A look back, written in 2026. I had worked remotely for clients since the Elance years, so 2020 changed less for me than for most. What changed was the clients: people who had never joined a video call were suddenly running their whole business through one.
The first weeks
When the UK went into lockdown in March 2020, the first job on almost every project was not technical. It was helping someone find the mute button, share the right window, and stop apologising for the connection.
It sounds trivial. It was not. A client who is uncomfortable on a call does not ask the question that would have saved a week of work.
Writing became the project
With no office to drop into, anything not written down did not exist. The projects that held together that year had one place where decisions lived — a short written brief, a running list of what was agreed and what was still open — and every call ended with a few lines added to it.
It also made projects fairer. A client could read back what they had agreed to, and so could I. Most disputes I have seen since come from projects that never had that page.
A meeting without a written outcome is a conversation. If it mattered, it is worth three lines in a shared document before everyone leaves.
Fewer, shorter meetings
Video calls are more tiring than sitting in a room, and people noticed quickly. The better rhythm was one short weekly call with a fixed agenda, and everything else asynchronous: a recorded walkthrough of a design instead of a meeting to present it, a written question instead of a call to ask it.
Trust without a handshake
New clients had to decide whether to trust someone they had never met. What worked was being unusually concrete: a clear scope, visible progress every week, and a demo link they could open themselves rather than screenshots. Showing the work beat describing it.
What I kept
The written project page, the weekly call, recorded walkthroughs, and the habit of ending every call with what was decided. Clients are back in offices, some of the time. Those habits made projects calmer then, and they still do.
