A remote team collaboration tool for people who’d rather write it down

Say you run a ten-person translation agency. Rory manages projects from Edinburgh, Jonas and Agnieszka translate from Berlin and Kraków, and Mathieu proofreads the French from Montréal, five hours behind. There’s no hour of the day when everyone is fresh. Some days there’s no hour when anyone is.

Time zones get easier when things are written down well enough that the person reading at 8am their time has nothing left to ask. Klusko is built around that habit. The client’s changes go in the task’s comments, the back-and-forth goes in a thread in the project channel, and when Mathieu logs on he reads both in order instead of waiting for Rory to wake up. We’d argue the habit matters more than whichever remote team collaboration tool you pick, ours included.

Channels get noisy when four people reply to different things at once. Reply in a thread and the answer stays attached to the question. The Threads view lists every thread you’re part of, so nothing sinks overnight, and when you come back a “new” divider marks where you stopped reading.

Online dots show who’s around right now. It’s a small thing, but it tells Agnieszka whether a quick question to Jonas will get a quick answer or should be written properly for tomorrow. Mentions and assignments land in your Inbox with a preview. There’s more on the team chat page, and if you’re weighing it up against Slack we compared Klusko and Slack in detail.

We haven’t built video or voice calls, and we aren’t in a hurry to. Your team probably has Google Meet or Zoom already, and they’re good at calls. Keep using whichever one you’ve got.

What we’d push back on is the number of calls. Plenty of remote teams swap the chat you’d have across a desk for a 30-minute video meeting, then book a second one to work out what the first decided. When a call does happen, have whoever ran it write the outcome on the task afterwards. Two lines is enough. Then the people who weren’t on it know what changed, and so does whoever picks the job up in November.

Each person’s My work page has a Today view of what’s theirs, which removes most of the reason for a morning stand-up. For the weekly round-up, give each person a recurring task called Friday update (recurring tasks are on the Team plan). When they tick it off, next week’s appears, and the three or four lines they wrote sit in the comments where anyone can read them on Monday.

Watch a task and its updates come to your Inbox without you being assigned, which lets a manager follow the Nordvik catalogue without hovering. Everything updates live, so a card Jonas drags in Berlin moves on Rory’s screen in Edinburgh as he drags it. The native iPhone app is in testing and not on the App Store yet, and there’s no Android app. Tasks has the rest.