If all you want to share is a “yesterday, today, blockers” update, you don’t need a standup meeting.

There’s an expression in Latin - festina lente. It means “make haste slowly”. We optimise for speed in software development. Deep work is often the casualty in this quest for speed. Slowing things down through writing has several benefits.

Most project management tools allow you to define a workflow for your team and visualise that workflow as a task board. When you revisit your workflow be careful not to design for the exceptions and worst-case scenarios.

Most project management tools allow you to define a workflow for your team and visualise that workflow as a task board. Your task board should be the source of truth for all the work your team is up to.

Broadcast how your team will interact with other teams, using a TEAM API.

This play has examples of how you can bring the phrase “async-first” into everyday conversation, by making it a catchphrase.

Distributed projects are chaotic to run without artefacts. The DEEP acronym provides you a mnemonic to remember what to document.

Complex topics need time to understand and to engage with. WUCA outlines a team approach to deal with complex discussions.

Identify your team values using a short, one hour workshop. By the end of this exercise, you’ll have a list of values and rough notes about what they mean to you.

Agreeing on response times for various collaboration tools and channels that you use on the team is important.

Writing up your team’s ways of working wrt collaboration, the environments, tools and project metrics is a good start.

Project handbooks are a fast and effective way to align the team, share knowledge and onboard people.

A great place to document the static/stable stuff on the project is right in the codebase, in a good, old README file, at the top level of your project folder.

Learn from the industry pioneers like Gitlab, Automattic, BaseCamp, Doist about asynchronous work.

Meetings as the last resort - not the first option.

Build the reading muscle, start with anything that interests you. It’ll help you get more productive with your asynchronous work experience.

Writing is the number one async and remote superpower. How about you hone that craft?