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🧰 How to Make Remote Work, Work
Published about 9 hours ago • 5 min read
🧰 Smart tools. Useful tips. Weekly.
Hola friend 👋,
I’m Josep. Each week, I hunt down practical tools and productivity hacks to help digital doers like you do more with less effort.
This week: the tools that power remote teams.
Here at Tooltester, we’re a (mostly) remote company. Although we’re headquartered in Barcelona, we have team members all over Spain and even in Germany. And of course, there's usually someone traveling.
This setup gives us a lot of freedom, but it also means we need to be really smart about how we collaborate. It’s not always possible to just swing by someone’s desk to ask a question.
So this week, I’m sharing three of the tools that make remote-first culture and collaboration possible.
Plus: a brilliant but off-topic tool for creating stunning AI art, a simple hack to get more out of your AI assistant, and a recent tech demo that didn't quite go as planned.
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This one was a recommendation of a Tooltester friend, Robert Wojno who works at Hostinger. So thanks Robert!
Remote work is great, but you still need a place to sketch out ideas, map flows and collaborate visually. Figma is best known as a powerful design tool for creating interfaces and prototypes, and it even replaces older tools like Photoshop or Illustrator because multiple team members can edit the same file simultaneously. But its companion tool FigJam turns Figma into an endless whiteboard for brainstorming and planning.
FigJam operates as an infinite canvas where you can drop colorful sticky notes, shapes, text boxes, connectors, and freehand drawings. Everyone’s cursor appears in real‑time, and you can comment directly on elements. You can even launch audio calls.
Because FigJam is natively integrated with Figma Design, you can copy‑and‑paste elements back and forth, creating a smooth workflow from brainstorming to final design.
When you’re juggling time zones or just want to dodge yet another Zoom call, a quick Loom video is hard to beat. It lets you effortlessly record your screen and webcam together, whether you’re sharing a polished walkthrough or just snapping a fast screenshot, and its simple editing tools make it easy to trim and tidy things up in seconds.
The moment you stop recording, Loom spins up a shareable link so your teammates can watch whenever it suits them, no scheduling gymnastics required. They can drop comments or reactions right on the video, turning a simple update into a lively two-way conversation.
Loom is ideal for product demos, bite-sized tutorials, or even walking your most tech‑averse relatives through turning off that mysterious dark mode they somehow switched on.
If you’ve ever needed to control a computer from afar, you know how tricky it can be (yes, Apple has remote control, but it’s not perfect). TeamViewer is my go-to solution for this. It’s a powerful tool that lets you access any device remotely, as if you were sitting right in front of it. If there is always someone in your team needing some quick IT help, this will definitely be useful!
I, personally, use it to manage my AI server, a.k.a. the Mac mini that lives at home (by the way, reply to this email if you want me to talk about this in a future issue). Whether I’m visiting my in-laws in the UK or working in a coffee shop, I can easily manage it. It’s also a lifesaver for helping out family members with their tech troubles, like my mom who, despite being pretty tech-savvy, still runs into a problem every now and then.
TeamViewer is packed with features like file transfer, remote printing, and even session recording. The connection is secure and reliable, and it works on a wide range of devices, including Windows, Mac, Linux, and mobile.
🛠️ Alternative to: AnyDesk, Splashtop, Zoho Assist
Lately, I’ve been playing around with AI art generators, and I’m blown away by what they can do. OpenArt is a powerful tool that lets you create stunning images from text prompts, but also videos and audio (voices).
You can use it to create anything you can imagine, from photorealistic portraits to abstract landscapes. You can also use it to edit your existing images, or to create variations on a theme. The interesting thing is that you can use several AI models like Veo, Kling or Nano Banana among others.
What I love about OpenArt is how easy it is to use. For example, Replicate.com has a larger selection and allows for more creativity, but the interface is trickier to use than OpenArt’s.
If you’re looking for a fun and creative way to express yourself, I highly recommend giving OpenArt a try.
🛠️ Alternative to: Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, DALL-E 3
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⚡This Week’s Productivity Hack
Tired of getting mediocre results from your AI assistant? You’re not alone. The problem often isn’t the AI, but the way we prompt it. We give it incomplete instructions and expect it to read our minds.
This week’s hack flips that on its head: Reverse Prompt Engineering.
Instead of you giving the AI a vague prompt, you tell the AI to ask you questions until it has all the information it needs to give you a great output.
Here’s an example prompt you can use:
“I want you to help me create a content marketing strategy. Before you give me any suggestions, I want you to ask me a series of questions to understand my business, my target audience, and my goals. Ask me as many questions as you need to get a clear picture of what I’m trying to achieve.”
Try it, it’s a game changer!
It forces the AI to dig deeper, filling in the gaps in its knowledge and giving you a much more tailored and effective response. Give it a try and let me know how it worked by answering this email.
🍿 Plot Twist of the Week
Tesla’s demos are usually the stuff of tech legend, but a recent event in Miami ended up going viral for all the wrong reasons. The ‘star’ of the show was Optimus, Tesla’s humanoid robot, which was tasked with handing out water bottles – pretty easy job for the average 2‑year‑old.
Things were going smoothly until, suddenly, the robot froze, clutched its head, and dramatically fell over backward. It was a bizarre and comical moment, but the real story was in the robot's final gesture. Eagle-eyed observers noted that the "head clutching" motion perfectly matched the movements of someone yanking off a VR headset.
The internet, of course, had a field day. The incident was quickly dubbed the "Wizard of Oz" moment, as it seemed to confirm that the supposedly "autonomous" robot was actually being puppeteered by a human teleoperator (see footage here). What do you think?
That’s it for this week. Thanks for reading! Next time, we’ll be exploring some must-have apps to manage your website. You won’t want to miss it.
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