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If you’re managing a team (and a calendar with enough 1:1s to make your head spin), you probably don’t need a definition of asynchronous collaboration. You need a way to make it happen, STAT.

Staying in-sync (without all the syncs) is Part I of the dream. 

Helping people stay in flow (with fewer interruptions) is Part II.

And making asynchronous work the norm—not the exception—is Part III.

In this post, we’ll zip through what’s been covered ad nauseam since COVID-19 flipped the way we work on its head. We needed and need that stuff—but only insofar as it informs an efficient, actionable, and long-term playbook for working async.  

Asynchronous vs synchronous collaboration

It doesn’t matter whether your team is ten feet or ten hours apart. If you value helping everyone do their best work, getting sh*t done, and making an impact, very little should happen in a vacuum. (👋, information silos!) 

Collaboration isn’t only key to building institutional knowledge, increasing productivity, and deepening relationships. It also makes it possible to:

• Make more informed decisions
• Deliver creative solutions to complex problems
• Leverage diverse perspectives, experiences, and skills

Information/idea sharing usually happens in one of two ways. Use the asynchronous vs. synchronous collaboration chart below with your team to confirm you’re on the same page about when, how, and where work should get done.

Asynchronous vs. Synchronous Collaboration

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In case your team needs more incentives to default to asynchronous vs synchronous communication, don’t miss the six advantages covered in more detail below.👇

Asynchronous collaboration benefits 

If everyone already wants to minimize interruptions and maximize focus time, asynchronous collaboration probably won’t be a hard sell. 

But if you’re surrounded by extroverts who *love* a quick huddle and are always game to hop on a call, you may have your work cut out for you. Here are a few benefits to make getting buy-in—and changing people’s habits—a little easier.

1. Less context switching 🙅‍♂️

If you want to start with a heavy hitter, start here. 

Going all in on asynchronous collaboration means less jumping back and forth between:

• Tasks
• Topics
• Types of work
• Open tabs 🫠

Which means it’s easier for everyone—introverts, extroverts, and everyone in between—to take a proactive approach to batching similar tasks, eating the frog, and contributing to collaborative projects when it makes the most sense.

2. Fewer meetings 📆

Another day, another stat about how much time we waste in meetings. 😅

What’s the latest (vote for asynchronous communication)?

• The average employee participates in at least eight meetings a week
• 71% of meetings could have been covered in an email or another method
• Workers spend as much as 31 hours per month in unproductive meetings
• 65% of employees agree that meetings prevent them from completing their own work
• U.S. businesses lose a combined $37 billion a year (or 300,000 hours each year) to unnecessary meetings

The better your team gets at working together, separately, the fewer meetings you’ll need. And when you do meet, it’ll be for the right reasons. To build trust and relationships with others, have freeform, live conversations, and feel the energy of your teammates.

3. Increased productivity 🙏

You’ve got your noise canceling headphones, your second cup of coffee/tea, Inbox Zero, a prioritized to-do list, and all the energy you need to get sh*t done. And then the interruptions start. 

A Slack message turns into a quick huddle. An email turns into a calendar invite. A quick sidebar turns into a 30-minute digression. Before you know it, all the focus you’d stored up is long gone. 🪫

By agreeing to default to asynchronous collaboration whenever possible, you can help your team:

• Avoid feeling drained faster than usual
• Focus with fewer distractions
• Set boundaries to take care of business
• Become more operationally excellent

4. Better work/life balance ⚖️

What makes boundaries hard to stick to? An overreliance on synchronous work—especially when paired with always-on tools. 📱

Asynchronous collaboration normalizes less instantaneous responses, and benefits anyone who:

• Works with people in different time zones
• Wants to plan their workday based on their most productive hours
• Needs time to fill their creative well 

5. A level playing field 🫶🏿

The loudest person on your team may be in their element when they’re thinking out loud, but what about the deep thinker who needs a minute to prepare their thoughts? 

They might never get that minute, in a conversation dominated by big personalities. Asynchronous collaboration makes it possible to level the playing field—especially for introverts and anyone who isn’t in a position of power. 

If you lean into working asynchronously, the quieter people on your team can:

• Share their winning ideas and be heard 
• Minimize any anxiety in social situations
• Avert the fear of being talked over
• Avoid the frustration of being overshadowed

6. More transparency and fewer knowledge gaps ✅

Even in the most inclusive synchronous meetings, communication is inherently less open—leading to a higher risk of knowledge gaps. 👀

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What else is avoidable? All the time spent tracking down information stored in people’s heads and getting new stakeholders up to speed, as goals and initiatives inevitably evolve.

7. Stronger documentation culture 👊

What’s an ideal forcing function for prioritizing documentation? Asynchronous collaboration. 👯

Without a strong culture of documentation, it’s tempting to get lazy about knowledge sharing. Which means the resources and insights people need to do their best work aren’t readily available. Which makes continuous learning (something we should all be doing!) much harder than it needs to be.

Documenting key policies and procedures will help you and your team:

• Default to low-context, to proactively help each other avoid blockers 
• Minimize repetitive questions 
• Stay aligned and in flow, even and especially during rapid change

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The async playbook: 7 ways to empower teams and increase focus

In theory—the more time your team can spend in get sh*t done mode, the more you will too. And the more time everyone will have to:

• Get deep work done
• Feel accomplished every day
• Hit their goals and get noticed 

To go from “in theory” to “in practice,” here are some suggestions from people who believe conversation is king and asynchronous collaboration is queen. 👑

1. Make it easy for people to decide between sync vs. async 

What slows everyone down? Lack of clarity.

To empower everyone to use their best judgment—no matter what time it is or where they are in the world—tweak the criteria below to suit your company culture and collective needs.

We should work asynchronously if:

• The topic isn’t urgent, and meeting isn’t the best use of anyone’s time 
• The project can be divided into smaller parts that can be worked on independently
• Documentation and async communication can effectively capture and convey information
• It’d be beneficial to have materials people can go back and reference 
• There are systems in place to support asynchronous collaboration 
• Coordinating calendars is a nightmare, with teammates in multiple time zones  

We should meet if: 

• Our #1 goal is to connect and build rapport
• Critical feedback and/or sensitive topics are on the agenda, and there’s a high risk of misinterpretation
• We want to brainstorm and feed off each other’s energy and ideas 
• We need immediate input and real-time decisions from multiple people to move forward 
• Interactive engagement is more important than concentrated, individual work
• There’s a crisis

2. Default to async—internally and externally 

Knowing whether to work asynchronously vs. synchronously is half the battle. Getting your team to default to Option A is the other half.

How to increase the ratio of async to sync collaboration internally:

• Lead by example. 😎 To start—cut unnecessary meetings and double down on documentation.
• Implement a meeting-free day. 🤩 Designate a day each week with no “quick sync” requests. Give everyone the opportunity to experience the upsides of uninterrupted work—so they can be more thoughtful about their next request to work synchronously.
• Define urgent. ⏲️ Self-explanatory on the surface; illuminating underneath. 
• Empower people to push back. 💪🏿 “Any chance we can work async on this?” is a great question to ask.
• Host a mini-retrospective for every meeting for a month. 🔍 At the end of each one, ask your team if the meeting could have been handled asynchronously (and if so, how).

How to encourage asynchronous collaboration with your external partners:

• Share your goals to work async as much as possible. 🤞🏽 Once you’ve had a kickoff call to get to know a contractor, freelancer, or agency, explain why you have a bias for async collaboration.
• Set systems up that will make it easy to work asynchronously. ⚙️ Technology is your friend, here. More on this below! 

3. Build an asynchronous collaboration tech stack

Using the right tool for the right task is a good rule of thumb in general—but it’s especially important if you want to operationalize asynchronous communication and collaboration.

Here are five of our favorites.

Tango

Explain anything to anyone, without jumping on another screen share. 🎉

Use Tango to:

• Document any process in seconds
• Automatically create beautiful how-tos guide with screenshots 
• Deliver interactive walkthroughs showing people see exactly what to do and where to click
• Guide your team to success, right on their screen (without tab switching!) 
• Break the interruption cycle, stay in flow, and get more sh*t done, faster 

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Asana

To manage team projects and individual tasks. 🫶

Use Asana to:

• Create and organize tasks into projects, assign them to team members, set due dates, and track progress without (another) status update meeting 
• Comment on tasks, share files, and have discussions within task threads so communication is contextual, and there’s no need for scattered email threads
• Keep team members in the loop about task assignments, due dates, and changes with notifications and reminders 
• Increase visibility into individual and shared goals, as well as project schedules, dependencies, and milestones

Notion

The digital workspace of our dreams. 🌟

Use Notion to:

• Create an organized repository of information to cut down on FAQs about company policies, project documentation, and best practices
• Leverage a wide range of customizable templates for meeting notes, project plans, goal tracking, etc. to save time on document creation
• Share pages, databases, and projects with others, allowing for asynchronous collaboration, comments, and discussions

Figma

To design, prototype, and gather feedback all in one place. 🎯

Use Figma to:

• Create visually appealing interfaces for websites, web applications, mobile apps, and more
• Collaborate with multiple people on the same design file at the same time
• Create wireframes and interactive prototypes to design and test user experiences
• Create reusable components, define style guides, and ensure design consistency across projects
• Simplify the handoff process between designers and developers

Miro

A collaborative online whiteboard platform. 💭

Use Miro to:

• Bring ideas together with freeform drawings, sticky notes, mind maps, and more
• Create design boards, conduct design critiques, and gather feedback asynchronously 
• Iterate on designs, diagrams, flowcharts, and wireframes simultaneously
• Create Kanban boards, Gantt charts, and timelines to visualize tasks, set priorities, assign responsibilities, and track progress
• Connect your tools and close your tabs

Loom

Everything you love about video, without the calendar invite.

Use Loom to: 

• Explain anything clearly and effortlessly—and skip the meeting
• Share video updates, project summaries, or feedback on your own schedule
• Interact with emoji reactions, time-stamped comments, and more interactive features
• Share knowledge without walls of text 

4. Trust your team

It’s going to be hard to do #1, #2, and #3 without #4.

Leaning into asynchronous collaboration may mean letting go of the ways you’ve assessed people’s productivity in the past. What’s out? Looking exclusively at hours worked and meetings attended, for sure. But also—looking for the little green dot announcing people’s (active) presence on Slack, and other common traps that make it easy to mistake busyness for effectiveness.  

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What matters most?

• Quality of work, innovation, and collaboration
• Solutions provided, impact made, and progress driven
• Goals achieved and exceeded

5. Go beyond asynchronous communication to asynchronous learning 

Asynchronous communication tools are obviously central to asynchronous collaboration. 

But to make async work work for the long run, you’ll need to find a way to go beyond mostly one-way status updates and encourage two-way learning.

Screen shares, live workshops, formal trainings, and classroom-style lectures have their time and place. But what’s the real unlock? 🔓 Making learning on the job asynchronously as easy as it should be.

Tools like Tango make it simple to:

• Capture and share expertise, instantly
• Proactively deliver microlearning moments (at scale!)
• Leverage curated insights from the experts when and where you need them
• Source process improvements from the bottom up
• Level up shared knowledge (when something is out of date, doesn’t make sense, or there’s a better way to perform a task) 

6. Make information easily accessible

We touched on the importance of documentation before—but here’s a stat to hammer it home: 81% of employees feel frustrated when they can’t access the information they need to complete a task.

If you’re serious about wanting to unblock your team, centralizing your team’s know-how is just as important as choosing the right tech and setting up asynchronous workflows.

Effective documentation means people don’t need to be available—or even awake—at the same time to make progress. 👌

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7. Glorify deep work

Deep work has all sorts of benefits, including but not limited to:

• Full immersion and deep engagement 
• Improved learning and skill acquisition
• Increase autonomy and sense of ownership 
• Reduced stress and burnout
• Higher quality outcomes

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