization are the fundamentals of work, in general, because they help you to avoid to wasting your time, but if you are working remotely they are absolutely the most important aspect.

Keep a list of all the tasks and maintain it organized, update it frequently and manage the project splitting it in small tasks. Be sure that all the people involved knows the “to do” list, the deadline and the project progress.

Plan a daily or weekly, meeting for talking about what it was done and what is the next thing to do. It is important have constant meeting, for example with Fattelo! we have a weekly video call since the first day we started to work on it. For 3 years it was on Monday but now we changed to Tuesday and if we miss a week we update each others via mail.

Good and frequent communication

A lack of communication is the main issue of remote working.

Working remotely means that the people can’t feel your mood directly. Everybody known that the work must not affected by your mood, but we are human being and if you have a bad day you have to let the team know. Be more clear as you can, you are a group and you have the same goals.

Trust

Without trusting each others you can quit the project now. You need to trust on your partners, on your clients and in everyone is involved in the project. Trust is the basis of a great partnership.

Willpower and enthusiasm

Sometimes remote working means work from home, and this can be a distractive environment and it can drive to be quite lazy.

The remote work requires the desire to be a group, to achieve a goal, it isn’t for lazy workers, you have to wake up every morning with the right incentives otherwise laziness takes over and it will affect the entire group works.

Personally, I worked for a while from home, but I preferred to move in a coworking space where I found new partners and avoided the solitude that could affect the home workers.

Resources

As curious I try often new program that can fit better with my workflow, this is my personal list of resources that could help you.

Work management

Wunderlist my first to do list app, available in all the platform is useful for quick list.

Todoist a great manager of to do list, it allow a deep stratification of the list, but most of the features require premium membership.

Asana the most complete to do list and project manager that I ever used.

Caato Time Tracker a simple but full of features time tracker.

Communication

Google Hangout I use it every day, with Fattelo! we started with Skype but we switch to Google Hangout soon because of its amazing features.

Facebook I know, it’s a social network, but sometimes a private hidden group can be useful.

Files storage

Dropbox everybody knows this app.

Google Drive the Dropbox competitor, personally I use both.