I had a chocolate cookie for today’s online Friday fika, ending our third week of remote working.

I’m sort of getting used to it, settling into this new reality, and finding solutions to make it a sustainable way of working. Our team retrospective today was also all about adapting to working 100% remotely and compensating for not being in the same room.

How do you check if your teammate is available for a quick chat, or deep in the middle of a tricky problem and doesn’t want to be disturbed? In the office you say their name, and if they’re busy, they can reply and tell you to go away, without breaking that thread of concentration. Remotely, you ping them on Slack, and then sit and wonder if they didn’t reply because they just forgot to check Slack or because they’re really busy.