What Remote Teams Actually Automate and What Breaks First

1. Slack notifications that trigger but never tell you what happened

There’s a weird moment we’ve all hit: you get a Slack ping that says “New response received” and… that’s it. No context. No link. Sometimes you don’t even know which form it’s talking about. Most of the time, someone left a form half-filled and walked away, or the integration is just half-working. I still don’t know which Google Form the “FYI – Submission received” messages are coming from in one of my Zaps.

If you’re using Zapier, this usually comes down to one of two things:

• The Zap step using Slack is trying to send a variable that doesn’t exist yet.
• A previous step failed quietly and skipped sending meaningful data.

The “aha” wasn’t fixing the Zap. It was finally adding a catch-all text block in Slack that says:

New response received: {{Submission Link}} - {{Email}} - {{Short Answer}}

Even if one field is missing, the rest comes through. Also: if you’re relying on conditional paths to decide what notification to send in Slack, add a fallback. Otherwise, you get no message at all — the Zap just ends silently. That’s the bug that got me a week’s worth of “no updates” in a pilot project, when it was totally active behind the scenes.

2. Daily standup prompts that collapse under their own logic

We tried automating daily async standups through Slack + Airtable. Sounded clean in theory. Airtable form sends to channel, team fills out quick notes, I compile into Monday.com. It broke in four days.

The root issue? Airtable was caching submitted email fields even if users changed them manually. So people’s status updates kept showing up under the wrong names. I didn’t realize how aggressively Airtable aligns records via autofill. It even pulled in data from a completely separate form I’d archived a week before.

What finally fixed it:

I switched the form to anonymous, added a short “name” text field users had to fill each time, and turned off email field linking. But the moment I did that, my Monday.com board started throwing ‘cannot parse creator ID’ errors — it had lost its schema glue.

Eventually I rebuilt the integration through Make instead, explicitly mapping text field inputs to expected columns. Took longer, but it finally let me control what got pushed vs. inferred.

3. The read receipt nobody realized came from PixieBrix

One of our contractors added a PixieBrix extension to track when Notion pages were viewed — and no one mentioned it until I started seeing random pingbacks in our logs. The payload looked like this:

{"referrer":"https://notion.so/work-spec","visitorId":"px-8132748731","timestamp":"1714309152"}

Turns out she had rigged it to fire a webhook to a private endpoint we use for uptime monitoring. Just tagged it on via PixieBrix’s “Run JavaScript” panel. Problem is, it broke our monitor by flooding it with junk payloads it wasn’t expecting. If you’re stitching together visibility tools like this, make sure the receiving endpoint is hardened enough to reject non-validation pings.

Also: PixieBrix doesn’t sandbox extensions the way you expect. If you’re logged into multiple Notion workspaces, it’ll run across all of them unless you limit by URL regex. That one’s buried in their documentation, but not surfaced anywhere obvious during build.

4. Zapier multi-step filters that drop valid data after formatting

One of those fun edge cases where something “passes the filter” when tested live but fails silently when running real-time. I was trying to route inbound emails via a Gmail trigger into various Slack channels based on subject lines.

Janet’s test email went through. Mine didn’t. Anthony’s didn’t. After twenty failed runs, I dug into it. The culprit: the subject line gets auto-truncated or encoded differently depending on the email client — Apple Mail adds a line break where Gmail doesn’t, which messes up Zapier’s pathway logic if you’re matching whole strings.

Here was the final working fix:

Input: {{Subject Line}}
Formatter step: Remove line breaks + normalize to lowercase
Code block: Regex match -> channelMap[subject]

Also had to move the Filter step after the Formatter. I learned Zapier treats unformatted input literally within filters — it doesn’t pass through even if you have a Formatter step earlier unless it’s ordered properly. That ordering thing tripped me up for way too long.

5. SharePoint file watchers that keep firing after deleting the folder

Okay Microsoft automation is a special kind of haunted. We had a Power Automate flow watching a client uploads folder in SharePoint — new PDF comes in, it sends to Docparser, pushes to Airtable, logs in a Teams channel. Worked okay for two weeks.

Then someone renamed the folder.

After that, the flow weirdly kept triggering on ghost files, sometimes multiple times per file. We checked the trigger. It was supposedly updated to the new folder name. But the old flow was still listed under “My flows” and still ran. Apparently Power Automate doesn’t fully unregister deleted folders as trigger sources sometimes. You have to go manually remove the connection reference tied to the original folder ID from Power Platform admin center.

A Microsoft forum thread eventually confirmed this is a known issue — SharePoint file triggers persist if another Flow used it before the folder deletion. It’s not in their docs anywhere publicly, but it’s real.

6. Meeting summaries that look great in Notion but kill context in linear tickets

On paper, summarizing Zoom calls via Otter.ai and stuffing them in Notion sounds like a smart async workflow. We had Linear tickets auto-created every time a call contained keywords like “bug” or “feature request.” Good in theory. In practice? It got weird.

The webhook would pull summaries, but only the first 1000 characters. Otter truncates long summaries at weird points. So we were getting context-free ticket descriptions like:

“User mentioned add-on not loading, then discussed a related compo”

This turned into a half-built Linear queue of mostly useless tickets with no thread history. We didn’t catch it until two sprints later when devs started complaining about “ghost stories.”

The workaround involved building a custom relay in n8n that first fetched the full meeting transcript, summarized via OpenAI (with windowed chunking), and then posted the summary to Notion and the linked Linear ticket body. Had to add a button to the Notion entry that said “View full source” to backref Otter. Still janky, but we haven’t had ghost bugs since.

7. Time tracking automations that trigger twice every afternoon

Came across this while trying to auto-log time entries in Harvest for people who use Clockify. Yes, everyone has their own timesheet religion. Whatever. The plan was: Clockify logs time block, that fires a webhook, which goes through Integromat (now Make), formats it, duplicates it into Harvest.

It worked. Until it didn’t. People started getting double entries — always at around 2 PM. After tracking it for days, I figured out Digest.app (used to aggregate every afternoon session) was also triggering the flow via its own webhook. Both were touching the same Clockify project.

The fix was dumb but effective: I added a UUID hash to each original webhook’s payload and stored it in a Redis instance. If the same hash fired within 60 seconds, it got skipped. Never got a duplicate again.

Make has no native deduper that works across external triggers unless you build one. That’s one of those assumed behaviors that just doesn’t exist natively — even though “don’t trigger twice” seems like such an obvious checkbox.