Unpredictable days are shapeless days. This represents the classic maker-manager paradox. Makers need contiguous blocks of time to achieve meaningful outcomes. A calendar driven schedule is amongst the worst blows to a maker’s productivity. We can’t be proud of this way of working.

I recently spent a couple of days in an office. That experience made me reflect a bit more about the tensions between remote work and the role of the office. In this short post, I share some thoughts about the purpose and a potential future for the office.

If decisions are the fuel for high-performing teams, a permissions culture is its kryptonite. In this post I discuss three areas you must focus on, so your team can maintain a high decision velocity.

I notice that some teams, organisations and products are attempting to recreate an office in the cloud. This is a counterproductive trend. In this post I explain why being async-first is a better idea.

Constant urgency is the enemy of deep work and an async-first culture. Often this means getting on meetings, and being ok with days full of IM interruptions. With enough of these “urgent” tasks, even the most motivated teams can slip back into their old, synchronous ways of working. In this post, I explain techniques to deal with urgency.

In large organisations, it’s tough for a small team to cling to its own subculture for too long. It’s not impossible to have an ‘async island of excellence’! It’s just hard. I want to use this post to reflect on the challenges your async-first team could face. In the process, I want to explain why it makes sense for the entire company to eventually go async-first.

The agile manifesto claims that the best way of communicating in a team, is face-to-face. Does that claim hold up to scrutiny? 21 years after the manifesto came to life, have technology, the nature of our projects and our ways of organising and working taught us something different? I explore all these questions and more.

Communication is a big part of an exec’s role. In fact, many people would argue that if an exec isn’t communicating, what are they doing? In today’s post I want to demystify asynchronous company communication for the executive. If you’re leading a department, or your own company, think of this as your guide to effective internal communication.

If you learned to be a manager in an office-centric setup, async-first remote work may seem like an opaque way to lead your people. How do you manage without walking around and listening? In this post, I’ll unpack the risks of leading unhappy, disengaged or struggling team members in remote teams and what you as a manager can do to pre-empt these problems.

Senior leaders are often victims to blind spots and corporate superstition. And just like in real life, superstition hurts at work as well. So, let’s examine some common superstitions we all face at work, with a critical lens. By the end of this post, we’ll know which of them hold up to logical scrutiny.

The future is uncertain. So, it helps to keep an adaptive mindset so we can respond to this uncertainty. I believe there are five key trends that are shaping the future of work, and, in this post, I want to share my thoughts about them.

Every work model has its pitfalls. It’s not as if a remote workplace can’t go south. In today’s post I want to explore some anti-patterns I’ve seen in remote-first and “hybrid” organisations that can make your workplace toxic. When you know of these possibilities ahead of time, you’ll be able to pre-empt them and put the right guardrails in place for your team.

To move away from the office mindset, then we’ll need to unlearn a few unhealthy habits we’ve picked up over the years. In this post, I want to share four of these habits. Benign as they may seem, they are pernicious obstacles in your path to being an async-first team or organisation. Let’s explore each of them and the problems they create. As we do so, I’ll outline a few alternatives to these behaviour

You don’t want work to feel mechanical and for people to feel like robots. The team should be able to balance efficiency at work with their sense of being human. In this post I want to show you how being intentional about synchronous communication can help you build a tightly knit async-first team.

There are different approaches to estimation and planning depending on the outcomes you’re looking for and the context you’re operating in. Making synchronous workshops efficient is part of this. Many activities can be asynchronous as well. You also need to consider if estimates are necessary in your context. I cover all these topics and more, in this post.

Onboarding is one of the first areas where you’ll see payoff for the effort you spend in writing things up. In this post, let’s explore a few mindset shifts and a few tips and tricks you can use to bring people aboard your team. As you read on, you’ll notice how your handbook and your developer documentation are among the key ingredients to brew the perfect onboarding storm.

In an async-first culture, the role of a manager is crucial. If the company is the mother-ship, the manager’s the employee’s bridge to it. They should be the individuals that know the most about their people, their skills, abilities and strengths, their personalities and their aspirations. You need managers who lead with care. In this post, I want to address how you can show that care as a leader and a manager.

Depending on the level you operate at as a leader, you probably have some discretionary budgets available to you. When you spend that money, your company wants you to get the most bang for their buck. In this post, I want to explore four areas of expenditure that’ll make a big impact on your remote teams.

In today’s post, I want to address four sets of factors that’ll affect your team’s productivity and happiness. As a leader, you’ll to address these factors using your judgement, experience and vision. Your choices will influence your new async agile team’s behaviour.

One sign of a healthy culture is that people feel motivated by the work they do. Yes, there’ll be good days and bad, but on the whole you want your people to enjoy the work they do. In today’s post, I want to examine autonomy, mastery and purpose as factors that help you create a motivating environment for the people you work with.