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Comment by msandford | Hacker News Reader

Is it just me, or does keeping up with the 30 or so web tools they've outlined sound exhausting?

Being able to work remotely sounds great. But I can't help but wonder if the time saved not commuting all gets eaten up by project management overhead and just logging in to all the services every morning.

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Exactly my thought! Many of these tools seem overlapping, and to keep these overlapping areas in sync doesn't sound like fun. Also, as you mentioned, logging into multiple places all the time is sub-optimal.

Hi there, I work at Mobile Jazz and it actually takes me less than 1 minute to log in to every service (that's when I have to log in, cause most of the times I'm already logged in). In terms of Syncing, Asana does a nice job integrating several services via some extensions (like Harvest for example to start your timer directly from a task), also, most of the time we have a central document per project where we keep all the different links and references that are relevant to it. I work half of the time at the office, some days from my apartment in Barcelona and at least once a year I travel to Mexico and keep working from there while I spend some time with my family. Over the time I have get used to the remote working mindset and I must say that I find it very efficient.

30 is a bit of an exaggeration don't you think? I counted 13 tools, 9 of which share (or can share) a common login (Google). This is far from as onerous as you're making it out to be.

Yes, it was an exaggeration. But they also talked about having a bunch of different hipchat rooms and things like that. They also talked about having everyone log all their time in harvest.

I get that consultancies have to log hours, but that doesn't make it any less of a drag for the people who work there. And every hipchat room that you have to keep up with is additional overhead.

So you're right that 30 is an exaggeration. But that doesn't mean that they don't have overhead (in terms of time) from using these online tools.

Certainly there will be overhead, and I can see how it can quickly mount up. Each person will have a different idea of where the tipping point is in terms of that overhead. For me personally, what was described is not that onerous.

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