Hey there, If you're looking for an easy way to catch up on new AI features quickly, this is for you. Today at 9am PT, I’m hosting Cooking with AI (Live!) — a walkthrough of four AI recipes I published in May:

✅ Create Your Own Meeting Prep Bot with Zapier agents​
✅ Create Instant SOPs from Meeting Recordings with Gemini Gems​
✅ Receive Landing Page Feedback with Lex​
✅ ​​Discover your Hogwarts House with ChatGPT o3

No jargon. No fluff. Come see how each one works in practice and get ideas for how to fit them into your own workflow.

Anyone can attend live for free, and paid Idea Kitchen subscribers will receive the full recording. Hope to see you there tomorrow! 😊

If you feel like you’re never fully off the clock (even when you technically are), you’re not imagining it. For many remote team leaders and knowledge workers, constant availability has quietly become the norm. The Slack pings. The email nudges. The looming sense that if you’re not instantly responsive, you’re somehow falling behind.

The result is a culture of low-level anxiety, shallow work, and chronic burnout. And it’s costing more than we realize.

TLDR below 👇 | Read this on the web | Subscribe​

Why This Happens in Remote Teams

Without office walls or physical cues, less seasoned remote teams often default to responsiveness as a proxy for productivity. Leaders want reassurance that people are engaged. Teammates want to show they’re pulling their weight. So everyone leans into performative responsiveness - fast replies, constant check-ins, and an always-on presence.

Why does this happen?

• Visibility: In remote environments, presence isn’t obvious. A quick reply becomes proof you’re working.
• Fear: When work is less visible, people worry they’ll seem unproductive or risk losing the privilege of remote work if they don’t respond quickly.
• Leadership modeling: If leaders reply instantly, it sets the expectation (even unintentionally) that others should do the same.
• Tool misuse: Slack and similar tools are great for fast communication, but terrible for focused collaboration. Too often, we use them for everything.

In our efforts to stay connected, we inadvertently create a reactive culture. Messages start to drive the day. Notifications override priorities. And the time needed for the real work quietly disappears.

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What Constant Availability Really Costs

Always-on culture doesn’t just feel stressful. It quietly chips away at our ability to do good work. Here’s what’s really at stake:

Focus Gets Fractured

You can’t get into deep work if you’re checking five tools every 10 minutes. Constant notifications fracture your attention and make it nearly impossible to stay with a complex task long enough to make progress.

Even short interruptions come with a big cost. Research shows it can take more than 20 minutes to refocus after a single distraction. Every Slack ping or email notification resets the clock and stops momentum.

Multiply that by a full day of context switching, and it’s no surprise people end the day mentally drained with little meaningful work done.

Energy Drains

Being always “on call” wears people down. It makes it impossible to relax, even when you’re technically off the clock. Over time, that background stress builds into fatigue. People feel depleted without knowing why.

Creativity Gets Squeezed Out

When your day is run by notifications, there’s no room for curiosity or exploration. People start optimizing for speed, not insight. That mindset might keep things moving, but it slowly flattens the kind of thinking that leads to breakthroughs.

Autonomy Disappears

Remote work promises freedom and flexibility. But when availability becomes the default, that promise fades. Instead of choosing when to work, people organize their day around the fear of missing a message. Eventually, personal autonomy erodes and with it, the ability to design a workday that actually works.

Inequities Deepen

The people who respond the fastest aren’t always the ones doing the most valuable work. Deep thinkers and teammates in different time zones often get left behind in a culture of urgency. Without meaning to, this creates an uneven playing field that punishes exactly the kind of thoughtful, diverse contributions that make a team stronger.

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What to Do Instead

It’s time to reset the defaults. The goal isn’t to make teams unresponsive. It’s to stop rewarding urgency by default and build healthier, async-friendly norms.

1. Set Clear Expectations

Create a responsiveness policy that defines what “responsive” actually means. Replace vague terms like “ASAP” with clear timelines: “within one business day” or “by end of week.” Put these expectations in writing, and repeat them often.

Use shared emoji signals in Slack, like the 👁️ emoji to show you’ve seen a message and are working on it. It’s a small gesture that builds trust by signaling presence without pressure.

Clarity isn’t just about timelines. It’s also about visibility. People often ping each other simply because they don’t know what’s going on. Proactively share regular updates, link to active working docs, and keep project status notes up to date. These small signals prevent unnecessary check-ins and help everyone stay in flow.

When expectations are clear, people stop guessing and start focusing.

2. Embrace the Boxed Sync Approach

Instead of defending deep work time, flip the script: define your sync hours and default the rest of your day to deep work.

For example, block the first and last 30 minutes of your workday to check Slack, Notion, and email. Use that time to reply to anything that takes less than 5 minutes. For longer tasks, flag them and respond during your next deep work block.

Let your team know these are your response windows. This kind of transparency creates a shared rhythm and lowers the pressure to always be “on.”

3. Measure Impact, Not Activity

Stop measuring how often someone checks in. Start measuring what they actually get done.

At the end of each sprint or project milestone, ask team members to share:

• What was the goal?
• What did they complete?
• What was the outcome?
• What would they improve next time?

These recaps help your team reflect, stay aligned, and focus on outcomes that actually matter.

What gets celebrated becomes the culture. If you praise thoughtful contributions and real progress, your team will feel permission to protect their focus.

4. Build Virtual Boundaries

Make sure to use the right tool for the job. Don’t use Slack if you’re expecting thoughtful collaboration. It creates urgency where none is needed. Use slower tools like Notion or Linear for collaborative communication. This helps train your team to match the tool with the task.

Also, remember: your tools weren’t designed to protect your time. They were designed to capture it.

Take back control. Change the settings. Turn off badges. Mute unnecessary channels. Build a system that supports your focus instead of stealing it.

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If You Only Remember One Thing

You don’t have to be constantly available to be a great teammate. In fact, always being “on” might be keeping you from doing your best work.

Your team was hired for their creativity, insight, and ability to solve problems. Not for how fast they can reply to a ping. Protect that.

Use this as your cue to reset the norms. Make it safe to pause before answering. Swap urgency for clarity. Let tools (and AI) handle the noise, so your people can do their best work.

This isn’t about doing less. It’s about making space for what matters most.

In Case You Missed It

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​How a Busy Marketer Uses AI to Work Faster (Without Losing Authenticity)​
In a recent Idea Kitchen recipe, I shared how a busy marketer uses AI. This is the first issue of our new series, AI at Work, showcasing how real people cook up results with AI in their daily work. Check it out and let me know what role you think I should profile next.

​Cooking with AI (Live!)​
Don't forget to join me today for a live demo of the AI recipes I published in May. If you're looking for a way to catch up on new AI features quickly or searching for practical use cases, this is for you. No jargon. No fluff. See you there!

Work Forward Society Want to meet others who do work differently? Join us in making 2025 your year of less meetings and more real work! Join The Work Forward Society →

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What did you think of this issue? What do you hope to see in the next one? Hit reply and let me know. I read every response. I truly appreciate you taking the time to read this. Hope you have a lovely day! Marissa ​Founder, Remote Work Prep​ P.S. Did you enjoy this issue? Share the article with a friend. Struggling with a remote work problem? Book a coaching call. If you liked this, consider supporting this free newsletter by leaving a testimonial. ​

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