Almanac
Our team at Almanac is fully distributed around the world and works with an async-first mentality. Async communication allows teammates more time to do deep work and get into flow. It also tends to produce more thoughtful direction & feedback as you are provided time to crystallize your thoughts.
In practice, that means we:
- Dedicate a majority of our time to accomplishing our goals via async work.
- Ruthlessly remove unnecessary standing meetings and check-ins if not absolutely necessary that they are synchronous.
- Create, share, and update documentation as our primary source of truth.
- Use workflows instead of meetings to ask for feedback, request approval, share out information, or updated documentation.
- Don't expect coworkers to reply immediately to pings or requests.
- Regularly update task boards and KPIs so coworkers can see progress and blockers without status updates.
- Have a quarterly "Async Week" with zero synchronous meetings.
Asynchronous communication is how we keep up in a way that respects team members' time and prioritizes productivity.
By no means are we perfect at async, but these practices and processes have given us the ability to achieve so much more than we could have otherwise.