Most companies didn’t go remote. They shipped everyone a laptop, bolted Zoom onto the same approval chains, and called it a day. That wasn’t remote work—it was office work in sweatpants: the same meetings, the same status theater, the same “quick syncs,” just piped through a webcam.
Working from home ≠ working remotely. (share this quote) There’s a world of difference between being forced out of the office and intentionally building a distributed, async culture. That difference is what Open and Async is about—and as of today, you can read it.
Open and Async is the opinionated, practical playbook for the two practices that make distributed work actually work: working in the open and communicating asynchronously. Async is the operating system; remote is the hardware. It’s how the next generation of tech leaders already think—and it’s a learnable skill for everyone else.
If you’ve spent any time on this blog, the argument will feel familiar—the book grew out of these posts. It’s where the scattered pieces finally become one ordered playbook: the full case, start to finish, with the connective tissue no single post ever had room for. Everything you’ve read here, plus the two-thirds that never made it to the blog.
What separates teams that thrive
More than a decade of remote-first work at GitHub made one thing clear: the tooling was never what separated the teams that thrived from the ones that just survived. Companies would adopt those workflows wholesale—add issues and pull requests on top of a hierarchy-driven approval process—and wonder why nothing changed. Tools: right. Bottlenecks: intact. The result was Zoom fatigue plus all the old dysfunction, now faster.
The teams that pulled ahead did something different. They gave every decision a URL so context survived reorgs and departures. They treated meetings as escalation, not default. They worked loudly so impact was visible without anyone performing busyness. None of it was intuition—it was a set of repeatable practices, and Open and Async is those practices, written down so you can put them to work.
Who it’s for
Two audiences, both in remote and distributed work:
- Managers—build teams that ship without constant synchronous coordination, and retain your best people by respecting their time, focus, and intelligence.
- Individual contributors—become visible, effective, and promotable on the strength of your work, not the luck of your seating chart. Interviewing at a remote-first company? This is the playbook they wish you’d already read.
What’s inside
A few of the things you’ll learn how to do:
- Treat meetings as a point of escalation, not the default—and reclaim the hours you’re losing to “quick syncs.”
- Give every decision a URL so context survives reorgs, departures, and Slack purges.
- Run 1:1s, weekly reports, and career conversations that aren’t a tax on everyone’s time.
- Lead—whether or not you have direct reports—by showing your work.
- Hire, onboard, and transition teams to remote-first work without losing what made them good.
It’s 575 pages, and the method ships as more than a manuscript. There’s even a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server that drops the book’s async-first practices straight into your editor, so an AI agent can draft a decision doc or pressure-test a status update against the same rubric the book teaches.
Stop digitizing the office. Start building something better. (share this quote)
