A study of roughly 500,000 tracked remote working hours landed this year, and the headline number is uncomfortable. The average remote worker gets 11.7 hours of genuine deep focus per week. That is 29% of a standard forty hour week. The rest goes to coordination: messages, calls, status updates, and the small administrative tax of keeping everyone in the loop.
The split is almost exactly even. 51% producing, 49% coordinating. For every hour of real work, you spend roughly an hour talking about work.
Most people react to that by hunting for a better app. That is usually the wrong move. The number doesn't improve because you switched task managers. It improves when you change what you agree to.
Two things move the needle. First, defend a block. One protected stretch of two to three hours, same time each day, no notifications, no calls. If you land that consistently you are already ahead of the average. Second, push coordination into writing. 83% of remote workers in the same research said asynchronous communication made them more productive, and only about one in ten said the opposite. A written update or a three minute screen recording does the job of a thirty minute call, and it does it while you sleep.
Living in Phuket adds a wrinkle. Members of the Digi Yesmads community routinely work across a five to eight hour gap with clients in Europe or the US, which means the calendar is going to get fragmented unless you actively fight for it. The upside is that the time difference gives you a quiet morning nobody can book. Use it before you give it away.
Track one week honestly. Most people are shocked by how little of it was actually work.