Here is a number worth sitting with. Around 55% of remote workers say most of their meetings could have been an email, a recorded video, or a shared doc. Not some. Most.
The 2026 data on async work is unusually clear. Roughly 83% of knowledge workers say asynchronous communication makes them more productive. Only about 8% want less of it. Teams that document properly report far fewer blocking delays, because nobody is sitting around waiting for someone in another timezone to wake up and confirm the obvious.
And yet the average remote worker still gets only two to three hours of genuine focus time a day. The rest goes to coordination.
This is something the TDY community deals with constantly. When you are in Phuket and your team is in London or Austin, the sync-first habit is not just annoying, it is structurally unworkable. You either take the 9pm call or you get left out of the decision.
The fix is boring and it works. Default to writing. Record a three minute Loom instead of booking thirty minutes. Keep one shared document per project that is actually current, so the answer to "what's the status" is a link, not a call. Protect one uninterrupted block a day and treat it like a client meeting, because it is worth more than one.
The teams doing this well are not more disciplined. They just moved the default. Sync became the exception you have to justify, rather than the reflex.
If you are the only remote person on a co-located team, you will have to push for this yourself. Start by writing the doc nobody asked for. It usually replaces the meeting within a month.