Remote Control: Self-Awareness, Time Management, and Nurturing Virtual Relationships, with Pilar Orti

You're listening to the Remote Work Europe podcast, the show formerly branded as the Future is freelance. The name has changed, but our values have not. We're still the podcast for solopreneurs, digital nomads and slowmads, consultants, remote workers, e-residents and everyone living a life without traditional boundaries. We're here for people who defy categorization, those who make a living and a life their own way. We're here for people who live in the open, beyond. Fortnightly on Fridays, we're serving up expert tips, inspired insights and stories from the frontiers of freelancing and the remote work revolution To help you achieve success with your borderless business and liberated lifestyle, whatever success means to you, as you live life on your own terms. Hello listeners, I am really excited about today's episode and talking to today's guest, because the fact that you're listening to this podcast at all is essentially Pilar Ortiz Fultz, because by welcoming me as a co-host on her own long established show, the 21st century work life, she not only gave me the bug, but she taught me everything I know. So Pilar and I have been collaborating for many years. In fact, she was my very first client when I started freelancing full time back in 2017. That also makes her my longest standing client, because we're still working together. She's a Madrileño living in London. I'm a Brit living in Spain. We both share a passion for remote work and what supports choices of where and how we live our lives, so it's high time we did this recording actually.

Welcome, pilar, thank you very much Maya and hello listeners. I am also really looking forward to this.

Yes, this would be fun and it's long overdue. So before we talk about your new book, which is finally give us an excuse to book this course, I want to hear about the book and the training courses for remote workers. So beforehand, could you tell listeners a little bit about your story, your remote work journey and a bit about virtual, not distant, yes.

So I'm as you've said. I am based in London and I've been here since 1990. So remote, how do I? I've been a freelancer, a freelancer all my life, so I suppose I've always had a little bit of the remote person in me, as in I don't think I've ever had a job where I was in the same place every day with the same people. So it's involved all kinds of things and took out a very long story short after doing. Actually actually maybe I'm wrong because my first job was in theater, my first career, which was a very co-located and there actually, funnily enough, what I was really pushing for was to have a space and a time that we could all be together. As I moved away from that, then I came more into the knowledge work kind. Then that has all been freelancing. So I've done all kinds of freelance work. I still work as a voiceover, where actually I go into studios. I don't do that from home, so that's not remote. But I worked as a production assistant, as a part timer. I used to be a part-time teacher, a drummer and acting. I then started to do corporate training and then I started to work online moderating a forum for an accredited management and leadership course, and then from that I started to look at remote work, mainly leading remote teams. I started blogging under the name Virtual Not Distant. I saw the blog posts were gaining more traction than the normal leadership posts, and so at some point I founded the company Virtual Not Distant, which for some years and for most of those with you helping, I was delivering training to managers of remote teams and also online collaboration sessions. And so until last year, when I decided I didn't want to do any more training or client work and now I am writing and podcasting.

Fantastic. So just another typical well-trodden path into remote work as a life strategy.

Yes, it was all planned.

Absolutely. I love unpacking all of this, but while I'm sure the clients miss you doing your direct training and facilitation work, their losses are gained as readers of your books and the content you create. You've got a new book out at the moment, which is about let me get the title right the Remote Worker's Guide to Time Management. Now, I've been really looking forward to this, because I'm a complete productivity book geek and I was excited about this one. But I wanted to ask you and I know the answer having read the book why you felt that remote workers out there in particular needed their own guide to getting time management right.

I think there's lots of different challenges, that I mean a lot of challenges are the same, but a lot of the challenges are different, and I think the main one is that usually, as a remote worker, you rely a lot on your own discipline to get things done and time management, of course, and productivity is about getting the right things done and I think that, as remote workers, we almost need more structure, but we need a lot of our own structure, especially in those jobs where there's a lot of flexibility and we need to have a lot of awareness of how we work best, of what are the things we should be doing, what are the things we could be doing, what are the things we like doing and in that way then structure our days. I think there's also that thing of balancing collaboration activities, which can be asynchronous, communication or meetings with the solo activities, and most knowledge work at the moment, and especially remote work, has both of those, and I think that, as a remote worker, you also have to be even more conscious and deliberate about when you do each. So those are some of the things.

Yeah, no, it's really interesting because I think for a lot of people who say, oh, I wouldn't like remote working, or I could never work remotely, or who said that before 2020 anyway, what they meant was they couldn't work without that structure being imposed for them. If we do certain things at certain times and we do this activity on tuesday, or you know, these are very short deadlines imposed by somebody else, and it seems to me that for entrepreneurs or anybody without a direct line manager and that kind of supervisory relationship, that time management's really a question of self management, then, and just managing your whole life, your work, and how that fits into that. It's. It's quite a big subject really it is, and I have to.

Well, I'm going to let you into a secret although of course, then it's not a secret and you know it already is that I actually co wrote this book with chat gpt mainly, and the reason for that was that it's not my Subject of expertise at all. I haven't really thought a lot about time management or actually maybe, like you, even read probably as many books productivity, although I did co host a show with a psychologist and this is mainly what he talked about. But one of the things that I realized as I was working with with the boat was and I'm one of my reflections was that the tends to be very, some very prescriptive or restrictive advice out there of what, like your day should look like as a remote work, is how you should dress when you're, if you're working for a home from.

Talking about that.

I thought I'd really like to present a book which is very varied and probably 40% of the book will not be relevant to a lot of people, but it won't be the same 40% but I wanted to present something that was very broad, to recognize that the way in which you have, in the way in which you look at your time and your work and your life and everything together and your collaborations are very different. And going back to why remote workers, I still think that we need an increased level of self awareness of who we are and how we work best and hopefully this helps. I mean, yeah, I could go on, but anyway, no, it's.

It's really interesting, actually, because you said that you didn't feel it would be relevant to everybody. And yet so many productivity books are very system based and they're very I mean, they can't make you do their thing but quite dictatorial in the sense of you should time block or you should use pomodoro's, or you know you should, and not all of those things work for every person. And as remote workers, the best thing we can do is learn how we work best and how to use our own natural, our own natural concentration and flow and work with our moods and temperaments and so on, and I really liked that. I'm. Maybe it's because you've been doing so much work with workplace psychologist that your your book came out very almost philosophical and really making people think About things that they maybe wouldn't just by buying a time management book to really think about why they procrastinate, where distractions come from, especially if you're, if you're an entrepreneur and you're doing what that you supposedly love, why do we still not get things done?

yeah, that is. That is one of the things I discovered writing the book and and there's a whole chapter around procrastination and, very surprisingly, the bot did prompt about and the need to understand the reasons and what I found I found myself asking exactly what the kind of question you're saying, which is why I love writing. Why does it take me so long to sit down and write when I love it, when I want to do it? What is it about the things I really want to do that I cannot get down to doing, whereas actually there's other things which I don't mind doing, all that I don't feel are as important and they're easy to do, and I realized, like, how sometimes the procrastination tactics we have are hidden, as in, for example, I'm really great at coming up with new projects when I'm struggling with something and again, I think that when we're working away from from others and we've got more time, even or more space for our brains to go somewhere else, that that is also something that we need to be to be looking out for. I'm really pleased with what you said. Yes, I did want that. I did want that throughout the book, to encourage people to think about whether bits were relevant to them and thinking about not tactics against procrastination, but actually why am I procrastinating? When am I procrastinating? Those questions are more important.

Well, it's easy if you go through a book of short term tactics or techniques for time management and yeah, if I can just do this at the same time as that or something or get a better app, then that will solve my problems. It's very easy to read a book like that and feel, even if you take a few really good tips from it, you feel you've significantly improved your process and you're going to be more productive. But actually a book that makes you think about how how you approach work and how you structure your whole mindset about your life and your work together, I think it have far more lasting value, and I actually I mentioned multitasking there and that was one of the things you identified as part of procrastination. I'd love to unpack that a bit more, because I multitasked probably more than I should.

I'll admit it. And when you say you multitask, what does that look like it?

means I often, for example, if I'm trying to learn something, I'll find the perfect video course, but then I'll put it on and I won't look at it, I'll look at my phone or something like that. Or I'll find that, yeah, I want to be doing something with my hands whilst I'm supposed to be paying attention to something, or I'll just get bored writing something and immediately have to switch. And I have one client I'm actually time tracking for now, which I haven't done for a long time and I really want to try and be fair to them. But I've often found that my productivity in terms of actually creating work for them, I can zone out a great deal and just realize that I haven't been actively doing anything else, but I've been thinking and I haven't been doing the thing, and you know I'm multitasking because that that focus isn't there to be 100% on task and I don't know whether that, if there's any way to prevent that, or whether it might be helpful to the creative process in some way.

Yeah, I think that noticing it is the first thing. And again, it could be that it helps you. It could be that it's disturbing you, we never know, because sometimes so when I multitask, maybe I task switch very quickly and what I realized was that it was a way of not getting deep into something or allowing myself to be distracted, not by pings and things like that. I'm very good managing external distractions, but it's all the internal. Oh, I'm really and this is probably what's going on subconsciously, it's really struggling with this. Oh, it wouldn't be great to hear from someone on LinkedIn. Oh, let me go and check LinkedIn.

I just see if anybody's left me an urgent, urgent LinkedIn comment.

Yes, or email. What does email? You know, all my notifications for email are always turned off, but it's high that goes into them. I go in and look for them. Yes, exactly, and I realize I don't do any like other procrastination things, like I always think I'm very diligent and do my work, but actually I've realized through writing this that no, there are things that I'm doing, and what I'm really doing it's not that I am able to do lots of things, is that actually I'm stopping myself from working more deeply. But you know, so that was interesting.

Yeah, it's one of those paradoxes of remote working that when we have that complete control over our time, we don't always use it. Yes as well as we could, and sometimes we need an external deadline of somebody else cracking the whip or turning us when to work.

Yeah, the other thing I mean you were saying earlier about the flexibility as well, I think in something I've realized is, if you can learn to, I'm going to say, manage your time, but use your time as best as possible when you're on your own somewhere, then you can transfer that to when you're working in the home. Another thing that I've noticed is that a lot of the advice about remote work is working from home, but we also have cafes and we have co-working spaces and other spaces, and if you can raise yourself awareness as to how those spaces affect your work and how you work, and then if you are also going into the office at some point, because you're a hybrid worker or because you're a freelancer that sometimes goes into people's offices, you're really aware of what it is that distracts you, what helps you, what kind of activities you do better on your own, which kind of activities you do better with our people around you, in a structured environment with colleagues with people, but not colleagues and this sense of awareness means that you can then you're really location agnostic.

Yes, and if you start to truly I mean it's a very high level of self-awareness then about what each location brings to you in terms of a mood and a level of productivity. And I think we've talked about this on the 21st century work life that some of us we see ourselves as very remote and work from anywhere, but actually we do certain kinds of work best in a certain time and place, and I've got great admiration for the true digital nomad who can get any kind of work done anywhere on one 11 inch screen and they could be in a new city or somewhere really noisy and distracting, they could be at an airport or traveling, and they still managed to get their head down and focus on really deep, productive work, whereas I tend to save quite superficial things to do for travel day. I know I might have some time at the airport, but I'm not trying to write anything, just wouldn't happen.

So it's really a very high level of self-awareness and personal management I think that we have as remote workers, or I'd like to think that the other thing that I think is different to how we think about our time and how we manage it when we're working away from others, if we are working in teams, is that something I realized as I was working with the chat bot was that those we often talk about setting boundaries and this is not just this is most knowledge workers and lots of workers where we want to set boundaries around when we are available, where we respond to communication, and that's why lots of teams have team agreements when they decide we'll message you know we have these many hours or days of response time, whatever. And it's the fact that, because we are usually away from our team members, the bonds and the relationships have to be very, very strong so that then we can set some personal boundaries and we can negotiate those personal boundaries. And that is something that I think we're still. I mean, we know that when we're away from each other, we have to be more intentional about developing those relationships, but I think it goes down to even if we want to enjoy working away from others, controlling our time a bit more, we need to have very good relationships so we can be able to negotiate.

I thought it was really interesting that you had such an in-depth section on relationships actually in a book about remote working, because we often think of that as a very self directed process and that it's very much up to us to create our boundaries and decide how we're going to do things, and actually that doesn't acknowledge the totality of the work itself, which almost always takes place in association with other people somehow, whether they're clients or customers or associates or other people on the bus or whatever they are. So you talked about how relationships can actually must buy you time or build you time or at least increase your flexibility in your time. So can you explain? Because I want everybody to go and read your book anyway, we can use that section a bit, because for me that was quite enlightening.

Yeah, well, I think it's really about people understanding. Ok, so let me go back One of the many, I think, pre-pandemic. Many years ago there was a study done, I think. The Harvard Business Review published something like how much, how stressful and how much time was being spent on collaboration activities, by which mainly they meant meetings, but collaboration, and one of the issues with collaboration or working with other people is that sometimes we need people when they're not available and other people need us when we don't really want to be available, and a lot of the stress when we're working remotely comes from not having that flexibility, because what's flexible for me might be annoying to you, because I want to be doing this, but you want to be doing this with me. And so if we want, for example, to say, tomorrow morning I'm not going to take any calls, or tomorrow morning I'm just going to be offline because I need to work, the closer we are to the people we're working with, the closer we are to the people who we communicate this to, the better, because then people know that it's just going to be better for everyone. But it's very difficult to do this if we're not constantly building these relationships, and in the online world. We have to be deliberate. So if I haven't really reached out to anyone to see how they are for three or four weeks or something like that, if I haven't offered to give them some offered help, if I haven't even told my teammates what I'm up to at work, if I haven't made a deliberate attempt to keep those relationships warm, when I then come and say, you know what, can you just leave me alone for a day, it might sound strange because the bonds have been lost. I think if you're in office you can see a lot more and you have those interactions. So it's this realization that in order for us to work like that, and also let me just go further, even to the point where, if we think of some people who work really well in the morning and some people who work really well at night, or people who don't mind mixing their work and personal life together, versus people who really are very strict about the separation, again, sometimes, if we don't know each other that well, we might not understand, for example, someone being so rigid and saying no, after five o'clock, I'm not replying to you, even if it's five-thirty, you have to wait until the next day and if you're like, well, I reply anytime because I don't care, I don't mind, I love my work, blah, and the other person actually thinks very differently, but there's never been either not necessarily an explicit conversation. But we don't know enough about each other to understand that. Then all these conversations, these things become more difficult.

So I think that's where we know till there's a clash of these cultures. I know you wrote about the integrator, separator spectrum, and it's such an interesting one, because I think it's definitely one of those where you don't necessarily realize other people aren't like you. Yeah, the way that you blend work and life, or not, if such is your style.

And you were talking earlier about doing work we love, and also, if we look at freelancing or part-time or entrepreneur work I remember I used to work with when I was running a theater company many years ago. I used to work with a girl who well, my co-leader of the thing. She worked in a shop Monday to Friday it's nine to five and during that time I was able to run the company, and so a lot of the time we had to do things over the weekend and I really, really hated it when she called me in the evenings because the evening was time where, precisely because I loved what I was doing, I had to switch off. Same with the weekends. Or I once worked with a friend of mine who had a proper job, a nine to five job, and again we had to work on this creation outside of office hours, and once he called me at 10 o'clock at night and for me it was horrible.

Yes, even though you're really integrated when you're on task and when you're in work mode.

Yeah, and again, even that and this, especially if we've been working with people for a while but we were working with them in the office and now either we've gone remote or the whole team's gone remote or something's changed. And these things they need to be at least mentioned, because it could be a big change and suddenly we don't understand how what's changed.

Yes, because it was never a thing when we were in the office, right, we just came and did our work together there and then went home. We didn't call each other at 10 o'clock. We never knew how somebody would feel about that or the work bleeding out across that relationship. There's an example I wrote about in the Finding your Edge book. I used to manage a colleague who was very much a separator in that respect and we worked extremely well together, except that we had this completely different approach to how and where, the boundaries of where we got things done. And I remember calling her once. She was getting her home office redesigned and I knew this was the day her new desk was being delivered. So I called to see if it had arrived yet and I was excited for her because she decorated and everything and she sounded a little bit strange. So I said oh, did you know? Did you take your phone down to the kitchen table? She said no, I'm sitting on the floor because her old desk had been collected for scrap but a new one hadn't arrived yet and that was the room that she did her work in and there was no way she was letting that go into her kitchen or the room or anywhere else. So she spent hours of that working day she didn't want to take leave, sitting on the floor doing her work, with no desk, and that was for her. That was a really important boundary and I was really concerned, you know, are you not? What about your back? And it's not really uncomfortable and difficult enough to rather be here. This is my office and it's coming together and by the end of the day I'll have a desk to put my laptop on, and in the meantime I'm sitting on the floor. So I think that was the first time I became aware of just how different our work styles work, as I would prefer to go to a cafe with my laptop and let somebody else deal with the furniture coming in and out, and you know, I just don't want anything to do with all that side of the practicalities of it, whereas for her it was more important to stay in the office and that was where work lived. So that was quite an interesting one for me, and it really goes back to everything you were saying about building that relationship capital, paying into that account on a regular basis until one day you're going to need to make a withdrawal maybe. Well, I suppose, speaking of relationships, I'd like to learn a little bit more about your co-author. Can you tell us a bit more about Sam and how the two of you worked together? What was your process like?

Yes, so the book. In the end I decided to co-author it with Sam Byte. I have to say that at the beginning I was completely under the pen name of Sam Byte and I had disappeared from it as Pilar Ortiz because I thought most of the text has been written by chat GPT and so that was it. It was the pen name of me working with chat GPT was Sam Byte, but then I realized that actually there is a lot of me in it.

I thought it read like a lot like you. No disrespect to Sam, but yeah.

Well, that's really interesting because today I was preparing a short. I'm going to share my process with some people. So I was looking back at things and I looked at, for example, a couple of paragraphs that the chat GPT came up with at the beginning of the process, and then I saw how they ended up in the book and they were very different. Just going back to the beginning, for listeners, I created this book by prompting chat GPT from, in fact, I knew I wanted to write a short book about something. This is something I've been wanting to do for a very long while and I have been playing with chat GPT in various contexts for over a year now and I asked it okay, what are the best you know? How do you write 20,000 word book, for example, what are some of the characteristics of it? Okay, and it told me. And then I asked okay, and what are some interesting topics around it? And eventually I think it came up with a list that said remote work and then time management. And I thought, oh, okay, maybe time management, because I know enough to know when it's spouting nonsense or what's the advice I want to put out there, but not enough that I want to write that book.

It extended your range really into something adjacent.

Definitely. Yeah, there was a couple of things, and I think this is something that I think is very important when we're using technology is that we know why we're using it, and then that helps us to use it in a way that works. So I knew it was a topic I know enough. I also knew that I don't know how to write how-to books, which is probably what is read more broadly, and I wanted to write a short book, and it wasn't that short, and so I thought this is going to be the best way for me to do that. Let's try. And then I asked it for them to see what kind of things it would come up with and see whether we're going to go anywhere with this. I asked it for a table of contents. It gave me something that I thought was very interesting, and then I just went chapter by chapter and said, ok, do this chapter, give me three bullets. Ok, start first bullet. Right, I don't know. 200 words, 300 words. And then from that OK, that sounds interesting, tell me more about that. Now, that thing you talk there, talk about it. Also, what happens if you're working from a cafe? Ok, blah, blah, blah, blah. And so I went on like this until we changed some chapters along the way, and then I started editing and the edit was in fact, for this. It probably should be written by chat GPT, edited by Pilar Ortiz, because I was developmental editor, as in. I went through, I looked at the whole thing. I influenced the content, what was in it, what wasn't the tone Again, the kind of book it was. Then I did some copy editing. Always the first line of every chapter was terrible.

And I've got a standing thing in my chat GPT instructions never to start a paragraph within.

Yes. In the world of remote work, in the realm of inclusion In. Yeah, oh dear. Does it listen to you? Because I said I asked it never to use the words delver and crucial and it's still used.

Yeah, I've got a whole list of it and sometimes it does, and then you tell it off and you say that's in your custom instructions. Don't start, don't use delver, unlock or yeah, all these other words Elevate, elevate, yes, so that's how I see it.

So yeah, it's a lot of fun.

Yes, it sounds like a great process. So, just to be clear, you basically got the whole text out kind of chunk by chunk before you started editing. Yes, right, so it must have felt almost like editing something that you hadn't written yourself or that you hadn't kind of been involved with step by step, so you were able to bring that freshness to it Exactly, as well as taking out all the dels and crucibles and masteries.

Exactly, and you know, and you know what happened is that? So that's great, because it's so much easier to edit someone else's writing than your own. It's like when, I mean, we both read a lot. I'm reading all day, I just love reading, so I know what good writing looks like. I just can't do it myself immediately and it's difficult to tweak your own writing, so I was coming back to the page. You could edit that. What did happen was that as I went along, I would add like a couple of sentences here and there because there was something missing or there, and those were the sentences when I came back to them that really stood out and that sometimes I just had to say to Chargibiti right, can you just rewrite this, because writing was not sitting well on top of it.

It's got to be consistent in the style, well, hasn't it? Yeah, and I was. You and Sam are different. Yes, yeah, and I was just saying it. Sam, are you relating it?

used to be Maggie. Ok, I think Sam maybe came later. I used to call it Maggie and I call it Chatty. I don't know, because some bite is not Chargibiti. Some bite is the combination of the right way, I and myself. You know, in my head it needs to make sense.

Yeah, no, that does make sense. So it's very much so. Sam's a sort of composite entity of you and Maggie or Chatty the other is Maggie, here with us on the bar.

The other thing that I saw that I did was I took some of the paragraphs that it had written and then I threw it back at him. At him I don't know why I say him at it, and said you can you rewrite this in a more active voice, for example, where you said this? You would say this, and actually I think maybe I can't to be honest, I can't remember, but I think it probably did a lot of its own editing at some point as well, but that was leaning to the passive a lot, doesn't it. Yes, and sometimes it's, it's, I don't, I don't know. Maybe I should have given it the instruction. So you know how, like how, two books are very much about you, you, you, it's, it's talking to you, the reader, whereas this is a bit more removed from it. So there was a lot of things where they probably say something like remote workers should do this and this. You want the book to say you want to do this and this. So there was a lot of that. There was a lot of bringing taking the general that Cha-Chia-GPT was giving me and say no, speak to the reader directly and yeah, yes, I suppose it doesn't know.

It's not a remote worker, it's not a reader. Yeah, it doesn't, yeah. So again, you just have to kind of coach it and tweak it and it sounds like you. It was a really interesting process. I think you should write a book, just pillar, about how to write a book with generative AI.

Yes, yes, no, I will, because I'm just waiting, because I want to write another book, which is the remote workers guide to connection, which will have a lot more of me, which is basically an expansion of everything we've just been talking about building those relationships, so I'm breaking down my process so that I can replicate it, because this was one of the ideas and I was listening to your the first episode of this season of remote work Europe and you were talking about how, how we're looking at different ways of earning income as well, and one of the things that I want to do, having stopped doing client work, is I want to write more books, but I am not a fast writer and I'm also not someone well, I would have to see now after this exercise but I'm someone who likes writing things that are very personal to me and that is difficult to find readership for. That I found. Whereas if I can tap into more of the how to market, then I think I can write more books, and the more books you have, the more potential that is, that your books sell.

Yeah, and I think there's something about what people want to pay for as well, and it's that kind of educational transformation. What you did is interesting and you know we love to read your stories but people are more likely to want to pay for something that they can implement, they can use and and put to work and make do something different in their own lives. So I think you're definitely onto something there.

Well, it's allowing me to go into an area of writing that I can't do on my own but where there might be some income and working in this way and again. And so I'm trying to dissect, and once I've done the other book on connection, then I'll probably write the book on how you write these books, because then I'll understand. Yes, you have to process that. But, very interestingly as well. I think that when we I think a lot of people who are stepping away from traditional employment are also very curious and a lot of them are also very tech curious, and there's, there's the danger, like half of me says, oh, maybe I can just ask chat GPT to write the book on writing the book, because it's going to have. It's got all our conversations I've done all the book is in one chat in chat GPT. So I've been referred back and the memory is about to come up so we'll be able to to remember a lot more of what you've done in there. And the temptation is to say write me the book on on this process. But hang on, that's probably something that I should do myself, one for brainpower and also then because it might be more interesting. So I think also there's the balance of when do we use the tools and when actually?

How far do we abstract away from the human? Yes, all together. And also because next time is it just going to write whatever book it wants. You don't have to be involved. That's one thing.

That is one thing, but the other thing is that we continue to learn through our work, especially those of us who are lucky enough to enjoy it, and we've got to really understand the parts of our work that help us to be better at our work, that actually, if we let them go, it's not going to affect us as much, or happiness as much. So we don't want to forget how to write. No, no, because I like it. I mean, if I didn't like to write, then who cares? But I want to know how to write. I want to be a better writer, and if I'm all the time outsourcing that to the machine, you know, if I'm all the time paying a ghost writer just more or less one Then I don't learn how to write.

This is true, it's true, we'd lose our expertise and then we won't have anything to bring to people who need what we have in terms of our learning and the ways we can help them, because actually they could just get that themselves straight from chat GPT. So, you know, it's it's you, pilar. People need to hear from your expertise. And that brings me. We've we've, actually we've quite a long time talking about the book, which has been brilliant, but I didn't want to let you go without talking to you about a synchronous work course, which has nothing to do with chat GPT, because I know it's not written, it's audio. So tell us a little bit about that as well.

It wants to be a book, but not yet. But it's an audio first course and this came. This idea of being audio first came once I podcasting. I'm a voiceover artist, I love audio, but also I think there's especially maybe not as much now, but there was a time when people were really really adverse to doing anything that involved looking at a screen. So Simon Wilson and I created a course for remote managers sorry, managers of remote teams who wanted to have more asynchronous communication in their mix, so who wanted their team to adopt more asynchronous communication, and we decided to do an audio first, which means the lessons, and it's very like. It's nothing innovative as a course. It really is an old fashioned audio. It's basically like I don't know. I remember my mother used to teach English to people in Spain and she had these tapes I don't know if they were from the BBC and you put them in this lesson one furniture. So it's very old fashioned the way in which we've delivered it, but it's it. Basically it's designed so that you can listen to it while you're maybe walking or when you're doing the chores, and then you can come back to the written version or you can then listen again to the last bit, which has the reflective questions. So I really want to be wanting to do something like that for a while and it sounded like asynchronous communication was a good, especially for it is for managers, but there's a lot there that's quite general as well.

Well, it sounds perfect for that subject and that audience, that you can engage with it when it's right for you and if it's going to your other activities, and whether you're in front of the screen or not, there's a way to interact with it and consume it. And, yeah, I think it sounds absolutely fascinating. So it's like a podcast that's going to teach you something, a private podcast, just for the people who purchase the course and who want to go on this learning journey.

Because I'm such a purist and you know me, I wouldn't call it a podcast because, well, the podcast is lots of different kind of podcast and for me podcasting is such an informal medium. But it is audio, I mean from that point of view, something you can carry around and actually the way in which it's delivered is delivered in an app created by Book Funnel. So it was actually designed for audio books and we've managed to hook it in and kind of make it work for a while, because there's nothing out there to deliver audio courses and, of course, if you want it to be screen free, then it's good if you can carry it around in your pocket as well. It's not for companionship, so you want it like informal stuff, but oh, actually, no, you do. We do have three modules which are informal conversations between Simon and I. That is more like a podcast, so it's very formal. It might sound a bit stuffy, I don't know, but the content is great and it's a good. I'm putting it down a bit.

Well, we know from those, those original language tapes that we had a couple of decades ago, that this work is just that repetition and clear, structured audio delivery. It's nice to have a bit of informal chit chat as well mixed in there, but I'm sure it's helping a lot of people and we're going to have to make sure we put the links to the course and the podcast and the book and everything will be in the show notes to this episode so people can catch up with you Before we let you go, Pilar, just tell us briefly what are you working on now and what are you excited about for the rest of 2024? Now we're now. We're more than two months in Well.

I want to write more, and what's been great about working for so long with the bot is that it's really helped me to edit my own work. It's given me a companion for when I'm stuck, and so I'm writing a cozy mystery that I've been writing for a couple of years now, but it it's really helping me. I ask it sometimes, for I have like theories about how the murder was committed, so I ask it for its opinion. And then I'm also writing another book, which would started with chat GPT, which takes 12 Shakespeare monologues or scenes. I ran them by chat GPT and did a few iterations for those monologues to illustrate a concept of remote work. And now I'm writing a reflective personal essay to go with each of them and the essays. They each touch a concept of remote work, but they also have my own experience and connection with the subject. So I think it's going to be called All the World's a Workplace and look out for it.

Well, I suppose playwrights in that era would have been working from home.

Well, yes, they would have been interesting to. Yes, I mean well, of that era maybe they were more in. I don't know. I don't know how. To be honest, I'm such a doer that I don't know much about history. But I imagine there was like the modern playwright, like sometimes when you're really at home on your own or wherever you're writing, and then you need to take it out into the world and workshop it and see how it lands and then go back to your own. So in a way it's like modern collaboration with you. You have times of complete focus on your own. Then you need to get out and continue to work with others. So it's the same negotiation.

You could only do that in a very synchronous way with direct collaboration. And then you have to retreat to your garret with your quill pen and bang out a few more scenes Brilliant, oh, I'm really looking forward to reading that. It seems like such an interesting, creative departure. I've really enjoyed this conversation. Thanks ever so much for joining us today, pilar.

Thank you so much. And, before we forget, we have to direct listeners to the 21st Century Work Life podcast, where you're also there talking about what's going on really and also sharing some news from remote work Europe.

So, yeah, it's always good fun on a monthly basis to check in because there is still a lot going on in remote work gone sort of into quite deep esoteric stuff from async to Shakespeare today, but actually there's still a lot in the fast moving world of what's changing, so definitely you need to be listening to both. Basically just tell everybody All right, well, it's as I said. It's been really nice talking to you today. I'll make sure we put all of the links in there for everybody to enjoy and follow the diverse and eclectic sources of information they've been hearing about today. Thanks very much for joining us on the Remote Work Europe show. You've been listening to the Remote Work Europe podcast brought to you by remoteworkEuropeeu. We bring you community information, training, coaching and more to help you achieve your location and dependent lifestyle in Europe and beyond, as an employee, entrepreneur, freelancer or whatever you want to be. If you enjoyed the show, please like, rate and comment and subscribe to our feed wherever you get your podcasts. If you really liked it, we'd appreciate a review as well. Here's to your remote work success in Europe and around the world.