I've been working remotely from about 90mi outside of Austin (for folks in Austin, doing front-end work on top of PHP). By being generally fast with email and

I've been working remotely from about 90mi outside of Austin (for folks in Austin, doing front-end work on top of PHP). By being generally fast with email and generally quick/responsive I've gotten a lot of freelance work, so maybe it's just a general skills issue; it's not easy communicating certain things in email/phone/text/message and developing that as a skill takes a lot of work... it's totally subjective, but it feels that it's taken as much effort to learn when to reply to an email and when to sit on it for a half hour as it took when I first learned how to use jQuery. IMO, this skill is made tougher to practice when the people I deal with are not also skilled at communicating; there is a lot of communication that I get remotely that takes a bit more decoding because whoever wrote it doesn't put a lot of thought into the communication. I dunno what the good answer is; just saying "hire more experienced remote workers" sounds like a dumb answer...