Dealing with the other party's poor communication and sometimes lack of engagement has been the most challenging thing for me over the course of say ten plus ye

Dealing with the other party's poor communication and sometimes lack of engagement has been the most challenging thing for me over the course of say ten plus years of remote work, mostly for individuals. The secret really is choosing good clients and having good project management. But even if it's a good client, sometimes people are just busy. The ideal thing is that you have a group of normal people who can log in and respond in a chat room or GitHub issues once or twice a day or so. Sometimes it makes more sense to just do a phone call or voice meeting. For many people, especially non-technical that is just much easier, and you may get more out of it. But I have found that some people just are not good at communicating over email, or in a chat room, etc. They can't really focus properly without being in a meeting. Again, non-developers (usually). You might consider just dropping those clients. But for me, I like to try to give each project I start a good chance of success, at least from a technical perspective. So sometimes that means the only working channel is a phone call and I get it once a week. Sometimes that's enough. If its other programmers then you would need to fire them probably.