Async Weeks

Next week we’re kicking off an “Async Week” within Engineering, Product & Design at Close.

We already work pretty asynchronously and don’t have a ton of meetings. But we use Async Weeks to flex our async muscles further, with zero prescheduled meetings during the week.

The idea is to encourage deep work and to be extra thoughtful about how we communicate.

Why / Goals: To encourage more time for deep work – write up your ideas, reading, thinking, thoughtfully reviewing and replying on docs/Issues/PRs. To challenge us to be thoughtful and experiment with how we work: try async where we might reach for a meeting by default, break the default routine of recurring meetings that fill our calendars, and help with meeting/Zoom fatigue.

The team wanted more

After a couple of test runs, the team overwhelmingly agreed we should do Async Weeks regularly.

Survey results for “Should we do Async Week again?” – 92% of 25 responses said yes, every cycle

We follow a Shape Up-inspired product development process, with 6-week cycles and 2-week cool-downs, so we’re doing an Async Week once every couple of months.

Async 1:1s

Managers are also encouraged to hold async 1:1s that week (written, or via Loom). It’s been a nice forcing function for questions that benefit from some reflection rather than an off-the-cuff answer.

Here are some good questions (that I stole):

How are you feeling about your work life, 0–10? How are you feeling about your life overall, 0–10? How are we performing as a company, 0–10? What is it like to work with me, 0–10? Each followed by: What would make it a 10?

“But we already don’t have many meetings”

That was the biggest hesitation I heard. It’s also very common for new hires to tell us we work much more async than their previous companies did. I think both are good things!

As our team grows (EPD is now at 35 people), we’ll keep experimenting with how we work.

What would you get done if your calendar looked like this?