Time and time difference: two factors that can make a big impact on a remote work setting.

You and your team live apart from each other. You work independently. A team member may work on his tasks by himself in the little corner of his house, in the park, in a coffee shop, or wherever it is that he feels like working that day.

Then again, each member of your team has the luxury to sign on for work. You may not keep the same working hours. Or even if you do, or you should, the team member can just send you a message—through email or text message—that he has no Internet connection and would be logging in as soon as he finds a connection somewhere, or till the power gets back, etc. The reasons for these could be plenty.

And you in your office cubicle, working away the hours, hoping that you’d get help from your teammate soon.

There are times, however, that you start working and think that your teammates have done the same. When the time comes that you need them, you click on your YM and scroll up or down for him, only to find out that he’s invisible, or he’s not there at all!

What do you do? You end up doing their task for them.

You may ask, why not email them and let them do it?

Because some tasks are urgent, and thus cannot be postponed for another second.

Now, we have come up with a monitoring device—a software that a team member has to sign on once he starts working—to check on each teammate’s progress and performance.

But this thing works only when you are in the same timeframe. What if the team member is on a night shift, and you are on day shift? You want to talk/chat with them, but that would mean you have to log in at nighttime.

Would you? I do so, sometimes, especially when the task is urgent.

Therefore, I say that in a remote-working environment, I feel like I’m living in a time warp.