The only major difference between work now and work 15 years ago is there's more remote work, and nobody has been taught how to work remote. There are multiple

The only major difference between work now and work 15 years ago is there's more remote work, and nobody has been taught how to work remote. There are multiple books, blogs and guides on it, but nobody reads anything anymore, so here's the tl;dr: - Schedule all your work. Schedule when you'll check e-mails, slack, teams. Schedule when you'll have office hours. Schedule when you'll do research. Schedule when you'll pair with someone. Schedule lunch. Your calendar should be booked pretty much every hour of the day, except for meeting day, when you keep a 3-hour window open for meetings. - Silence all notifications except meeting reminders. Provide an escalation path for use in emergencies. Make e-mail rules, slack rules, etc that will bypass a snoozed notification and go right to you. Put your phone number in your Slack, Teams, Outlook, etc profile. - When you do have meetings, be strategic. Schedule meetings only when you have already done the work to prepare for them, have an agenda, have done research, and need consensus or troubleshooting. Choose shorter meeting windows, like 15 minutes, 25 minutes, 45 minutes. Have someone keep a timer to remind people before the meeting comes to a close and end it on time. Don't schedule a meeting to find out if you need a meeting. Don't end the meeting without action items and meeting notes. Don't schedule a meeting when an e-mail back-and-forth will do. - Prioritize working asynchronously. Push back on meetings and calls, and instead ask for details in e-mail, Slack, Jira, Confluence, GitHub Issues/PRs, etc. - Actually learn how to use your ticketing and wiki system. Don't make it someone else's job to organize your own work. Use the systems to make your work more efficient. Put notes in as you do work, and direct people to go look for your current progress there rather than bug you. Be habitual about keeping status, progress, etc consistently up-to-date. If someone asks for status, point them at a URL to your status updates. If this seems arduous, there are almost always existing tools designed to make it easier. - Document and publicize your workflow. What your schedule is, how you organize it, how to contact you and under what circumstances. Make sure anyone in your company can find out whether they need to contact you and when and how. - Try hard not to multitask. If you aren't getting several tickets done per week, your work hasn't been broken up sufficiently, or you're jumping around too much. - Keep track of your time and work so that you can account for it. Measure toil vs feature work. If the toil goes over 50%, tell your boss, and keep a record of it. After a month of that you should be able to estimate your lost time, extrapolate it out to a year, and show them how much time/money they're losing. If your boss doesn't care, have a skip-level. If you think any of that is crazy, just remember some of us have been doing Open Source development for 20+ years without meetings. If IRC, pull requests, and mailing lists are good enough to create the foundations of most of the world's software, it's probably good enough for your job.