I worked in the London office from 2013 to 2018, then moved to Brazil and kept the same job with the same team. Not a new role, not a new company — the same work, relocated. That turned out to be a useful experiment, because everything that changed was attributable to distance alone.

The things I expected to be hard were fine. Meetings worked. Tools worked. Time zones were an inconvenience, not an obstacle.

What broke was context, not communication

In an office you absorb an enormous amount without anyone deciding to tell you. A conversation two desks away tells you a project changed direction. Somebody's face in a meeting tells you a decision is not as settled as the notes suggest. None of that survives the move, and none of it is in any document, because nobody ever thought of it as information.

The symptom is subtle: you are not excluded from decisions, you simply arrive at them slightly late and slightly under-informed, and you cannot point at what you missed.

What fixed it

Writing by default, including the things that felt too small to write. Status before it is asked for. Handovers with the reasoning included, not just the outcome — the next person does not need to know only what was decided, they need to know what was nearly decided instead.

And asking directly for the thing an office gives you for free: what changed this week that I would have overheard?

The uncomfortable truth about remote work

It rewards people who write clearly and it punishes people who do not, regardless of how good they are at the job itself. That is not fair, and it is not going to change. Someone whose value shows up in the room loses part of it at a distance unless they learn to put it in writing — which is a learnable skill, and one worth naming out loud to a team rather than letting people discover it by underperforming.

Eight years on, I would not go back. But I would tell anyone making the move that the first six months are not about discipline or tooling. They are about rebuilding, deliberately, all the information that used to arrive by accident.