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Maintaining focus while performing daily activities is very hard nowadays. More things are trying to steal our attention and prevent us from carrying out each activity with focus. The presence of smartphones, social media, and increasingly high work demands expecting instant results are some of the factors that are causing this.
According to various studies, our productivity will be negatively impacted if we switch contexts too often. Unfortunately, it’s a very common sight today to see people checking emails, responding to messages and even doing their work while attending face-to-face meetings.
Every time a context change occurs, there’s a price to pay in the form of lost concentration, energy, and time. So if these context changes are carried out repeatedly in a very short duration (often called multitasking), we cannot complete anything and only get tired by the end of the day.
In this article, I want to discuss how we can build a working environment that supports more asynchronous (async) collaboration. There are several advantages we can get by doing this, including increased productivity and reducing the possibility of burnout, which is a condition of excessive feelings of failure and lethargy due to demands that are too burdensome for one’s energy and abilities.
Additionally, in my opinion async collaboration is a precursor before we can work effectively in a remote or distributed teams setting. If the teams in those situation doesn’t have the ability to work async, then I would suggest to forget any plans to allow our team members to work remotely because it won’t be effective at all.
But what exactly is async collaboration?
Async Collaboration
Async means “two or more related things that don’t happen at the same time.” In this case, async collaboration means a process that doesn’t require parties involved to coordinate simultaneously. Coordination is an important thing that cannot be avoided when working towards a common goal. Coordination helps involved parties to avoid duplication of work and prevents work from not being completed due to lack of clarity about who is doing what.
Before the era of gadgets and the internet, humans were accustomed to work and conduct activities in the same place. Thus coordination was done directly, in a face-to-face manner. This causes us to become too accustomed and dependent on synchronous (sync) collaboration. How we can change this habit is the main topic to be discussed in this article.
Technological developments in the form of gadgets and the internet are both a blessing but also a risk. As we discussed at the beginning of this article, the reason for the decreasing focus is the presence of gadgets and the internet, which always try to grab our attention. However, those technologies are also enabler for us to adopt a new work style, namely the async work style.
What exactly are the things that must be done so that we can collaborate async? I try to group this into 3 categories:
- Agreeing on shared goals and success parameters
- Principles of async work
- Ensuring accountability
Now let’s discuss them one by one.
Agreeing on Shared Goals and Success Parameters
The first and most important thing when wanting to improve our ability to collaborate async is to determine clear and mutual goals.
Okay, actually determining shared goals is important for all types of collaborative activities. But the absence of concrete goals when our team works async will increase the “damage” that might occur. One of the reasons is because when we work async, the coordination process will become substantially less intensive than before. So if someone in the team is making the wrong assumption, it’s very likely that won’t make relevant progress to the goals.
Let’s take the example of GitLab, one of the digital technology companies that doesn’t have an office and allows all its workers to work remotely. GitLab understands very well that having clear goals understood by all employees is very important because their collaboration is mostly done async. They mitigate this by publishing a detailed company strategy in public.
Once we determine the goals, we also have to determine what’s success looks like. In the spirit of increasing clarity and reducing ambiguity, success parameters are very useful so that each team member doesn’t have different interpretations of the goals that have been set. There are many frameworks that can be used to create success parameters, such as OKRs and KPIs. Choosing the right framework to determine success parameters is outside the scope of this article; we can choose any framework as long as all team members can understand and align into it well.
Next, let’s discuss the principles for async collaboration.
Principles of Async Work
First, we need to determine core working hours. Core working hours are times when every team member are focused on achieving the goals and its success parameters. During this time, interruptions should be reduced or even eliminated. One example of common interruption that should be avoided is unplanned meetings without a clear agenda. We will discuss again later about the types of meetings that can (and need to) be held and how to improve and maintain its efficiency.
Second is determining the forms of communication that are allowed and the conditions for their use. First, we can start by listing all possible communications along with their characteristics, for example: video calls, voice calls, chat, or e-mail. Then for each form of communications, we need to write down examples of common use cases. When doing this, try to prioritize async communication over the sync ones. For example, email should be preferred over voice calls, because email is not interruptive. However, we certainly still can allow voice or video calls under certain circumstances.
Third is the mindset of writing everything down. There are at least 2 kind of documents which are very important: READMEs and journals. READMEs are typically addressed to people internal or external to the team who want to utilize our work. it contains a guideline on how to setup and how to use our work. READMEs are very important because it can significantly reduce interruptions to the people doing the work, as good READMEs will allow people to self-onboard to the project. In some cases, it might be beneficial the principle of README-driven development to ensure all produced works has README attached.
Beside READMEs, it’s also beneficial to write a “journal”-type of documentation to capture how a work has evolved over time. If READMEs explain the ‘what’ more then journal will explains the ‘why’ more. For software engineering teams, there are several kinds of journals that are useful, such as:
- RFC (Request for Comment)
- ADR (Architectural Decision Record)
- RCA (Root-cause Analysis)
- ..And many other journals such as personal work journals and working sessions journals that we can adopt accordingly
Fourth is the principle of becoming more proactive in communication (overcommunicate). This doesn’t mean we have to frequently interrupt our teammates with barrage of messages or huddle request. But if we face obstacles in our work or when we complete work faster than scheduled, we should communicate these status updates with the team so that further actions can be taken. Remember that the goal to be achieved is a shared goal, so no matter how good an individual’s work is, it will be meaningless if the common goal is not achieved.
Improving Meeting Efficiency
I will deviate slightly before talking about accountability by discussing meeting efficiency. Meetings cannot be avoided because meetings are still the most efficient activity for coordination and alignment (ensuring everyone has the same understanding). But on the other hand, meetings might become the biggest time-waster in a team if done too often, not planned, and not well implemented.
Then what can we do to improve and maintain efficient meeting culture?
- Always prepare and share the agenda before the meeting. Often meetings are ineffective because participants are caught by surprise with the agenda during the meeting.
- Appoint a facilitator or meeting leader. The person will be responsible to ensure all agendas are discussed in timely manner.
- Write minutes and display them on-screen. This is useful to ensure participants have the same understanding and beneficial for those who are late.
- Embrace silent meetings. If there are too many participants or agendas, the silent meeting format may help to increase the effectiveness of time utilization.
Ensuring Accountability
The last thing that’s no less important is to maintain process to ensure accountability. This is to make sure that the team trusts one another, and everyone is motivated to make progress every day towards their goals.
There are two things that I usually do for this purpose. First, I’ve setup several routine coordination activities:
- Daily progress meetings or standups. This short meeting is held so that each team member can provide a brief progress report. Those who are used to Agile may already familiar with this activity; for more details, see this article.
- Demo days or showcases. Done to present work results directly to all team members and leaderships or stakeholders.
- Planning meetings. This activity is important to ensure that the work is in accordance with the mutual goals. This meeting is also often known as sprint planning or IPM (iteration planning meeting) in Agile.
- One-on-one’s. Conducted between team leaders and team members, to discuss progress and challenges in work that sometimes cannot be conveyed in open meetings.
Second, prepare documents or dashboards that display work progress. There is no better incentive to ensure progress than maintaining a dashboard that displays work progress openly. The form can certainly be adjusted to the needs, as long as the work progress displayed is mapped against the success parameters that have been determined at the beginning.
Conclusion
Async collaboration is a relatively new working style that evolved alongside technological advancements. While these same technologies often contribute to our distraction, they also provide powerful tools to reshape how we work.
The three pillars we’ve discussed—establishing shared goals, implementing async-friendly principles, and ensuring accountability—form a framework that any team can adapt to their specific context. When executed thoughtfully, this approach not only reduces the constant interruptions that plague modern work environments but also builds a more resilient and inclusive team culture.
For organizations considering or already implementing remote work, async collaboration isn’t just beneficial—it’s essential. Teams that master these practices will find themselves not only more productive but also more balanced, with team members experiencing greater autonomy, clearer purpose, and significantly reduced burnout risk. In our increasingly distributed world, the ability to collaborate effectively across time and space may well become the defining competitive advantage for knowledge workers and the organizations they build.