My experience working remote for 10 years is the opposite of yours. I found that email is a really great communication tool for work. People tend to talk a lot

My experience working remote for 10 years is the opposite of yours. I found that email is a really great communication tool for work. People tend to talk a lot and unfocused during face to face meeting, but when forced to use email only, they’ll spend more time to write down their thoughts to make sure the other people can understand their points without wasting their time. Email is asynchronous so you don’t need to drag people out of their routine just to discuss stuff that can be done over emails. Meeting is reserved only for absolutely important stuff that can’t be done over email, which is surprisingly rare. Linux kernel development is an example of this, a global collaboration essentially done over emails. We got magnificent tools like git because of the need to streamline this kind of remote works.