Async Communication - What and Why

date

Jan 29, 2024

slug

async-comms-what-and-why

status

Published

Introduction

In this post, I’ll be sharing, as implied by the title, what async communication is and why you may want to explicitly add this to your arsenal. This post is essentially meant to be a quick intro into this — where we go through this at a high level.

Context

But first, context. Context is important, super important. Let’s add context both from a micro and macro perspective.

Micro - I’m coming at this as a frontend developer who is working in a 100% remote environment.

Macro - You’ll want to make sure that the matter you’re communicating about is not an emergency (e.g. the application server is down). For those situations that are not emergencies, you’ll want to make sure the culture is on board. The company, or team, you work with must be on board with supporting this type of culture. Otherwise, you’ll be spinning your wheels to no end.

With this out of the way, let’s get into the fun part.

What is Async Comms

In short: It’s communicating via some channel (e.g. Slack) without expecting an immediate response.

To contrast this, much of our communication in our personal, and sometimes professional, lives involve communicating with folks by talking face to face or in Zoom meetings. These are synchronous modes of communication.

On the flip side, in asynchronous communication, we leverage technology to communicate a message without needing an answer right away. For example, leaving a comment in Jira for someone to answer at a later time.

The question becomes why would we like to do this? How does this help us work in a remote environment? Why?

Why Async Comms

If you work in a remote team, then you’ll want to leverage the power of async communications. The reasons for this are many; let’s look at the main ones that come to mind.

Avoid Distractions and Focus Time

This is my favorite point. Async communication has singlehandedly helped me achieve deep levels of focus time.

Rather than getting tapped on Slack, or on the shoulders in person, I’ve been able to work in an environment, where unless it’s an emergency, I can focus on work. Periodically, I can then check the communication channels.

This has been key to unlocking a new level of focus and flow, where I’m not constantly context switching. This is key!

It’s lead to an environment where both my teammates and I are happier and producing higher quality of work.

Practical to Address Limitations

In many cases, it’s just practical and required. This is the case when you’ve got team members spread throughout the globe in different timezones.

For example, let’s say you’ve got teammates in a timezone that is 5 hours ahead of you (e.g. you live in NYC and have folks in London).

When this is the case, you can’t just “sync” any moment of the day. Instead, you need to be able to communicate efficiently and effectively for when that person is back online.

Thus, enter async communication. 😃

Knowledge Base

One underrated benefit I’ve seen is that it forces you to build up your documentation, if you’d like to be able to help folks outside of your timezone operate independent of your time.

Thus, what this creates is an environment where you’re essentially self serviced to a certain extent. Because you can’t tap someone else’s shoulder or have your shoulder tapped constantly, you have access to documentation that must be kept up to date in order to keep team members aligned.

This is great, the more folks that have access to knowledge, the better. This is the dream, not needing to be dependent on anyone to keep things running smoothly.

Paper Trail

With needing to document most communications in written or video form, you can now reference various different threads if other teammates need access to context for why a decision was made. It also is self documenting for you, when you’re working on a task.

For example, commenting on a Jira ticket to clarify requirements, designs, and more, you can now go back in time to see how you or others got to a specific point.

As I mentioned earlier, context is critical.

Higher Quality of Life

If you don’t constantly need to be in front of your computer, this really liberates you and the rest of the team from the requirement of having to be in front of a computer screen at all times, while working remotely. Instead, unless there is a planned sync for some reason or emergency, then you feel empowered to go off and do the kind of deep work you’ve been dreaming about.

This to me, personally, has lead to a higher quality of life.

I am not constantly stressing to ensure I answer everyone at every specific moment.

Others

Perhaps you see a why that I don’t. This is meant to highlight some of the top reasons why I constantly choose to communicate in an asynchronous format. Feel free to think about some more I did not mention.

My Ultimate Philosophy

In general, my thinking is: Default to async communications, and move to sync when something is not clear or there’s an emergency.

Conclusion

If you can’t already tell, async communication is super important to me. It’s not only practical, but it really does add to one’s quality of life and work. I absolutely love it.