(2026-04-09) Procopio This Is The Hidden Killer Of Remote Work Productivity It Starts With Jira

Joe Procopio: This Is the Hidden Killer Of Remote Work Productivity, It Starts With Jira

Further, I had already started pulling threads on the lack-of-results problems by that point. And I was pretty quick to discover that the problem wasn’t the fact that the employees were working remotely, it was the way they were working. The problem stemmed from an evolution that had taken place well after remote work had become the norm.

See, by this time, early 2023, the pandemic lockdowns had already pushed development collaborative tools — Jira, Confluence, Trello, Miro, and their methodological partners-in-crime Agile and Scrum — into a full-blown platform collaboration party. Zoom and Teams and GSuite and 365 were just itching to fill calendars full of collaborative work-sessions, well-attended status-meetings, team-wide stand-ups, company-wide post-mortems, and individual focus-time blockoffs.

you might not have even noticed, but standard meeting protocol has shifted from a back-and-forth series of attempts to herd cats into the same room to, “Just drop some time on my calendar.” And people did just that.

One of the strategies I use to unblock a blocked company is to talk to people face to face, so I can ask hard questions and get real answers. One of the first roadblocks to employing that strategy is perpetually opening people’s calendars and finding zero time available over the coming two weeks (at least).

The ironic thing is that they’re not “busy.” But they sure look “busy.” It’s right there on their calendars.

I’ll tell you why and how to get out of the doom loop.

As someone who built my own consulting firm and lived off billable hours from myself and others, I’ve gotten really good at keeping and mandating detailed timesheets, even if they’re just for me

That’s one answer right there. You can mandate people keep detailed records of what they do. They’ll hate it, and probably be bad at it. But I bring it up not as a solution, but to color the “why” of the problem.

If we’re not collaborating, interfacing, interacting, or communicating, we have a hard time connecting our own efforts to the greater efforts of the company, let alone the customer. Management (not leadership) has figured this out. The result? OKRs, QBRs, KPIs, metrics, dashboards, groomings, retros, and a slew of other productivity theater garbage that results in checkboxes, clicks, points, scores, ratios, and… meetings.

In other words, if what you did isn’t logged in some Atlassian database, it never happened, and you don’t get credit for your effort. This is what is driving meeting bloat, in fact it’s driving almost all productivity-theater bloat, and nine times out of ten, the tools themselves encourage the behavior. (legibility)

So what’s the fix?

Your entire organization needs to get comfortable with the lack of face time and reduce its dependency on the checking of checklists.

It starts with removing the influence of “project heroes.” These are the people who are constantly “busy,” putting out fires, completing tasks, driving initiatives, conducting meetings, giving presentations. (glue people, etc)

Then you have to constantly underline the critical nature of “time to not think.” And you have to explain it. Here’s how I simplify it.

My method of writing is to write the first draft all at once, then I walk away and come back later, at least a couple hours later, and then I read the draft all the way through before I do anything else with it. What I discover, every single time, is that the draft is a completely different thing than what I thought I wrote, and it’s usually much worse than it was when I walked away, even though nothing had changed.

In a remote environment, you have to commit to focus time and talking-through-it time, and even “not-thinking time.”

Encourage the saying of no (just say no). No to the unnecessary meetings, no to the inclusion of anyone who isn’t hands-on involved, no to the cascading endless public documentation of every muscle twitch. No to the inevitable bloat.

And for you company leaders, your people aren’t going to do this on their own. You have to mandate it, promote it, and most importantly, live it. It starts with half your calendar being open every week and staying that way.

I think a big factor is the lack of coherent business strategy, making it hard to align on

• what's worth doing now/next (Most Important Task)
• what part of that drives the value (incremental/iterative)
  and the lack of a (clear/crisp) Writing culture (Org Writing Practices) makes it easier to hide/ignore that incoherence/incongruence.