We're building Stashpad to help developers stay in flow so they can do their best work and enjoy it.

We're software developers. In 2019, our first idea was to build a better wiki for engineering teams. We talked to hundreds of developers who described their workflows and the challenges they experienced. But we couldn't help but notice that something else was always up on their screen. It was the humble scratchpad - an untitled text file, sticky note, message to self, or similar.

The scratchpad is key to how developers get work done.

It's where we jot things down to process information. It's where we go when we have an idea of how to solve a problem. It's where we go to stash something away to come back to later. It's where we go to start drafting a document or considered reply to a teammate.

The scratchpad is where we go to begin our work.

And yet, for most of us, our scratchpad consists of a jumble of sticky notes, random text files, scraps of paper, and messages to yourself.

The result is that we're constantly operating out of a state of chaos. And we don't have to.

Stashpad is a new scratchpad for developers. It's fast to use and actually stays organized so you can do your best work and enjoy it.

Stashpad has all the features that developers expect of any tool - like code syntax highlighting and markdown support. It's also specifically designed to reduce friction in common workflows - like seamlessly jotting something down on an unrelated topic.

You'll find many little details in Stashpad that are intended to make life as a developer just a little bit better.

Bytebase is now Stashpad. We're in Open Beta!

Today, we're excited to announce our name change from Bytebase to Stashpad. In our new name, we wanted to better communicate what the tool is and what it enables you to do: Stashpad is a new kind of developer scratchpad that makes it easy to stash your thoughts and notes without breaking your flow.

We're also excited to release the Stashpad Desktop app in Open Beta. Any developer can go to stashpad.com and instantly download the Stashpad Desktop app for MacOS, Windows, or Linux.

And we're just getting started. Stay tuned for a Stashpad mobile app, integrations with other key tools in the dev toolset, and full extensibility so you can build exactly what you need to power your workflows.

Introducing Stashpad

Cara Borenstein

Stashpad is a new scratchpad for developers. 

In the office, it’s pretty obvious when your colleague is in 

. You look over and see that she’s deep in some code. She’s in the zone, with her eyes glued to the screen. If your question isn’t urgent, you save it for later. If it’s urgent, you interrupt and get all hands on deck.

When you’re in the office, it’s also obvious when your colleague is on a break. She’ll be away from her desk. If you have a non-urgent question, you save it for later. If it’s urgent, you send a page and go looking.

With Work From Home, you don’t have this same type of visibility. It takes a little more effort to recreate it, but it can be worthwhile and provide benefits beyond teammate visibility.

The last few weeks, we’ve been experimenting with using a set of 4 emojis to denote our current status at work: Deep Work, Deep Break, Out of Office (OOO), In a meeting.

Each of us sets a Slack Status as we transition throughout the day.

1. Select your photo/avatar in the top right to view settings.

2. Click on your Status to start editing.

You can customize them to the statuses that work best for your team. This is what we use at Bytebase:

Our original goal in testing this out was to see if it would make collaboration more seamless. Just like in the office, it’s useful to know if someone is available to jump in and pair or if they’re unavailable. It can be puzzling to ping someone and not get a response for a while. And it’s distracting to receive non-urgent communication when you’re in the middle of something. Knowing what teammates are up to lets you adapt your plan for the day.

With Slack Statuses, we know when a teammate is in Deep Work, on a break, or available to jump in with us. It’s a lightweight way to reduce friction to collaborating.

There are two factors that have resulted in each of us spending more time in Deep Work or in Deep Break/Out of Office:

As a team, we especially value Deep Work and Deep Breaks. Deep Work is when we problem-solve. It’s productive and it’s satisfying. Deep Breaks allow us to recharge and enjoy time outside of work. They’re essential to prevent burnout. Slack Statuses help us hold one another accountable in how we spend our time.

Statuses create a good opportunity for reflection as a team. When a teammate doesn’t have enough uninterrupted Deep Work, we can look into what busy-work or other challenges are getting in the way. When a teammate is in “Deep Work” at ten at night, that can also be worth discussing. Everyone has their own working style but it’s important to have time for full breaks in order to avoid burnout. Ten at night would usually be a break time.

However, we found team accountability isn’t the biggest advantage of using Slack Statuses.

When I set my emoji to be “Deep Work,” it’s in my best interest to not actually be on twitter or reading articles. I’m setting my intention for the next period of time. This reduces the likelihood that I mindlessly go down some rabbit hole that is not actually in line with my priorities for the day.

Likewise, when I’m on a “Deep Break”, I better not be checking Slack or email. My teammates know I’m on a Deep Break and will reach me via page / call if I’m needed.

When I set my emoji to “Home,” this means I’m done for the day. I shouldn’t be coming in at a random time and coding. I’m meant to be relaxing, not doing random scattered work outside of regular hours.

My goal is to maximize Deep Work and Deep Breaks. When I notice I’ve been “working” for a while, I pause and choose either a Deep Work or Deep Break direction instead.

Deep Work is the most satisfying and fulfilling part of the work day. It’s time spent problem-solving and building. It’s fun and it’s fulfilling. It also takes a lot of energy - it’s not possible to spend your whole day in Deep Work every day.

Deep Breaks or time completely off the clock are essential too. They’re a lot harder to protect with WFH because it’s easy to let yourself drift back into work mode. But by setting my intention, I have more full breaks, without guilt or feeling like I need to respond to messages immediately.

After experimenting with Slack Statuses as a tool for remote work, we ran into a few opportunities for improvement.

We’ve run into issues where we start Deep Work and forget to set that as our intention. I.e., something that started as more shallow work becomes Deep Work where I am not available to respond to messages. Likewise, a break where I’m not available to respond can start suddenly when something comes up at home. This lack of visibility can lead to confusion.

When you set ‘Deep Work’ as your focus for one hour, it will clear to a state where no Status is set. Most likely, you’re still in Deep Work but Slack doesn’t re-affirm this. Our workaround is to have the Statuses never clear, but this results in the above problem (forgetting to set the Status).

Insights have to be based on intuition - there’s no tracking linked to Status usage. It would be helpful to see a breakdown of time spent in Deep Work, and Deep Break/Out of Office to see how we can keep improving!

It’s valuable to use Statuses to protect Deep Work and Deep Breaks from interruptions. It’s not healthy for a team to use Statuses to create guilt around how you structure your day. If your coffee break goes long but you’re available to respond in Slack, it’s unnecessary to broadcast that you’re on a “break.” Statuses aren’t for micro-managing, they’re for you. That’s why we’ve chosen our Slack Status suggestions to be Deep Work, Deep Break, and Out of Office. We intentionally do not have one for ‘Working’ because that’s assumed to be the baseline case and is too conducive to micromanagement.

Setting slack status for remote work

Using slack statuses to improve collaboration and work-life balance when working remotely.

The right idea is out there. Sometimes it’s right in front of you. More often it’s not.

 out of the swirl of ideas is hard. Especially if you’re trying to look for solutions with your entire team. So, how do you go from chaos to clarity?

You need a process for brainstorming as a team. A way to encourage idea generation without the constraints of quality filters or hierarchy.

At Bytebase, we use a four piece strategy for group brainstorming that melds individual creativity with the collective experience of our team. Here’s how to dramatically alter the course of a project in 15 minutes with a planned brainstorming session.

1. Build a culture that celebrates idea generation, not the “best idea.”

Find the calm before the brainstorm. Make it clear your team wants ideas. We know that in order to have great ideas, we need to get as many ideas out in the open, as possible.

Brainstorming came into vogue nearly 75 years ago when advertising executive Alex Osborn, 

, suggested “it’s easier to tone down a wild idea than think up a new one.”

The prolific author wrote vividly about encouraging imagination, noting that “creativity is so delicate a flower that praise tends to make it bloom while disencouragement often nips it in the bud.”

To encourage ideas, we (and you) have to separate our egos and identities from our ideas. That’s why we repeatedly stress that comments and feedback are about the content, not the person writing the content. Celebrate the act of coming up with an idea, not just the idea that makes it into the final product spec.

If we are all sharing ideas consistently, it becomes second nature that not every idea is going to be in the final code. It’s a virtuous cycle that builds a culture of idea generation.

The best brainstorming sessions start with the right questions. Otherwise answers are difficult to find. For us, one member of our team prepares a project document to establish the scope for the task at hand. It lets everyone have a clear topic for brainstorming.

Then, the first several minutes of every session are set aside for silent writing. We use 

 for writing and editing shared documents. It’s simple and fast to highlight text and add comments.

Setting aside time for writing is important for three reasons: spontaneity, inclusivity, and fearlessness.

 Designating the beginning of the meeting for comments ensures your team doesn’t have to spend time or effort on preparation. Instead, they can respond in the moment.

 The chance to initially individually question and comment on a document is more inclusive – giving everyone offering feedback an equal platform and opportunity to weigh in – and allows for independent thinking.

 A short window where there’s an expectation that lots of ideas will be offered means there is no fear of bad ideas. Suggestions can flow freely without the worry of judgment.

Refine the ideas that spark conversation. If the entire development team is in agreement about a comment, then it’s added to the product spec without further discussion. But if there are open questions, then we jump into a live (spoken) conversation.

Transitioning to a facilitated discussion allows your team to hone the ideas in front of you. What Osborn didn’t know in 1948 is that 

 it’s more effective to ideate in private before processing those points of inspiration collectively.

“Decades of research have consistently shown that brainstorming groups think of far fewer ideas than the same number of people who work alone and later pool their ideas,” 

 Keith Sawyer, Ph.D., an associate professor of education and psychology at Washington University.

Researchers discovered that people, unencumbered by convention or groupthink, can come up with wildly inventive answers while working alone. Those unexpected answers then kickstart the group discussion because they offer the possibility of more than one starting point. Criticism – unexpectedly – and the accompanying debate in a group setting also helped stimulate additional ideas because each individual considers the ideas of others more fully and re-examines their own hypothesis.

This combination of writing and discussion consistently generates new ideas at Bytebase. We believe using these two different styles of thinking and communication result in different pieces getting caught that one alone won’t capture.

The discussion process will also align your team. You’ll get to experience what it’s like to build something hard together. The world of an engineer can be solitary, at times, but this is an opportunity to do rewarding, creative work as a collective. Embrace that sense of accomplishment. You’ll appreciate the work you’ve put in upfront as you get closer to shipping a product or releasing a new feature.

Now, spin momentum into action. Turn to the project’s owner to translate ideas into concrete action steps.

Once we’re aligned as a team on a potential new direction or questions that need answering, we write up the action items within the meeting and rely on the team member who created the initial spec document to outline any details within those action items that resulted from our brainstorming session. Our engineers have discovered writing these notes not only highlights what matters; but also increases the probability of internalizing what’s important.

As a start-up, it’s important that we extract clear action items from each brainstorm meeting we have. Our takeaways are not always fixes to problems. Sometimes, the takeaway is that there are more unresolved questions that require further brainstorming. But they are always clear action items.

Effective group brainstorming requires being intentional about how you work together.

Build a culture that values ideas. Use writing to generate lots of ideas free of judgment. Center those ideas in the middle of a discussion to refine them. Then, amplify the ideas you like and build concrete action steps.

Maximize creativity with planned group brainstorming sessions

Johnathan Bender

How to generate, define and turn ideas into action

Planned Group Brainstorming

It’s human nature to shy away from the things that we don’t like doing and to avoid the gritty work. That doesn’t change the fact that the work still needs to get done and it needs to get done well.

When you embrace the importance of the small details of your work, then you can give yourself space to execute on those details really well and to connect with the people who are impacted by those details. The result is something sublime because you’re not only seeing the project, you’re seeing the people impacted by the work you produce.

Read on for the 3 steps that will transform your mundane or frustrating tasks into rewarding work that you look forward to doing.

1. Acknowledge and accept that every system will, at times, fail.

What do great User Experience (UX) designers present you with when their apps crash? 

 You present someone with an empathy banana. 

, the chat and text app, has a terrific non-sequitur response when a search comes up empty. Not always, but on rare joyous occasions, the no-results screen shows you a banana image with the words “no results found. Empathy banana is here for you.”

Discord created a light-hearted beat for users to forget their frustration. The banana could be anything (the app will also sometimes reference dropping a magnifying glass when search is down). While the humor is appreciated; this moment matters because it shows a bit of the team’s personality and lets users feel seen.

Instead of a simple error message, Discord has taken the time to acknowledge frustration. It’s an important spark of connection that occurred because the team acknowledged and accepted that not every search query will result in success. It was what they did with that knowledge that made all the difference.

You may not be involved in UX design of crash screens, but you can bring the same mindset to the work that you do. What are the “crash states” that your colleagues run into and how can you make those crash states a little better?

Brand strategist Renny Gleeson, the chief strategy officer for SciFutures, talked about the opportunity provided by moments of frustration in 

. Renny highlights how moments that are otherwise frustrating can be used to create connection instead.

“Little things done right actually matter,” said Gleeson. “Well-designed moments can build brands.”

2. Take ownership of the mundane to make other people’s lives better.

As an engineer, you love building things. But the reality is that there’s a lot of daily maintenance that needs to happen in order to support what your team is building. It’s bugs and QA and co-ordinating complex projects and deploys.

Don’t shy away from the tasks you don’t like doing. Instead, pause and spend time to think about those routine tasks from a new perspective. This is an opportunity to not only make something delightful for your users and co-workers but to make their lives better.

Take ownership of tasks and you’ll discover two new feelings: a sense of connection with your team and a deeper satisfaction when you complete the routine parts of your job.

The service component of what you’re doing is important. When you’re thinking about the other people who come after you, it no longer feels like you have to do this chore alone. Instead, you’re part of something bigger. Aiding your team is fulfilling, a chance to foster collaboration even if you’re working asynchronously.

If you’re no longer rushing to complete something, you’re more engaged and may be surprised by what you learn. For us, we’ve seen how thoughtful ownership can pay 

. It’s taken a task that can feel dreadful and transformed it into a part of our DNA.

We now know documentation is a way for team members to provide an internal roadmap for each other, as well as demonstrate why particular code choices were made. This has helped us when onboarding new team members and provided a solid foundation of collaboration by slowly improving our documentation habits over time.

3. Turn difficult moments into something awesome.

Once you own your process and embrace that there will be bumps along the way, you can flip the narrative. It’s not a case of why your search didn’t find anything, it’s a chance to be delighted by an empathy banana (and yes, it is delightful).

Our intentional approach to documentation strengthened the connections on our team and it made us wonder how else could we apply this mindset of turning problems into opportunities. That was right around the time that we began working on our data handling policy.

We’ve been working for months to make sure our approach to data analytics is clear, transparent and easy to understand. We’ve done that to build trust with our users and to reinforce the idea that we are consistently leaning into the human side of our work.

We believe that analytics, like documentation, is a chance for us to look at what is necessary and place it front and center. We’re shining a light on the gritty work. The rote work. The work that doesn’t often get discussed.

And we’re hoping it sparks something in you. Every day you take on tasks that are not glamorous. The gritty might make up the bulk of your projects.

Bring that into the light. Revel in the details. So, you can find more of yourself in the moments of connection with your team and users.

Find Meaning In The Gritty Work

Change your mindset for daily tasks to yield big results

Nobody sets out to have an entire day of meetings.

But then your team doubles. Half your engineers are working remotely. And you wake up to discover your calendar is completely blocked off before you’ve even sat down at your keyboard.

When it comes to productivity, it often feels like you’re presented with a no-win situation. We can get on the same page through meetings and other communication 

 we can do our work. But what if you could better balance both?

Your calendar is likely a source of tension because interruptions destroy a developer’s workflow. A 

study from the University of California Irvine

 showed that workers needed an average of 25 minutes to get back on track after an interruption.

Yet, the needs of your organization don’t have to be in conflict with the needs of your team. You can encourage communication without intruding on a developer’s 

. At Stashpad, we’ve built a schedule designed to foster collaboration without sacrificing the space required for individual focus.

Here are our 4 strategies for minimizing interruptions to deep work.

As a manager, you can give your developers the schedule you wished you had when you were a developer. But building that schedule isn’t always easy because you need time to get aligned on priorities, and it’s easy to forget the 

“As a leader, you’re no longer expected to write the most code, solve the hardest technical problems, or fix the trickiest bugs. Instead, you’re responsible for ensuring that your team can do these things,”

Karl Hughes, a software engineer and the founder of

, a content marketing firm that works with start-ups.

“It’s hard for great engineers to move into management because they like being deeply focused on challenging technical problems, not hopping in and out of a dozen meetings every day.”

It may take time; but you have to switch your mindset to facilitate the deep work of others. Creating a calendar with distinct blocks of time devoted to particular types of work enables incremental change in your habits and the overall work culture you’re trying to build. Here, you might want to take a look at the 

, wherein your daily schedule is broken down into digestible 30-minute chunks known as a “pomodoro.”

At Stashpad, we have a daily stand-up meeting for 10 to 15 minutes. That’s our opportunity to check in and ensure we’re all on the same page. If we need to have a project meeting, we put it immediately after standup so that we don’t create more context-switching.

We do this for two critical reasons. It stops our team from having to switch contexts and it enables us to keep our deep work time free of interruptions. Time blocking helps cut down on the mental fatigue from switching gears so we can channel our energy into problem solving.

Our work is interconnected; but the challenge is that team members always have different priorities. Waiting on responses or being stuck in a liminal state is an easy way to build resentment and frustration.

How do we make sure we’re giving specific, actionable requests? All of our projects begin with a spec with high level needs outlined by the project lead and presented at the start of a meeting.

We then sit silently for 15 minutes with people offering notes in the comments

. This is a key stage of our feedback process because writing can be more inclusive – whether someone on your team is an introvert or likes to process ideas internally before offering suggestions – and offers a quick reference for the project lead on how to tweak a given spec.

Those 15 minutes are incredibly valuable to our team. That writing time gives everyone a chance to voice their feedback and express their ideas. And we often discover issues that need to be addressed, which hadn’t been identified and could have been major headaches if they popped up further along in the process.

The written notes form the basis for a brief conversation out loud, where the project lead asks for clarification or uses a written note as a jumping off point for a quick brainstorming session. At the end of the session, the project lead then has a blueprint for how to update their spec with the benefit of the rest of the team’s experience and ideas.

, you can streamline your communication to reports and gain back time. Give a clear description of each project task. Make specific, singular requests and offer actionable advice when presented with problems by team members.

3. Create transparency around availability.

A developer-friendly schedule doesn’t only account for meetings, it also creates opportunities for sustained periods of focus. ‘No Meeting Wednesdays’ sound great until someone sees that open block of time and knows that everyone always has a few minutes in the middle of the week.

Instead, let your team know that you value communication about availability. Encourage developers to block out their calendar with focus blocks. Tell your team to 

 to reflect what they’re currently doing. For us, this is a great shorthand to quickly see if someone is in a flow state so that we don’t interrupt a productive stretch.

This is also where you need to pause before you reach out to a member of your team. As Gergely Orosz 

, “you have to think twice before broadcasting information.”

Go ahead and draft a message because the act of writing might reveal something new to you. Then, build in a moment of pause to consider what happens when you fire off that message.

If there’s too many requests on Slack and people feel pressure to respond promptly, then the cost of context switching outweighs the value of answering a question. On the other hand, if you’re completely stuck – see our handy 30 Minute Rule below – you need to be able to reach out.

Before you hit send, think about the importance of the message. 

Is it worth asking someone to context switch?

 If you’re stuck and your team values velocity, then it’s worth it.

Building a resilient committed team requires trust. You have to trust that your team members will be able to solve problems. And you have to trust that they’ll be open to acknowledging when they need help. But how do you build the right amount of runway?

. If you haven’t made progress on a project for 30 minutes, then you simply post in a Slack channel what you’re doing and the specific challenge you’re trying to address.

This ensures that nobody feels isolated or like they have to tackle a problem alone. It can often help a junior developer or someone working on a project with an expanded scope get unstuck.

It also has the added benefit of strengthening connections among developers. Our team often gains unexpected insights and finds joy in helping colleagues. This is how you leverage the experience of senior developers without sacrificing the autonomy of junior developers.

This simple rule reinforces the feedback process we’ve built as part of our product development cycle. It also ensures that a particularly frustrating bug doesn’t derail an entire block of deep work time.

When you create systems that encourage independence while also making space for collaboration, your team will excel. That success will then naturally strengthen and reinforce a schedule which allows two seemingly conflicting responsibilities – regular meetings and deep work – to co-exist.

How we minimize deep work interruptions at Stashpad

Developer-centric schedules and feedback culture.

 is a productivity technique where you chunk your time into 30 minutes blocks and allocate 25 minutes for focused time and 5 minutes for break. Each 30-minute block is called a “Pomodoro.”

The technique was created by Francesco Cirillo while he was at college in the late 1980’s. Cirillo found that viewing your time through the lens of Pomodoro “alleviates anxiety and in doing so leads to enhanced personal effectiveness.” In short: it’s a way to get things done.

It’s worth noting that — according to Cirillo — a ’true’ Pomodoro doesn’t allow for interruptions. With each Pomodoro, you exclusively dedicate your attention to the task at hand for 25 minutes. Nothing else. It’s important to try and create an uninterrupted stretch of time. Maybe 

 to let folks know you’re locking in. Or block off time in your calendar manually or with a tool like 

But — in describing a ’true’ Pomodoro — Cirillo is describing an ideal. Someone learning how to work at home over the course of the pandemic might not have had the luxury of only being able to focus on completing a single, specific task over the course of twenty-five minutes. Reddit users have spoken about 

 to get ‘stuck into’ work, but one consistent comment is that even using part of the Pomodoro technique is an effective way to improve productivity.

 — has worked remotely for a little over 4 years. Each working week, he estimates how many pomodoros each task will take, and then tracks his work in a spreadsheet.

“At the end of a Pomodoro,” he said, “I doc in Stashpad how it went and usually what to do next. I do 25/5 pomodoros because … life. I used to do 50/10 but my time is so much more fragmented in the past year. I only do pomodoros when I have at least a 90 minute block of focus time and I only use it for sprint work.”

“I don’t do POMs for anything other than coding right now,” he continued. “Most everything else I can walk away from, or do little tiny bits of work without an interruption penalty. Coding is definitely different. What I’ve found is that [Pomodoros] actually slow me down but having some documentation for each one has been golden for tracking how a sprint went. The little bit of time I spend capturing things in Stashpad pays dividends later.”

Medlin isn’t the only one who has found modifying Pomodoros to be helpful. One Reddit user who suffered from depression and migraines found that a ‘

’ helped them get work done. Another user found that only allowing for 25 minutes of work 

. Changing the 25 minute marker of the ‘Pomodoro’ into something else allowed them to study more efficiently.

Besides developers and students, the Pomodoro Technique is useful for artists as well. In the clip above, taken from the Netflix show 

, we see what happens when an illustrator shows up to work again and again. Artists don’t just rely on inspiration or planning — they show up to work and focus on working. This leads to results. Paul McCartney showed up to work, and — through dedication and focus — pulled the song ‘Get Back’ out of the air. The writer Richard Mirabella worked on his novel while holding down a full time job, tackling his novel thirty minutes at a time, 

, during a period of time still so marked by the pandemic? As Derek Thompson pointed out in 

, the boundaries between work and non-work have grown ’leaky’: we drift onto the web at work. Our phones are always with us. We work on an excel sheet while sitting on the couch at home. Our focus is continually being challenged again and again. (

 focused on the impact of Covid in the Netherlands posits that “when work-life boundaries are blurred, people are less happy.”)

The Pomodoro technique gives you a structure to better manage the blurring between work and life. It’s effective, easy to use, and something you can try today.

Go ahead. Get started. We’ll set the timer.

Why the pomodoro method is more useful than you might think

Evan Fleischer

The pomodoro method uses scheduled breaks to maximize your time in deep work.

Do you sigh when your email dings with another meeting request? You’re not alone.

A recent Pew Research study showed that 40 percent of people feel 

 from video conferencing. Even Zoom’s CEO Eric Yuan 

 with meetings. In Yuan’s defense, it took 19 meetings in a single day to break him. Your breaking point likely arrived a lot sooner.

“Zoom fatigue is real,” says Liyani Rodriguez, co-founder and CEO of 

. “But this is less about the house we meet in and more about how we show up for meetings. We have to start thinking about how we show up in a virtual world because this is here to stay.”

Video meetings aren’t disappearing. But Zoom chats can be productive with the right boundaries in place. So, how do you navigate meetings as a participant or presenter in the world of remote work?

We spoke with three experts – who are committed to improving the meetings we take every day – to understand how you can acknowledge the messy reality of Zoom and still build real connections.

Time spent together is the most scarce resource. If we’re blocking off that time, we’re taking away flexibility and the 

. We have to make meetings more intentional.

Many of us spent the early part of the pandemic attempting to keep hard lines between work and home. Cameras were off. Backgrounds hid those boxes in the corner. But constantly trying to present a perfect version of yourself without a cat walking in front of your screen is exhausting.

“I had to become more open with bringing all of me to work,” says Kendra Dixon, the operations director for 

. “With remote work that’s important because there’s a fluidity to work and life. You have to be honest about what you need in order to get ready to show up. That means being a little more vulnerable and showing more of who you are because the little things won’t come through on Zoom.”

You need to take stock of where you are each day and honor what you discover.

 While that might mean rescheduling a meeting (or pushing it back five minutes), it ensures that you’ll be ready to participate when the meeting starts. When you stop trying to hide who you are or where you are in a given moment, you’re building the foundation for meaningful collaboration.

The office is by definition a place where you go to work. Your brain isn’t set up yet to expect the same thing when you sit down at a coffee shop or your dining room table. And part of helping your brain be present is defining the space where you choose to work.

Rodriguez makes it a point to pare away distractions in her physical space. She recommends stripping away clutter. Clear sticky notes from your monitor or papers on your desk that might steal your focus. Do the same with your digital real estate. Turn off notifications. Close browser tabs. Mute everything that’s not essential. The closer you get to singular focus, the quicker you can signal your brain that it’s time to work.

Give your team time to sit with what’s coming. Pieper sends shared documents or videos a day or two before a meeting, so team members can comment and engage with ideas when it works for their schedule.

“This is about using technology to make meetings more efficient,” says Pieper.

Use that initial feedback to shape the meeting agenda. Cover only what’s unclear or topics that benefit from face-to-face discussion in real time. Fight to give people back their day, so your team knows that if you’re meeting, there’s a clear reason.

Why You Should Get Out Of Your Chair In Between Meetings



It’s easy to forget that you walked to meetings in person: a few minutes in the hallway to gather your thoughts before sinking into a conference room chair. Rodriguez suggests you bring back those brief moments of being active, especially with a full day of video chats ahead of you. Don’t just click on the next meeting. Schedule short breaks to move your body. Before and in between meetings, take time to walk, do jumping jacks, or meditate. Move physically to allow yourself to reset mentally.

None of us signed up to be reality stars. And that’s what it can feel like when you’re on camera all the time. Maintaining eye contact with a colleague while staring at yourself 

 over the course of the day. So, how do you recharge? You talk about what it means to be the star of your own screen and consider the potential impact on every member of your team.

If you’re in a position to set the culture of your company, build a culture of inclusivity by holding audio-only meetings. This shows your team – and you should say this out loud – that you don’t need to see them to know that they’re engaged.

Blog | From the Stashpad team and community

Introducing Stashpad

Setting slack status for remote work

Maximize creativity with planned group brainstorming sessions

Find Meaning In The Gritty Work

How we minimize deep work interruptions at Stashpad

Why the pomodoro method is more useful than you might think

Embrace the reality of zoom meetings and make them work for you

You probably don't need a knowledge garden

5 strategies for self-care when working from home

How to maximize deep work when working remotely

Status dumps for software engineers

Start stashing today