Notes and Boards as Virtual Offices: A Lightweight Approach

Summary

• When we think of virtual offices, we often imagine 3D spaces like Minecraft or VRChat, or 2D environments like Gather, but that's not all there is.
• Enter the "Light-weight Virtual Office"
  • For example, Miro can be considered a board-type virtual office.
  • Tools like Google Docs and Box Notes can be seen as note-type virtual offices.
• The lightweight virtual office pairs well with collaborative daily reports.

Background

The Balance of Virtual Offices

The necessity of virtual offices is often emphasized because they offer a balanced approach between real and virtual interactions. Meeting in person can be burdensome in terms of daily life, while full remote or flexible work models may not foster enough engagement due to difficulties in gathering effectively. Virtual offices provide a good option by allowing people to "gather in a virtual setting."

Challenges of Virtual Office Tools

However, virtual office tools come with their own set of challenges. They may be cumbersome to operate, lack enterprise-level security, be difficult to adapt to, or offer poor integration with work operations.

Consider a globally popular tool like Minecraft. Can Minecraft become part of your workflow? The workflow here refers to the places you frequently use, like Slack or Teams for business chat. Could you transition entirely to Minecraft? Realistically, the answer for most people is likely "no."

Light-weight Virtual Offices

Examples

The benefits of a virtual office can be realized with more lightweight tools as well.

For instance, Miro can be described as a virtual office. The world is a board, and while your avatar is just a cursor, you can engage with people in real-time within a virtual setting. It's a bona fide virtual office. Similarly, tools like Google Docs, Box Notes, Notion, or Cosense can be seen as virtual offices where you can collaborate on a document in real time. The only difference is that the world is a note and your avatar is a cursor.

Examples that fit the lightweight virtual office category include Japanese products like Remotty and Teracy. Remotty has a user interface that lines up all team members' faces with photos updated by their PC cameras every two minutes. Teracy displays each person's icon in a 2D room without requiring scrolling and shows what they are doing in real time by installing a client agent that monitors active windows. Both offer a seamless conversation experience, allowing voice calls with a single click. However, this article won't delve into them further.

Definition

Such lightweight virtual offices are termed as Light-weight Virtual Offices.

Advantages

The advantages of Light-weight Virtual Offices include:

They realistically offer the experience of virtual gathering, allowing teams to maintain diversity by not skewing entirely towards either real or virtual settings.

Recommended Practice: Collaborative Daily Reports

As mentioned, there are note-type and board-type lightweight virtual offices.

So, how can these be effectively utilized in daily operations? I recommend the practice of Collaborative Daily Reports (Daily Park), which in essence involves:

• Creating a single note or board each day so that,
• All members gather there,
• And create their own areas to write in.

Let's break this process down into steps.

Understanding Daily Reports

In Japan, there is a culture of Daily Reports (Times Channel) using Slack. Each person creates a personal channel (named #xxxx-times) and posts updates much like X, where anyone can view and join the conversation.

For those from outside Japan, this might seem a bit baffling due to Japan's high-context culture, where direct communication is often challenging, and opinions are hard to express. Creating personal spaces where team members can freely write helps alleviate these challenges.

The Downside of Daily Reports: Accessibility Challenges

Simply put, in a team of seven people, seven different channels would exist. Excluding managers, six people are involved. Managers would need to check and participate in all six channels consistently. It's cumbersome.

Although tools for team-based SNS like X don't exist, what can be done to manage this effectively?

Implementing a Twist with Light-weight Virtual Offices

Here is where Light-weight Virtual Offices come in handy.

Here's how you can implement this:

• Create a note or board for each day.
  • For example, if today is 2025/11/23, you'd create a note or board titled 2025/11/23.
  • This will be referred to as the Daily Area.
  • The following explanation will use a note-type example.
• Gather all team members in the Daily Area, each setting up their own space.

Here's a hypothetical example with spaces for 🐶, 🐱, 🐏, and 🐵.

20251123.md

# 🐶
(🐶 can write anything here)

# 🐱
(🐱 can write anything here)

# 🐏
...

# 🐵
...

For encouraging comments, lists are effective. A list-based structure allows line-based interruptions, which is convenient (★ marks the comment area).

# 🐶
- 🐶's comment
    - 🐶's comment
    - 🐶's comment
        - 🐱's comment ★
- 🐶's comment
    - 🐵's comment ★
- 🐶's comment

To identify who wrote what in each line, assign emojis. Below is an example: even within 🐶's area, you can see who said what at a glance.

# 🐶
- This is the worst, I forgot to bring my lunch...
    - 🐱 Oh my God
    - 🐏 How about we have lunch together today?
        - 🐶 Sounds good
        - 🐱 Nice, can I join too?
        - 🐏 Of course!
- I see potential in ChatGPT Atlas
- ......

How does this look?

With this method, the Daily Area becomes the workflow each day. It creates a virtual world where everyone naturally gathers, writes what they want, and reads what others write. It's not as rigid as real-world meetings but not as disconnected as virtual ones. The balance allows you to feel the presence of information and other members in a real-time editing style—neither too quiet nor too noisy.

Since this information is retained as text, you can even provide it to generative AI to gain insights!

Conclusion

We explored the concept of using notes and boards as a lightweight virtual office, especially diving deep with note-based examples.