Asynchronous Work Can Help Us All Slow Down

In the heart-pounding moment of deciding between cutting the blue or red wire to avert a city's destruction, or the adrenaline-fueled intensity of a pilot determining the precise moment to pull up during a death-defying dive, evading pursuers hot on their tail, we are frequently shown that the most impactful decisions often demand swift and precise actions.

While it’s unlikely that the work we perform has that level of risk and impact, we have the technology that enables us to access information and people instantly, and that’s how we often choose to work: quickly.

Shooting off a sudden question in chat. Organizing a last-minute meeting to share an update and get team input. Pushing out that important announcement that pings loudly.And for the traditionalists: picking up the phone and calling a colleague to pick their brains. We’re used to doing things quickly and synchronously with our colleagues to get done what we can’t do alone.

But, are we actually being less productive by working so quickly? If we slow down, can we actually speed up decision making? Or at least make it more effective?

The Trap of Synchronicity

Asynchronous work slows down how we work. It gives us more time to listen and respond, and is common practice in remote and distributed organizations, such as Gitlab. However, you don’t have to be in a different time zone from your colleagues to get the benefits of asynchronous working.

Firstly, let’s explore some of the problems with synchronous working, and why it can be unhealthy and counterproductive:

Notifications! Instant communication and collaboration is incredibly distracting. Notifications, particularly from chat messages, are hard to ignore and take us away from our flow of work. Incredibly, one estimate found that it takes on average 23 minutes to return to the original task after a distraction. Think about that when processing our 32 chat messages every day.
The pressure to say something. When something is urgent, or appears so, there is a sense of pressure to respond. Even if we have nothing of value to say at the moment besides, “I’m definitely here and working, and able to respond quickly, boss.”
Thinking takes time. Do we actually have something valuable to say in a meeting during the brief window of opportunity we have? How many times does a thought pop-up after the meeting, with us looking glum and thinking “if only I’d thought of this earlier…”
It’s hard to capture and reuse knowledge in fast settings. Quite often, it’s a very transactional exchange. We also don’t help ourselves by using tools and practices that aren’t great as knowledge repositories, such as chat and meetings (unless we record or transcribe them).

Now, let’s slow things down. What are the benefits of working more asynchronously to modern knowledge workers?

Hybrid Needs Asynchronous Like the Office Needs People

Gallup’s recent survey of workplace trends indicates that hybrid is here to stay, but not without its challenges. Leaders most fear decreasing workplace communication and collaboration, whereas employees’ greatest challenges include a lack of culture, impaired relationships and also decreased collaboration.

This tends to drive us to try to collaborate more, not collaborate better. Meetings and email are still our most dominant digital habits. Let’s look at this from the perspective of a flexible hybrid worker attempting to deliver some focus work from home. They likely have a day full of scheduled meetings, a number of ad-hoc ones and a continuous flow of emails that may or may not be urgent.

Even for the office-based worker, these are not good habits for productivity. Especially if we are mostly using live meetings to just coordinate work.

Simply put, asynchronous work allows us to have more control over when (and where) we work.

Plus, we get a range of other benefits from adopting some asynchronous working practices:

More focus time. Asynchronous working cuts down on meetings and ad-hoc distractions.
Greater knowledge visibility. Rich content on what we’re doing is the backbone of asynchronous work, leaving behind a repository of tacit and explicit knowledge.
It’s easier to pick up the narrative. For someone joining the task, perhaps as a new team member, asynchronous work provides context, more history and more information.
It’s more inclusive. Asynchronous work creates a more equal space for speaking and listening when we are all relying on the same type font rather than our individual voices and angry hand gestures.
It gets us ready for AI. With more content to work with, the benefits of AI will be much greater as it has access to up-to-date, recorded knowledge and information on what we’re doing — not just what we’ve done.

Related Article: Why Collaboration Design Matters

What This Needs to Work

Asynchronous work won’t work if only one or two of us subscribe. The whole team needs to be on board, and in agreement of what it looks like. This means defining which specific practices can be asynchronous and which have to be synchronous — in person or via other means. It’s of little use if some of us still prefer to use asynchronous communications methods to demand an immediate response. Agreeing on a specific and different method for urgent communication is also essential to ensure messages are received the right way in the right place.

A good way to start is by identifying all current synchronous collaboration practices in your team, such as meetings, brainstorming sessions, coordinating work and sharing updates.

We can look and see how much time we spend listening here rather than collaborating, as well as looking at the frequency, duration and urgency of these activities. If we find a number of synchronous activities where we don’t actually collaborate, then these are perfect to be asynchronous. We can share this sort of information over a longer period of time, such as in a message thread, rather than wasting time when all we’re doing is absorbing information.

This gives us more time to think and respond, making decision-making far more considerate than it might be after we’ve been multitasking during a team meeting and not really paying attention to the two hours of one-way conversation. At the end, we yell out to cut the red wire to show we are there and decisive. But if we’d thought about it, it should have been the blue wire. KABOOM!

We don’t need to reach for the stars, or indeed save the city from oblivion. We can start small. For example, try capturing meeting notes where we can contribute to the agenda and add comments after the meeting. Something simple can start an asynchronous journey.

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