Asynchronous communication: The key to effective [remote] work.

Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, a lot of people have been forced to switch to remote work overnight. The natural tendency for someone new to remote work could be to replace the office chatter by constant videoconference calls, but it’s easy that they end up filling your whole workday, leaving you with the feeling that you made no real progress.

Anyone who has been working remotely for a couple of years knows that to stay productive, it’s key to adopt an async communication style, reducing meetings and increasing written communication. But how do you know what to write and when?

One approach that works for me is:

Work as if you had no memory and your computer was going to be whipped out over the night

• Every time you work in a task take notes of what’s your current status, what you’re thinking and what you plan to do next.
• Publish your notes in a comment on the corresponding issue in your project tracker. There’s no need to write an essay, just a few words are better than no notes.
• Make sure to have all your resources permanently online (Github, Google Drive, Dropbox, shared storage or what makes sense for you) and include links in your notes to every resource mentioned or needed to continue the work.

Side note: There’s no such thing as oversharing while working remotely, It’s very useful and time-saving to share links to any resource you mention in any conversation, even if you know that the other person knows how to locate them. Other team members might not be in the same context, and this practice reduces the friction for them to check your work.

• Use your team chat as a notification center: Mention that you’ve updated an issue, share links to documents or posts you’ve written or even post the notes there too with links to other resources. Chats tend to receive a lot of attention because they’re too easy to use, but they can easily become a waste of time, so using them to redirect the attention to real work is a nice way to teach better ways of communication by showing.
• And last but not least, write in a positive way to motivate the rest of the team with every step of your progress. Sharing a partial success can show progress, and even if you share a problem, you can make it positive with some theories or a list of things you already tried.

Following these recommendations have many benefits:

• Anyone in your team can see how a task is going, what are you doing and what you’re planning next, allowing them to intervene or send you tips to make it easier.

Popular unpopular belief: Daily meetings suck. Twice while working remotely.

• If for any reason you need to reprioritize your work, it’s easier to restart the task quickly later.
• If you have to switch to a different project, you can redirect the task to another person and they’ll have all the context right away.
• If your computer gets broken, stolen, or lost, you lose no data nor context. Extra tip: Be aware of the bad guys, remember to always encrypt your hard drive! ;-)
• Taking notes and writing down your current status and plan helps you to think about what you’re doing and make better decisions.

People that are used to have their coworkers on the same room might tend to under-communicate when they switch to remote, when you’re all in the same room it’s easier to keep a shared team-wide context. Losing this shared context can lead to problems ranging from spending a lot of time doing the wrong task (nobody will pass by and ask how you’re doing on their way to the coffee machine), to wasting a lot of time in meetings trying to re-compose the information later. When you don’t write things down the only resource you have is your memory, a non-searchable device with a single I/O bus, so every time that someone needs the information stored in it, you’ll be forced to stop doing whatever you’re doing to communicate it.

This way of working is extremely inefficient and comes from a clear cognitive bias. It all starts with this feeling that “you’re too busy to write an explanation/comment/note”. You’re trying to avoid 30m of writing when you have all the context in your head to switch to the next task sooner and solve more tasks per unit of time. That could even make you feel like an overachiever, but in reality it’s more like being the one bailing more water out of a sinking boat. The reality is that you’re blocking your team and making them be constantly asking you, becoming a bottleneck and making them play a guess game on if they’ll need a new bit of information 5 minutes after the last clarification call. You could easily find yourself investing hours of Q&A sessions just to avoid those 30m of writing.

Writing things down saves everyone’s time, starting by yours, and once it’s written and you put it in a shared place, you’ll quickly see your coworkers answering other’s questions with links to your notes. How awesome is that? With a 30m investment you’re not answering to one person, but two, in different timeframes and with zero intervention or extra meetings, and the answers are there for the next one who asks. Time savings are exponential!

Summarizing: Async communication is awesome, try it and you’ll never go back. Share the resources and context as you generate them and write stuff down for an exponential productivity boost for you and your team. It’s tempting to think that you’re saving time by not writing notes, but the reality is that the alternative is a tsunami of meetings and questions that will quickly exceed the initial time savings. Synchronous communication like meetings and chats are cheap to start but very expensive in the long term because the outcomes are not ready to be reused. And more interestingly, getting used to this approach can make you more productive way after you stop working remotely!

What else do you consider key to be effective working remotely?