On Wednesday I was asking a colleague what his plans for today are and he replied that he’s on his way to go surfing but would have about 15 minutes to talk about our project now if I like.

I thought that’s way enough time to talk about task management etc and called him while he was on the bus to the beach. But I was wrong; he didn’t wanted to talk about tasks but about our problem of the last three days—a release blocker that had already cost us hours of work with no solution.

But after only five minutes we together came up with an interesting idea that I immediately tried out. And after two more iterations we found the fix to our Postgres query.

This is a story how we fixed a complex task while one of us sat in a bus without a computer in 15 minutes. I love working remotely because it enables us to think about problems differently and to try out new ways of working. That afternoon, I celebrated the success and went biking in my home mountains.