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.
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.
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.
Block focus time
Block out focus time on your calendar so people know exactly when you are available.