Async: The Secret Ingredient to Successful Remote Work

In 2019, people packed their laptops, headed home, and locked their doors.

The Remote Work Boom began, but there was one problem.

Nobody told them how to work, so they relied on what they were already familiar with:

Synchronous Work

”Hi, can I ask you a question?”

”Hey, are you there?”

Every time I see one of these, I swear, a CPU cries up somewhere, and a program crashes.

Why is this important?

Effective remote work is a minmax game.

You aim to minimize the time lost due to interruptions while simultaneously maximizing the value gained from them.

Deep Dive

Remote work comes with one huge perk: they’re physically unable to interrupt you.

This allows people to complete a ton of deep work in a fraction of the time compared to sitting in an office.

However, remote work can be less effective than on-site or hybrid work unless you make it Async¹.

Good Async work is like starting a routine virus scan on your computer that runs in the background, leaving you focused on centering a div.

But as no antivirus can guess when you want a routine scan and what folder you’re interested in, your peers can’t guess what you want.

So next time, instead of asking, “Hey, are you there? I have a question.” ask, “Hey,<insert question here>?”.

Async work is about framing requests to allow others to process them when it suits them.

This framing has an additional side effect:

You might answer the question.

This is exactly what happened to Sir Andrew John Wiles while he was trying to figure out Fermat’s Last Theorem. I suggest you give this a read:

What does solving a 300-year-old mathematical problem can teach software engineers?

But even if writing and framing your problem doesn’t bring clarity, you still end up with a format that is processable by others, async.

This type of communication lets people respond at their convenience, promoting flexibility and efficiency in communication.

Last year, the internet was loud from titles like office work will be mandatory again, promotions will be linked to on-site work and non-negotiable office returns.

As someone who’s been working remotely for almost a decade, I feel this is rooted in not training people to work remotely and async.

What would help:

• workshops on async work

• managers promoting and encouraging async work

Remote work is here to stay.

Let’s turn it into async and get more done. 🚀

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📰 Weekly Shoutout

1. Planning is overrated, doing is underrated by

   John Crickett
   . Allow me to repeat my recent favorite quote from Mike Tyson one more: ”Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.”. The internet is full of thinkers but not a lot of doers.

2. How I almost quit because of $75 by

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   . Great personal stories from Anton. Sometimes, it’s fascinating how our lives are similar and how easy it is to use someone else’s learning to improve your life.

3. Staff Engineer Panel Summary -

   Ryan Peterman
   shares some great insights from a panel discussion with
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   ,
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   . If you want to be promoted from Senior to Staff, read this!

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1. For my non-technical readers: Asynchronous, in simple terms, means not happening at the same time. It’s like sending a letter instead of having a real-time conversation. You write your message and send it off, and the other person reads and responds when they have the time rather than needing to reply immediately.