Async isn’t just for remote teams 📩

Remote workers are more productive than office people. That is a fact! While the reason for this is not entirely clear, the CEO of Doist makes a great point – “the benefits of remote work aren’t necessarily the result of location independence, but rather the byproduct of async communication”.

This is basically giving a team more control over when they communicate with their teammates – you don’t need to be working remotely for that! This can be done in the office too!

We have written about finding the right balance between sync and async before based on an interview with Buffer’s VP of Engineering. Buffer brought out the pros and cons of each of these communication ways have:

Synchronous – chatting online, really great for being connected, bonding as a team, real-time collaboration, being creative with ideas

Asynchronous – people respond when it suits them, not a lot of meetings, no chatting going on at all times, so everyone can work with their heads down

If the nature of the work allows, it’s a good idea to move towards async communication as much as possible. This will provide deeper work time and also increases productivity. 

We all know that there can be days we spend on meetings and calls and won’t get anything important done but with async communication this can be history.

With the rise of async communication, will we now lose all these fancy chat apps  and go back to the plain old email?