Go async-first with your team
Use the filters below to find async-first methods that are relevant to your team. For detailed articles, check out the blog.
- Audit trails
- Budgeting and funding
- Collaboration fundamentals
- Communication tools
- Company culture
- Design
- Efficient onboarding
- Enable change
- Estimation
- General management
- Inceptions
- Lead by example
- Leadership communication
- Learn the basics
- Meetings as the last resort
- Pairing and feature dev
- People management
- Personal productivity
- Planning
- Promote feedback
- Relationships
- Remote strategy
- Rethink scrum
- Simplify the story lifecycle
- Sprint management
- Team bonding
- Team commitments
- Team culture
Unlink speed and productivity
Because hey, they aren’t the same thing.
Promote skin in the game
Don’t tell smart people what to do. Give them autonomy and allow them to take risks.
Take the long view
Don’t disrupt yourselves. The future of work is location and time independent. Prepare for that future.
Manage by outcomes
When you measure performance, ignore presence and focus on what people are actually achieving.
Coach your team to write
Your team won’t start writing things up diligently from day one. As a leader, you must coach them.
Champion deep work
Deep work is the ultimate superpower in the age of AI. Champion it.
Escape recurring meeting hell
Recurring meetings are the bane of leaders’ and managers’ existences. Just. Get. Rid. Of. Them.
Eliminate bullshit jobs
No one needs to do meaningless, soul-sapping work. Not even you. Take the time to get rid of such work so you and your colleagues can focus on the work that brings you joy.
Inceptions as a process, not an event
Every activity in the inception journey has the potential to be at least partly asynchronous. To be pragmatic about how much synchrony you need, you must recognise inceptions as a process and not an event.
Make your inceptions lean
The lean inception is a focused way to gather information to start a project. You can complete this in a single week.
Recorded presentations
Recorded presentations help you convey information asynchronously. This frees up time to meet for high stakes, engaging conversations and workshops.
6 page memo
The 6-page memo pattern forces you to prep for a meeting and to consume the background information before you dive into discussion.
Silent meetings
Silent meetings can better leverage the ideas, perspectives, and insights of your team. They’ll not just help improve your meetings, you’ll also see better ideas and solutions emerge.
Write, don’t meet
You can avoid many meetings by just writing things up. This can help you generate reusable artefacts in many cases.
Delete recurring meetings
Recurring meetings are usually meetings looking for an agenda. Not the other way around. You’ll do well to delete most of them.
Meeting free halves
It’s a good practice to keep at least half the days of your team calendar meeting free. This meeting free half should also sync with your personal calendar.
Replace "quick sync" with "async"
Most “quick syncs” can be async. This honours everyone’s need for flow and deep work.
ConveRel quadrants
The ConveRel quadrants are a way for you to triage your meetings and figure out which ones can immediately or eventually be async.
No meeting Fridays
Clear up one day each week, so it’s meeting free.
Block focus time
Block out focus time on your calendar so people know exactly when you are available.
Chat status
Set up your default status in a way that everyone knows you use the platform in an asynchronous manner.
Distraction blocking
Plan your week in advance, ration the distractions and use an app blocker to reap all the benefits of async work.
Shift left on retros
Think retro as a process that has two parts - take inputs asynchronously and run it synchronously.
Demos only when necessary
Let’s be honest. Teams don’t always have something big to showcase every sprint. Without substantive demos, the sprint reviews become a formality and a reporting exercise. Take a pragmatic approach to sprint reviews instead.
Drop the sprint planning meeting
Sprint planning is amongst the most time consuming activities for development teams. One could argue that the value you get is not proportional to the effort you put into these meetings. With some effort you can drop sprint planning meetings completely.
Make your standup async
If all you want to share is a “yesterday, today, blockers” update, you don’t need a standup meeting.
Avoid communication blasts
A single line message that you send to 200 people isn’t a single line message anymore. It’s a 200-line message. Instead, “shrink the blast radius”.
Slow things down
Arguments on chat don’t help. Take a deep breath and slow things down.
Target your conversations
Limit chat conversations only to those necessary to the discussion.
React, don’t respond
In the spirit of limiting messages, use emoji reactions where possible, instead of responding to a message.