Obstacles in Remote Work: Adopt Async Work and unlock 5 enormous benefits
Working remotely is not the same as office work and you need to adopt new approaches. Async work has many benefits and alleviates obstacles in remote work.
Many companies started offering hybrid or remote work for their employees but kept their old and traditional work practices and they are struggling to adapt to this new environment. Working the same way just does not cut it. You can’t just move your office into the online setting and expect the same results. That might be detrimental as it can lead to a loss of productivity, effectiveness, and even health and satisfaction.
I want to show you the benefits of async work as well as when’s the best time to use this approach (and when it’s best not to) whether you’re working in a hybrid, fully remote, or even in-office environment.
I believe that most white-collar companies and organizations would benefit from at least partially trying out async work. The best part is that you don’t have to get your whole organization on board. You can start with your team and your closest collaborators.
This article is from a series of articles called “Async and remote work for skeptics”:
- Obstacles in Remote Work: Adopt Async Work and unlock 5 enormous benefits (This one)
- How to actually practice Async work effectively and never dread remote meetings nightmare
- Post about how to run remote meetings (TBD)
- Post about Deep work (TBD)
Public Async work guide with everything in one place
You can also find an Async work guide I created that inspired these articles here in Notion.
I decided to make the guide public, even though it’s not complete and there are some sections I need to finish or update to be more generic - I created it in my spare time for the specific needs of our team.
Feel free to check it out, and leave comments, questions, or even potential improvements.
Terminology
Before we continue, let’s quickly define some terms.
Sync AKA Real-time - refers to an event or activity occurring in real-time for all participants.
Sync communication - refers to the exchange of information or messages that requires an immediate response or the participation of all parties at the same time, eg. a video call.
Benefits
Let's talk about the benefits - the Why. If you want to know How, check out this article or go to the "How to" section in the Async guide.
Fostering deep work, focus and flow
Increase productivity, improve focus and concentration, and produce a better quality of work.
Deep work - the ability to focus without distraction on a cognitively demanding task - has many benefits. But it requires a state of flow to achieve. However, achieving a flow state requires time and effort.
(Note to self, write an article about flow and flow triggers).
On average, it takes around 20 minutes to get into the state of flow and it can last up to 2 hours. Yet, interruptions can disrupt the flow. They make it difficult to get back into a productive state (as difficult as when you started). So some prerequisites need to be met to achieve flow and deep work:
- No interruptions, meaning no messages, no 10-minute meetings, etc.
- Significant dedicated block of time (2+ hour blocks)
- Focused effort on one defined task (no context switching)
Practical example
Protect your time and calendar. It's important for Individual Contributors who engage in deep work to adopt a "maker" schedule rather than a "manager" schedule. This helps to avoid interruptions and maintain productivity.
In practice, this means that you block off at least half a day for your deep work.
Synchronous time is expensive
Real-time meetings waste more time than it seems
We’ve all been to a non-effective meeting. “Isn’t it most of them?”, I hear you scream. Yes, that could be the case. Especially in big organizations coming from an office environment.
Let's say that in-person meetings are more productive and there are more synchronicities. But even if this is true, remote meetings lack the same dynamic.
The larger the remote meeting, the less effective and more costly it becomes. As the size of the meeting increases, attention spans decrease. And you can't speed it up. You're stuck listening to it at 1x speed.
Cost of meetings + examples of alternative
Let’s calculate a cost of a common meeting of 8 people that lasts for 1 hour.
Cost of regular meeting = costs 8 hours to get 4 productive hours
Let’s define a few generous assumptions. We assume that the meeting is 50% effective, meaning that half of the time was spent effectively on transmitting the right information. We assume that everyone at the meeting was supposed to be there all the time.
On top of that, let’s ignore the time spent on work interruption, meeting preparation, time wasted before and after the meeting, etc. If we didn't, the cost would be way worse.
With these assumptions in place, we can calculate the following:
1h*8p = 8 hours spent on a meeting.
8h*0.5 = 4 hours spent productively,
So we spent 8 hours and got 4 productive hours.
Cost of alternative = 5.5 hours as the worst-case scenario
Let’s say the presenter spent 2 hours preparing, thinking deeply about the problem, and then preparing a bulleted list of information. He also creates a 0.4-hour video and some other documentation. Let’s assume it’d take 0.5 hours to get over everything at regular speed. That is the same as the effectiveness of our previous meeting.
The other seven people can review the materials at their own pace, including the bulleted list and the video. Bonus point: they can only go through whatever is relevant for them. Then they leave comments or ideas for the presenter to review.
On average, people speed videos up by 33% (1.33x speed). This leads to a 25% savings in time, which means that
(0.5h*0.75)*7 = 2.625 productive hours reviewing the material.
Let’s round it to 3 hours as some people will leave comments or do some thinking.
Some people might not need to look through everything but we'll ignore this fact in our example.
Afterward, the presenter spends another 0.5 hours reviewing the comments.
So with this example, we spent 5.5 effective hours (2h + 0.5h + 3h).
That is a 31.25% increase in effectiveness compared to 8 hours spent on a previous meeting.
Some of you might have spotted that the presenter spent way more time on the "meeting" and the problem than before. That might also explain why some individuals would rather prefer to hold a meeting than think deeply about the problem they are solving.
That is correct. Though all that thinking will lead to a better more thorough outcome. This in turn will prevent a pile of extra meetings.
Let me also point out one more thing. If the meeting was mostly about presenting/transmitting information, the preparation time would be the same as our synchronous meeting.
On top of that, now there’s an asset that can be shared with others, which leads nicely to the next benefit.
Async documentation lives on after the meeting
Work and decision documentation enables cross-collaboration and foster transparency
When the default is to document asynchronously, then the information can spread to the right people, at the right time, even 1 year from now.
This cannot necessarily be said about regular meetings.
It’s hard to remember everything. Decisions might not be documented. Or worse, they are forgotten. Even if the meeting is recorded, it’s not as easy to get back to a particular point that interests you. And when someone is absent from a meeting (eg. due to illness or lack of relevance at that time), it often results in a separate meeting being scheduled to repeat the same information that was discussed.
Having a culture of properly documenting work has multiple benefits
- Transmit information just once: Avoid having the same meeting with multiple people (sometimes even multiple times).
- "Water-cooler effect" in async work: Collaborate and get ideas from outside stakeholders. As others can review the decisions and the reason behind them on their own time, they can also offer their ideas and feedback.
- Accessible information: Anyone can view and find the information at any time, even months after the decision was made. This makes it easy to look back and understand what was done, agreed upon, and why, or even more importantly, why not.
- Avoid having information "in one person's head": It's important to document important information to avoid having it stored only in one person's head. This can save time and avoid blocking progress when searching for the right person with the necessary information or when that person is unavailable or busy.
And this leads to another benefit.
Foster deep thinking
Deep work will help people to mull things over
Async work can foster deep thinking by focusing on async documentation and spending more time doing deep work and in flow. Even the time preparing materials for a meeting or preparing async documentation will be a thoughtful time that can reveal initial flaws in the thinking.
This “mulling things over” can also lead to more impactful meetings because more time can be spent brainstorming and generating new ideas rather than just transmitting information.
Get work done without blockers
Be happier doing work at your own time, order and pace
One of the benefits of async work is the ability to get work done without blockers or interruptions. Instead of being constantly interrupted by synchronous meetings or notifications, individuals can focus on their work in whatever way suits them most (eg. working early hours), at their own pace, and in the order that makes sense to them. This can lead to greater productivity and satisfaction, as people can work in a way that aligns with their personal preferences and style. Additionally, the flexibility of async work can lead to greater work-life balance and happiness, as people can fit work into their schedules in a way that works for them.
Sync vs Async
Which one to choose for which situations?
I am a giant believer in Async and there’s a way to perform most if not all tasks that way. However, this requires an extremely dedicated, even fanatical mindset from you or your company.
So let’s dial it down to the real world and make it applicable for most companies and discuss when to use which approach.
Take these principles as a guide to decide what tasks you could “asynchronize” and which tasks are better off for a call or in-person.
When to choose Async communication
Async work is amazing for the times when you are mostly transmitting information. That means that you are presenting or explaining information to 1 or more people. Maybe there is some interaction at the end, but for the most part, you are just dumping knowledge on someone.
Some examples might include
- Walkthroughs
- Documentations
- Explanations
- Sharing research findings
- Simple questions and answers
- Work updates
- Small iterative changes
I’d suggest defaulting to async for these kinds of tasks and then if needed you can switch to sync. Later on, you can “upgrade” by iterating asynchronously as well.
When to choose Sync communication
There are times when meeting synchronously is better. A great example is when you are transforming information. That means you are bouncing ideas off each other continuously and iterating together on something, essentially playing “mental tennis”. Alternatively, any potentially emotional content is better suited for a more human approach. This might also apply to social goals.
Here are some examples:
- Workshops and brainstorming
- Hard conversations, delivering constructive feedback or other emotional content.
- Design review (with async prep)
- Very complex subject matter or when ideas are diverging and require decision (Still good to have some parts pre-recorded for context beforehand)
- Complex discussions that require too many decisions to be made.
- To create a social experience. Eg. the meeting fosters a better social bond between colleagues or a sense of belonging, etc.
Conclusion
Async work can provide many benefits for companies and organizations, including fostering deep work, focus, and flow, reducing distractions and interruptions, enabling work to be done at the employee's own time, order, and pace, and facilitating collaboration and idea generation from outside stakeholders. Though sometimes it’s more effective or beneficial to use sync approaches so it’s important to consider what you’re trying to achieve with each meeting and adapt accordingly.
What are your thoughts on Async work? Do you agree or disagree? What benefits or perils did you encounter with Async and remote work?
If you want to check out the in-progress Async guide, go to this link. Feel free to also leave some comments.
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