My most meaningful conversation today was with a 10kg Jack Russell who has anxiety challenges. He didn’t offer much in the way of strategic feedback, but he’s an excellent listener and he never schedules a 5pm Thursday call.
The only other person I spoke to was the woman at the bakery. She asked if I wanted the usual. I said yes. That was it. That was my human interaction for the day, unless you count Slack, which I don’t, because typing into a void and waiting for a reaction emoji is not the same as talking to someone.
I’m a remote CTO. I lead a distributed engineering team across multiple timezones. I am, technically, connected to people all day long. And some days, I am profoundly lonely.
Nobody warns you about this part. The leadership books talk about strategy and delegation and difficult conversations. They don’t mention the silence.
The shape of a day
I should describe what a day actually looks like, because I think people imagine something different.
I’m in Larnaca, Cyprus. My office is a room in my house. As a single mum with shared custody, my days are a patchwork of work, laundry, school logistics, meal planning, the weekly shop, car tax, finding a gardener, cleaning bathrooms, dealing with my accountant, and all the other invisible domestic work that fills a week before you’ve even opened your laptop.
The dog and I go to the park three times a day. Morning, lunch, and evening. We walk around the Salt Lake and through the pathways at Pattichieo, and he explores the bushes while I think. A LOT of my best work happens on those walks. Problems I’ve been staring at on a screen for hours suddenly untangle themselves when I’m watching a terrier dig enthusiastically in completely the wrong place.
This is the bit that’s hard to explain: the loneliness is real, but it’s also productive. The silence that sometimes feels isolating is the same silence that lets me think deeply. The lack of office interruptions that makes Tuesday feel endless is the same lack of interruptions that means I can hold a complex system in my head for three hours straight. It’s the same thing. The loneliness and the deep work are two sides of the same coin.
The dog gang and the quarterly meetup
It’s not all silence. I’ve built something here, slowly, over time.
There’s the dog gang. The other people who walk their dogs at the same times I do, around the same paths. We know each other’s dogs’ names before we know each other’s. We chat about nothing in particular while the dogs do their thing. It’s not deep, but it’s human, and on some days it’s the difference between feeling like a person and feeling like a function.
Then there’s my tech circle. I have about five people in Larnaca that I’ve done technical work with over the years, through various different jobs. Some I left, some they left, but we all kept talking. We do a meetup roughly every quarter, catch up on what we’re each building, swap war stories. And one of that group I see every week or two, and we sit somewhere and talk tech for four or five hours straight. Those conversations are oxygen.
But this isn’t Berlin or Manchester. There’s no hacker-space to wander into on a Saturday afternoon. There’s no meetup culture to plug into. The tech community here is small, and building your own takes years, not months.
The professional distance problem
Here’s the thing about leadership that nobody explains properly until you’re already in it: you can’t be friends with everyone on your team. Not really. Not in the way you were friends with your colleagues before you were in charge.
Part of your job is to defend the business. And defending the business sometimes means letting people go, not because they did anything wrong, but because the company didn’t capitalise, or the business changed shape, or the funding didn’t come through. That’s a conversation you might have to have with anyone on your team, and it changes the dynamic whether you want it to or not.
I’ve learned to read people for this. Some engineers are mature enough to understand that we can be friends AND that I have a role to play. They get that if I ever have to let them go, it’s not personal, it’s structural. They understand that we have different responsibilities, and part of mine is making hard calls about headcount. Those people, you can be genuinely close with. They’re smart enough to separate the friendship from the org chart, and smart enough to still be friends afterwards.
But not everyone is like that. And until you know which kind of person you’re dealing with, you keep a distance. Which means that the people you spend all day working with, the people you’re building something with, the people who are closest to understanding what your day actually looks like, are often the people you can’t fully open up to.
That’s lonely in a way that has nothing to do with remote work, honestly. Office CTOs feel it too. But remote makes it sharper, because there’s no casual lunch to soften the edges. There’s no bumping into someone in the corridor and having a human moment. There’s just Slack, and Slack has no body language.
The productive solitude
I don’t want this to read as a complaint, because it isn’t one. Or at least, it’s not only one.
The solitude is genuinely valuable. I do some of my best thinking on those dog walks around the Salt Lake. The solution to a tricky architecture problem, the right way to frame a difficult conversation, the clarity about what we should build next, these things don’t come to me at my desk. They come when I’m walking, when my mind is loose, when there’s nothing competing for my attention except a small dog who has found something suspicious in a bush.
I’ve talked before about closing Slack for deep work, and that’s real, but the deeper truth is that the most valuable thinking happens when I’m not even pretending to work. When I’m standing by the lake watching the flamingos and my brain is quietly processing a problem I didn’t consciously know I was working on.
You can’t do that in an office. You can’t do that with people around. You need the silence, and the silence comes with loneliness attached. They’re a package deal.
What I’d tell someone starting out
If you’re stepping into remote leadership for the first time, here’s what I wish someone had said to me:
Build your own village. It won’t happen naturally the way it does in an office. You need to actively seek out people who understand what you do, people who can talk tech with you, people who won’t glaze over when you explain what you’re working on. It takes years, and it’s worth every awkward first coffee.
Protect the dog walks. Or whatever your equivalent is. The walks, the runs, the swims, the whatever-gets-you-away-from-the-screen. Those aren’t breaks from work. They ARE work. Your brain needs unstructured time to process the structured problems you’ve been throwing at it.
Accept the distance. You can’t be everyone’s friend. That’s not cold, it’s responsible. The people who understand that will become your closest allies. The people who don’t will interpret professional distance as personal rejection, and that’s painful but it’s not something you can fix by pretending the power dynamic doesn’t exist.
Find your one person. You don’t need a huge network. You need one person who gets it, who you can sit with for four hours and talk through the hard stuff. If you have that, you have enough.
The bit I keep coming back to
There’s a moment most evenings, after the last dog walk, after the screen is closed, when the house goes quiet and the work is done but the thinking hasn’t stopped. And I sit with it, this weird mix of exhaustion and satisfaction and loneliness and gratitude.
I chose this. I chose remote work, I chose startup life, I chose Cyprus. And most of the time, it’s exactly right. The loneliness is the price, and the solitude is the reward, and they’re the same thing, and that’s fine.
It’s just that nobody tells you about it beforehand. So I’m telling you now.