Remote work as a manager

I was thinking about being a remote manager, compared to when I was 5 days a week in an office. I spent a lot more time talking with people. Either they were planned or not, meetings occupied most of my time. Async work and flexible schedules are great. As a manager, I used to rely a lot on unscheduled, spontaneous conversations. Now I need to be more conscious about my engineer’s time and working schedule. It forces me to create the right environment to get the information I need, without creating a syncing point. These still happen, but only when we believe that the typical ping pong from async conversations won’t do. It gives me a lot more time to do work beyond management, like coding, customer support and meetings and thinking about our tech stack and where we are heading. If I had to put in one sentence, remote work for a manager forces them to be a lot more disciplined.