# Why you should work asynchronously

**TL;DR:** Async is what makes remote work actually work. It produces better outcomes, improves work-life balance, and makes room for flow, by moving past Cold War-era workflows.

Published 2022-03-17 · [View on Ben Balter's site](https://ben.balter.com/2022/03/17/why-async/)

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Most corporate workflows haven't evolved much from [their Cold War predecessors](https://ben.balter.com/2015/11/18/tools-to-empower-open-collaboration/#evolving-beyond-cold-war-workflows). Sure, we've replaced typewriters with laptops, inter-office mail with email (or Slack), and in-person meetings with Zoom, but if you diagram out how people work and how information flows, not much has changed over the past seventy or so years beyond the cadence. We've digitized paper-based workflows, but we haven't reimagined them for the modern (and distributed) world.

The pandemic moved most of those workflows online, but few companies [made the maturity leap to fully remote-first](https://ma.tt/2020/04/five-levels-of-autonomy/), leaving their employees less productive and more likely to burn out. The difference between being *able* to work remotely and [being able to *thrive* remotely](https://web.archive.org/web/20220118191050/https://www.thegreatcodeadventure.com/my-long-distance-relationship-with-github/) is the ability to work not just digitally, but *asynchronously*.

## Working asynchronously

Asynchronous work is knowledge workers'[^5] natural evolution beyond the assembly-line-inspired, ad hoc, and bespoke workflows that continue to influence most companies today. Specifically, working asynchronously means:

- not requiring people to be in a certain place at a certain time, or working on a certain thing at a certain time,
- allowing individuals to be productive without waiting for others to respond or complete a task,
- reducing batch size so that work can progress faster than its slowest component,
- minimizing unplanned interruptions and demands for immediate attention,
- decoupling work from communication,[^4] and ultimately
- granting workers the trust to work autonomously in the pursuit of shared goals.

## Benefits of working asynchronously

Async work is [a forcing function](https://ben.balter.com/2015/09/21/open-source-behind-the-firewall/#how-you-work-is-as-important-as-what-you-work-on). It gets you the same outcomes as synchronous work,[^6] and it's more productive and more enjoyable than working in person. Specifically:

- **Inclusivity.** When done right, async work is timezone agnostic. It also reduces proximity bias and access to information imbalance. There’s no “you had to be there” when “there” is "online" and "anytime". Async also means that [all voices, not just the loudest, fastest to unmute, or most extroverted, are able to contribute to the conversation](https://ben.balter.com/2024/01/08/dissenting-voices/).
- **Produces better outcomes faster.** Writing things down forces a shift to better (even if *perceived* to be slower), more deliberate decision-making, and to higher-quality communication and planning. When teams distill their ideas and intentions in writing, they cut ambiguity, imprecision, and churn, and over time they ship the best ideas faster.
- **Discoverability and permanence.** Async runs on written communication and documentation: decisions, process, and artifacts get captured and linked, which makes the work [discoverable, permanent, open, self-documenting, succinct, and transparent](https://ben.balter.com/2023/05/19/pull-requests-are-a-form-of-documentations/). That pays off in [a number](https://ben.balter.com/2015/11/12/why-urls/#the-value-of-giving-concepts-urls) of [benefits](https://ben.balter.com/2022/02/16/leaders-show-their-work/#the-value-of-showing-your-work).
- **Create space for learning.** Most of us don't learn at the speed of synchronous human interaction. You can pick things up by watching and participating lightly, and async creates the space for reflection, processing, and ultimately learning. This is true of both the business and technical problem at hand and the organizational culture and values that it socializes through its operation.
- **Shift to higher-value work.** When knowledge workers ([especially managers](https://ben.balter.com/2012/12/16/deprecate-management/)) stop spending countless cycles shuttling information around the organization, they move from low-value work to higher-value work, solving novel, more interesting, and if you believe [creative minds want to be creative](https://ben.balter.com/2013/02/04/what-is-a-hacker/#the-hacker-way), ultimately more enjoyable problems. As a result, the shift to async simultaneously increases both productivity and overall job satisfaction.
- **Work-life balance.** When work becomes largely time-agnostic, you get more flexibility and better work-life balance. Work is measured on its impact, not time in seat, meaning employees can schedule their working hours around child care, a doctor's appointment, a mid-day grocery run,[^3] and when they personally work best.
- **Distributed teams.** Distributed teams thrive on async, which means your team can tap into the world's top talent, expand your business globally, and enable "follow the sun" work by spanning across timezones. This is especially beneficial for on-call roles like incident response or SRE that can be on call during their local working hours and for customer-facing roles like support, sales, and marketing that specialize in the regions where they are located.
- **Parallelization and flow.** Async necessitates adopting non-blocking workflows that [parallelize work](https://web.archive.org/web/20220124061958/https://remote.com/blog/why-you-should-be-doing-async-work)[^1] and ultimately [encourage flow](https://ben.balter.com/2020/03/18/tips-for-working-remotely/#1-prefer-asynchronous-communication).[^2] It's the shift from waterfall to agile, but applied to personal and organizational time management and productivity.

> **Won't async just slow everything down?** The optimal cycle rate will speed up the overall system. A single batch may *feel* slower, because you're waiting for a well-thought-out reply with links to source material instead of the instant gratification of a series of stream-of-consciousness chat messages. But the team ships the idea sooner. Here's why:
>
> 1. Parallel work minimizes blockers.
> 2. Clarity, thoroughness, and forward thinking reduce decision churn ([fast thinking vs. slow thinking](https://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Fast-Slow-Daniel-Kahneman-ebook/dp/B00555X8OA/?tag=benbalter07-20)).
> 3. One-to-many communication optimizes for the long tail of recipients, not the single sender.
> 4. Shared context builds up and increases the team's tempo, quality, and resiliency over time.
>

## Async takes a remote-first culture, not just remote tools

To make remote work successful, it's not enough to digitize traditional workflows. Asynchronous work offers many advantages, but in practice, the shift to async requires adoption of remote-first tools and, more importantly, a remote-first culture. That means defaulting to things like GitHub or Google Docs as your primary means of collaboration and reserving more synchronous tools like Slack or Zoom as *points of escalation* only when the urgency or complexity of the communication requires it. If you're considering adopting more asynchronous workflows (you should!), I encourage you to check out my previous post on [*how* to approach working asynchronously](https://ben.balter.com/2014/11/06/rules-of-communicating-at-github/). After all, [how you work is just as important as what you work on](https://ben.balter.com/2015/09/21/open-source-behind-the-firewall/#how-you-work-is-as-important-as-what-you-work-on). You've already traded the typewriter for a laptop. Now trade in the workflow that came with it.

*Thank you and :sparkles: to [Jed Verity](https://github.com/glortho) and [Lizzy Soltis](https://github.com/lizzysoltis) for the conversations, observations, frameworks, and suggestions that inspired (and are reflected in) this post. Thanks also to [randw on Twitter](https://twitter.com/randw), who, when I asked about ideas for this post, [replied](https://twitter.com/randw/status/1504212558227513345) with [a presentation I gave 8 years ago](https://ben.balter.com/open-sourcing-government/) and subsequently forgot about.*

[^1]: This is the engineering concept of multiplexing applied to humans. Rather than waiting for one large unit of work to conclude before starting the next, you start 2, 3, or 4 small tasks in parallel, and make progress on each individually. Smaller, more frequent changes let you gain confidence with each one, respond closer to real time, and allocate people better.

[^2]: Knowledge workers [are most productive](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology)) when they have [large blocks of uninterrupted time](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=noc-DKZoNGU). A two-hour block of time is not fungible with four thirty-minute blocks, or more realistically, that thirty-minute block being further subdivided into three ten-minute blocks of uninterrupted time between responding to DMs.

[^3]: Or a haircut, or just going for a walk around the block because you're not feeling it. Work when you're productive and do what you need to do to take care of your life, when you need to.

[^4]: Making work naturally visible is one of the "cheapest" and most impactful forms of communication for distributed teams. This requires [low-friction tooling that organically captures and exposes process](https://ben.balter.com/2015/11/18/tools-to-empower-open-collaboration/#tools-in-practice) and the necessary psychological safety and trust to make high-visibility workflows low-risk for those involved.

[^5]: If you're a professional, there's a good chance that you're a [knowledge worker](https://ben.balter.com/2015/11/12/why-urls/#knowledge-work-as-craft). Your deliverable at the end of each day doesn’t actually exist beyond electrical impulses in the cloud. Through meetings, discussions, and drafting, you create organizational knowledge.

[^6]: You do lose a lot that you get for "free" from working in person, unless you [purposefully recreate](https://ben.balter.com/2020/03/18/tips-for-working-remotely/) it.