This is how we set up our office to work fully digital as the COVID-19 virus has shut everything down.

Going fully remote as a team will be a challenge a lot of us will have to solve these days. This is how we plan to do it.

First things first. Stay safe. Practice social distancing, wash your hands, follow all the official health guidelines and local authorities and let’s do our best to contain the spread and minimize the load on the hospitals. This is going to be tough and our hearts go out to everyone who is affected by the virus — whether that is economically or physically. It’s normal to be feeling anxious, worried and even a little cabin fever-y.

In moments like this, it’s okay to take a pause and remember to breathe. In the end, we will find a way through this and figure it out together. Maybe we will even emerge from this crisis stronger. That is our hope anyway. As a team of optimists, we’re trying to find the silver lining.

For us — everything will go online starting today. Our classes, activities and our own office.

Going fully remote as a team will be a steep learning curve for us. But we also think it’s an exciting opportunity for us to learn. This is quite a change, so how do we meet this challenge?

Internally we will be using a range of tools to keep us going, and thanks to Slack, Zoom, Notion, Google Calendar and Google Hangouts we feel pretty confident going forward.

Some we have already been using for a while. Others are being implemented as we speak. We have been checking out these guides for working remotely (Trello, TeamSuccess) and this is where we are at.

The most difficult thing is to keep our sense of being connected. For this we will try out Zoom and simply have it open throughout the day. Just for us to see each other once in a while and not to feel all alone, when we sit in front of the computer.

Secondly, we will be more active in using our Google calendars to block out time for our tasks, for focused time and let everyone know what we’re working on.

For a while we have been testing out various project management software like Airtable, Asana and Basecamp and while they’re all great and have different key features that would be very useful to us, we’ve decided to implement Notion as our main project management software going forward. It serves a lot of our needs for real-time collaboration and provides the ability for our team to share, comment and assign tasks and reminders. Going fully online, we’ll need it implemented fast, so we assigned a lead to spend time setting it all up this week including linking it to the rest of our software such as Trello, Slack and G Suite.

We have already been using Slack for a while for internal communications and Google Hangouts for our meetings with our teams in Iraq, Turkey and Yemen. They’re both pretty great.

For our new bootcamp students, we’re facing the same challenges of keeping them motivated and connected. We are working hard to find the right online solutions for this and we will have more on this in a few days.

Finally, we have to give credit and thanks to our donors for their understanding and support in these circumstances. We all want to keep going and help our students build a new future for themselves. We’re confident that we can make this bootcamp one of the best yet, despite the need for adaptation.