- AllThingsRemote
- Posts
- the hidden productivity tax your team is paying
the hidden productivity tax your team is paying
3 simple changes that'll reclaim 10+ hours per week (per person).
In partnership with
👋 Welcome back to All Things Remote: your weekly shortcut to building lean, efficient remote teams without the chaos.
Most remote teams aren't struggling because they're working too little.
They're struggling because they're working on too many things at once.
Context switching is the silent productivity killer, and in remote teams it's worse because the switching happens invisibly across Slack threads, email chains, Zoom calls, and project management tools.
In today’s send:
✅ Why your teams productive capacity is reducing
✅ The 3 types of context switching that drain you
✅ A simple framework to protect deep work
But first, a quick question:
What's stealing your team's focus most? |
And whilst we are on the topic of tools + focus…
Global HR shouldn't require five tools per country
Your company going global shouldn’t mean endless headaches. Deel’s free guide shows you how to unify payroll, onboarding, and compliance across every country you operate in. No more juggling separate systems for the US, Europe, and APAC. No more Slack messages filling gaps. Just one consolidated approach that scales.
Top finds this week
Hiring? 3 trends set to define the year ahead
Covering major labour reforms, pay transparency requirements, and AI regulation across Europe, APAC, and beyond.How fragmented work is quietly killing productivity
A breakdown of context switching and constant interruptions.Remote acquires Atlas to simplify how global teams spend & scale
This is a big signal as to where global hiring is heading next.
Your team isn't distracted. They're fragmented.
Here's what actually happens in most remote teams:
Your developer starts working on a feature at 9am.
At 9:17am, a Slack message pops up.
They respond quickly (just being helpful).
They try to get back into code… but now they've lost the thread.
By 10:30am they've switched contexts 8 times.
Not because they're unfocused.
Because your systems require constant context switching.
The problem isn't willpower. The problem is that your team's default operating system treats every input as equally urgent.
And in remote work, where there's no physical buffer between "someone walking by your desk" and "a Slack notification interrupting deep work," this gets exponentially worse.
Let me show you where this is costing you…