The benefits of a more asynchronous workplace - <AUTHOR> https://doist.com/blog/asynchronous-communication/ <comment><USER2> I tried sharing these studies at my ex employers in Europe hoping they'd spare me the hellish 40 minute commute in stop/start traffic and they weren't interested at all.

Management there only values _" butt time in seats"_ and the ability to come over and interrupt you by tapping you on the shoulder whenever they need something.

As one of my ex CEOs put it: _" If I don't see my employees stressing out at thier desks I get the impression they're not working."_

Until we get over this psychological attachment of management loving to visually see their slaves on the open office plantation through their private panopticon[1] offices, remote won't take off no matter how many studies get published.

[1][https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon)

<comment><USER3> As someone who has gone to the dark side, there's an interesting tradeoff here. There's basically three scenarios:

(1) all employees are trusted and unmeasured, but you have to tap people on the shoulder every once in a while to confirm that they're on track. Naturally, this is easier if everyone is on-site.

(2) everyone is accountable for producing of tickets, and you can check that everyone is at least doing some work. Check-ins can happen via comments in tickets.

(3) Everyone just does whatever they think they're supposed to be doing, and the manager only finds out something is wrong when the employee volunteers the information or the project isn't delivered on-time.

(1) is the common case, (2) requires time and skills many managers don't have (and creates @#$% Jira commentary form the peanut gallery), (3) requires building an excellent team with years of mutual trust between them, and still goes wrong all the time.

Seeing you at your desk working, and asking a casual question or two at the water cooler is by far the easiest (laziest?) way to make sure things don't go too far sideways.

<comment><USER4> Reminds me of an old adage about tech work and other skilled labors: If you give me a task that takes a normal perosn 8 hours, and I finish it in 30 minutes, you're paying me for the skill, knowledge and experience that allows me to do it in 30 minutes. I do not owe you another 7.5 hours of work. I owe you the job being done, not the hours it should take to do it.

<comment><USER5> > I do not owe you another 7.5 hours of work.

Only if you are a contractor and you've fulfilled your contract. If you are a salaried employee I expect you to keep your hopper of tasks full so you aren't sitting around idle 95% of the day waiting for me to feed you 30 minute taskers

<comment><USER6> Why? As a salaried employee you're literally paying me for my ability to get work done, not for my hourly output. If the goal is to keep me busy for X number of hours a day, instead of getting a job done whatever it requires, why am I salaried?

<comment><USER5> > If the goal is to keep me busy for X number of hours a day, instead of > getting a job done whatever it requires, why am I salaried?

The "goal" in a lot of cases is nebulous (i.e. "keep developing the product", "improve stability", etc). There might not be a manager feeding you tasks every time you run out. At least in my company, you are expected to figure out on your own how to continually make the product better and proactively do it, not sit around idle after rapidly finishing the last task your manager gave you.

If you are just a dumb worker that can only work when your manager fills your queue, you are not valuable to me as a salaried employee (you are more valuable as a contractor who I can call upon for a one-off difficult task that you can then complete in 30 minutes).

<comment><USER6> So you're not trusting the salaried employee to use their judgement on how best to utilize their time, but instead assuming they instead use their skill to be a butt in a seat and working for at least 40 hours? What's special about the salary then? It's just easier than an hourly system?

<comment><USER5> You seem to be presenting confused ideas.

Here's what I believe:

If I pay you a salary, I want (roughly) 40 hours per week of productive work at your current skill level. Note: I consider sitting around thinking about things relevant to the product or company to be productive work. If you believe your level of output deserves higher compensation than you are receiving, come talk to me or find a company that will pay what you think you are worth. However, accepting a salary and then doing tasks really fast and then going idle (watching netflix, working on side projects, etc.) until your manager cattle prods you is not acceptable for a salaried employee; that would be more appropriate for a contractor where you can idle on your own dime.

<comment><USER7> If this is happening, it's 100% due to bad management. It means the employee wasn't given creative freedom and a strategic direction to go in. The very last thing any manager should ever do is punish their best employees (e.g. the person who can finish a whole day's worth of work very quickly).

<comment><USER5> > The very last thing any manager should ever do is punish their best > employees (e.g. the person who can finish a whole day's worth of work very > quickly).

They are not the "best employees" if they are constantly idling, waiting for me to tell them what to do next. People here seem to think the ideal manager/subordinate relationship is that of a worker thread pool where the manager fills the queue and the worker threads pull tasks off the queue.

Not so. The "best employees" are ones who can examine the current state of affairs, and then come to me and propose things to work on. The ideal manager/subordinate relationship is actually one where the workers are all artificial general intelligences that learn over time what the product is, how to improve it, and proactively create tasks to work on.

If you are a rockstar but only work as a a super-fast super-efficient thread in a worker thread pool, you are less valuable to me than a non-rockstar AGI who can dynamically recognize which tasks need to be done and only occasionally needs guidance and course-correction.

<comment><USER7> It sounds like you do value creativity and autonomy. If that's the case why would it matter how many hours someone was working? Judge them by their output, not how they got there.

<comment><USER8> This depends a lot on what the value of their output was. If they want to do their tasks 5 times faster than the interns and leave then they can do that for intern pay since that's the value they bring. If they are actually doing more valuable work that involves understanding the product, working with other teams, designing new systems, and they can still do it in less than 40 hours then that is fine. Being effective at driving projects and making decisions are a different kind of work that usually take some time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I work remotely.

I've noticed that one thing that make me work harder than in an office, is that I feel that I need to earn the trust that my employer gives me. In an office, sometimes I feel that just being there is enough to justify my salary, even if I'm just chatting with colleagues or browsing the web. I discipline myself better when I work remotely.

Another thing that makes a difference for me: I suffer from back pain when sitting in a chair for too long. At my place, I can lie down if needed.

On the downside, I suffer from being far from where decisions are taken, and I sometimes miss important information.

<comment><USER10> > _On the downside, I suffer from being far from where decisions are taken_

And your employer suffers from your lack of input in those decisions.

<comment><USER11> That may or may not have consequences for them but almost always will hurt the employee's career.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Since remote work seems to be the topic this article on async communication spawned I wanted to throw this out there for reactions.

First off let me acknowledge that some people prefer remote work and also say up front I do not.

I recent YouAreNotSoSmart podcast interviewed Laurie Santos from Yale and if I understood her research basically claims we often both individually and as a society choose things we think will make us happy but actually don't. Examples seemed to include anything that takes you away from people. One example was the ATM machine. It's more convenient than a bank teller but interacting with the teller adds to your quota of needed interaction for happiness. Things like the fact that you can order a Starbucks coffee on your phone and pick it up with no interaction as another tiny example. I'm sure those were minor examples but she was basically claiming we're often inadvertently choosing things that actually make us less happy.

For me I prefer in office work because I want to be around other people. I want them to interrupt me too. Not 100% of the time but I enjoy the camaraderie, the conversations, going over solutions together, etc...

So in that context, is it possible the push for remote work fits in that line? We think it will make us happy but it for many people it will have the unintended consequence of isolating them and actually make them less happy.

I'm not saying you shouldn't be given the choice. Maybe you are different. Maybe you have special needs (someone you need to take care of for example) or maybe you're remote location has family or friends around. But, if Laurie Santos is correct then maybe a large percent of people are actually making a bad choice?

PS: I don't know if I trust her research. I'm only passing on my interpretation what I though she said in the interview.

<comment><USER13> Here's an anecdote for you. I work remote and normally make time for activities or groups at least a few times a week. Once, after something upset me I decided to spend a couple weeks not going out. I rapidly went toasty. By the end of the first week I couldn't concentrate on anything. I was restless, anxious, and desperately unhappy. So yes, I need some social interaction to feel normal. But it doesn't come from my co-workers.

<comment><USER14> I think this is the key. I'm not sure "forced interaction" is the answer for everyone. I work remotely and spent yesterday morning for 2 hours just chatting with some folks at a coffee shop I regularly work out of over some common interests. That filled my "meaningful interaction" bucket more than 2 or 3 days of office work in my previous office'd life. My 2 cents as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The issue I often have with discussions of remote work vs. on-site, is how much confirmation bias tends to be incorporated into the conclusions made.

After about 16 years of on-site work (at various jobs), I did almost 5 years of remote work (for a single company), having just recently returned to an in- office role (despite focusing on landing another remote position, the best opportunity wasn't.)

And, frankly, I find neither inherently, categorically superior. It has far more to do with a number of unique variables, among them: culture, software tools, and the people themselves.

So while I do largely agree with the core argument of the linked post (roughly summarized: asynchronous communication helps facilitate productivity for knowledge workers), I also feel too much emphasis is placed on working remotely as inherent in part of the solution.

How about we just teach and incentivize people to, for example, not interrupt others unnecessarily, how to recognize when someone may be deeply focused on a task, how to indicate such an effort is currently underway, plus to recognize when it may be appropriate, necessary, and healthy to stop the "deep work" and address communal, biological, and psychological needs? All regardless of the exact mode of the work.

<comment><USER16> While "remote workers are more productive" is in the article's title, I disagree that the author is suggesting that working remotely is a necessary part of the solution. The article's subtitle is "Async isn't just for remote teams".

I think the post makes it clear to that office workers could benefit a ton from async communication. And I agree completely. Sync communication at my previous job was such a drain on my productivity. For me, Slack made communication easier, but it made focus more difficult and work more stressful.

I think you're right that software tools can make a big difference. The author seems to be promoting its product - Twist - as a great Slack alternative. And I think it looks solid.

<comment><USER17> Slack can be used as a asynchronous mechanism - but too many teams develop into using direct IMs/convos as a preferred communications style.

<comment><USER18> It _can_ be but nothing about it makes that the default or even easy.

I'd love to see companies abandon chat in favor of discussion threads.

For "water cooler" conversations video is almost always better.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Sometimes I wonder if the underlying issue is that there isn't enough actual work for people to do. I worry that I'm about to sound super out of touch, but hear me out; I'm not making a value judgement about anyone's job.

It is assumed that everyone needs to do exactly 40 hours of work per week, but ask yourself this: for every person in your company, what do their next 40 hours look like? 40 hours worth of HR policies need to be created. 40 hours worth of sales calls need to be made. 40 hours worth of snacks need to be ordered for the office. 40 hours worth of website text updates need to be made. 40 hours worth of UIs need to be designed. 40 hours worth of code needs to be typed in. Isn't it strange that all these vastly different tasks take the same number of hours to complete in a week? My guess is that chattin' is what takes up whatever time remains; people are required to pretend that they do 40 hours of work every week, so they come up with their own way of filling the time. Planning is always valued (and a good idea!), so if you report "yeah I spent the week planning for our Q3 XXX" then it sounds like the money spent on your salary was worth it, and it continues to pay.

As a software engineer, I've never had the problem of not having enough work to do. Tasks are always added to the backlog at a faster rate than they are removed from the backlog. But I feel like a lot of other jobs aren't like this, and the "there is infinite work forever!" thing is most prevalent in fields like engineering, design, art, fabrication, etc.

Meanwhile, most of the people in your average office aren't doing any of those things. To some extent, they're on retainer, waiting for their skills to be needed. And, trying to optimize this is perilous. If you get employee utilization up to 100%, people complain loudly (Amazon fulfillment center workers aren't sending 1000 Slack messages a day). If you try to not pay people for the time periods where they're not being utilized, you just get the "gig economy" which is awful.

I dunno, it all makes very little sense to me. Sometimes I wonder what percentage of the US economy is about doing work that doesn't need to be done, and how many people would not have jobs if we decided "we're not paying for this anymore". I think I'm scared about it, though.

<comment><USER20> You'll probably be interested to read about Bullshit Jobs. The authors' name escapes me currently.

<comment><USER21> Is it this one, maybe? [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs)

You're shadow-banned btw (which I normally wouldn't tell) but your comments look OK, so maybe this has happened by accident? You could try to challenge that (maybe via the email support?).

<comment><USER22> I can see the parent comment, so I think he isn't shadowbanned..?

<comment><USER23> Comment history is mainly dead, so my guess is they are. Someone likely [vouch]ed for the dead comment in this thread, so it's now visible to everyone.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> This is amusing. Not long ago I was in a thread about how to do remote work well and the top complaint amongst remote workers was "not responding quickly to IM" ( _between_ remote workers). And the general sentiment was the expectation to respond quickly is greater in remote work. That alone made me not want to take remote jobs. At my current work place, my IM status says that whoever IM's me should not expect a response and that if their query is urgent, they should simply walk over to my cube and talk (I don't mind). If not urgent, they should email.

The other thing that came out of that thread was "If you're remote and don't respond quickly enough, people assume you're slacking off - while in the office people visibly slack off all the time and it's considered OK".

<comment><USER25> I worked with both types of people.

Funny thing is, when I am a freelancer, who gets paid much more money per hour than an employee, people valued my time and would send me mails or text messages and wait hours or days for an answer,.

When I was an remote employee, people paid me less and called me three times before 10am.

Somehow, many employers have the perception to own every minute their employees are awake.

I would never go back to such a work culture.

<comment><USER26> Yea, I'm contracting remotely and the difference between working a full-time job in the office seems to be night and day.

As a remote contractor, they judge me by my results and trust me to do my job however I see fit. No hand-holding or micromanaging, only one standup every couple days.

Meanwhile at the office I've got to attend a morning attendance meeting everyday, a bunch of other useless meetings, and I need to ask for permission if I need to take a couple hours to go to the doctor and apologize if I happened to sleep in one day.

Can't say I miss office life.

<comment><USER25> Especially the sleeping...

I have not set an alarm for months now.

<comment><USER26> I've always said one of my primary goals in life is to not have to wake up to an alarm. I'm so used to it now I didn't even think to mention it, but reading your comment I just realized I've achieved that.

<comment><USER25> But I sleep till noon lol

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Except for the occasional visit to the office to give a few high fives and have some chit-chat I work remotely.

Until recently we used Toggl to track work time and the guidance was to have "6h of focused work daily".

I'm managing 5h 15min-ish, but only when working remotely. When I'm in the office that number organically drops to around 3h 40min.

Only person really doing those hours(and above) is one guy who's not into chit-chat.

<comment><USER28> That is roughly consistent with my experience.

When I was using the "pomodoro" technique, I first started with the goal of 14 pomodoros per day (14 x 25min of focused work). My (fairly successful) friend who had done pomodoro told me that was not a reasonable goal. 10-12 seems a more reasonable goal for most people.

When doing focused reading in grad school I could do maybe 8-9 hours on a good day.

Working on a personal project I enjoy at home, I can do maybe 7-8 hours of focused coding in a day (but probably not multiple days in a row).

At work I probably do 4 hours of focused coding on average. This is partly because of non-coding tasks, but also my attention tends to peter out beyond 4.5 hours.

<comment><USER29> I can't tell you how unburdening it is to read your response. Thank you for your honesty.

<comment><USER30> I can tell you, I'm in the same boat. I can't really do more than 4 -5 hours of actual coding on a typical day. I've done days with 7 - 12 hours of coding but those are outliers. Also by Thursday, I'm pretty burned out. I rarely get a lot done on Friday.

<comment><USER27> We all are, but we play this little game with our employers so that we don't get fired.

My take is that you can't shoehorn creative work into your desired time slots. Not if the result is supposed to have any quality.

I have found that sometimes I just need to stare away from the screen and forget what exactly I have written in order to obtain a fresh perspective and spot any problems.

No way to speed up this process, and what's worse is that if I try to log only the time during which I did "focused work", the result generally doesn't go over the mentioned 5h 15min daily.

Every person I ever asked about this is in the same situation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Been working 100% remotely for 3 years now. My biggest fear is having to go back to an office at some point in my career. I hope it never happens.

</comment><comment><USER32> This article hits on a lot of good points to me, because I often see people treat chat like it's a stand-in for an IRL conversation.

People will start conversations with just "Hello", and wait for me to respond, as if we're talking on the phone or something. This, to me, fundamentally misses out on the benefits of online communication: You don't need to wait to establish a conversation with me to ask me your question; you can just come out with it. And your question/problem can become just another item on my TODO list, which I can prioritize throughout the day:

\- If it's something I can answer/address right away, I can do so

\- If it's something that will take some investigation, I can start investigating it (and let you know how much time I'll need, etc)

\- If it's something clearly low-priority, I can wait until later when I'm not as busy to address it

\- If it's something that doesn't really make sense, or there are things I can explain to you to help point you in the right direction, I can spend a moment to help dig up some information for you.

If you just say "Hello" (or "Ping", etc) you're taking away my ability to prioritize your question/problem, and are asking me to agree to spend time on something before I know what it is.

If instead you begin the conversation with the question/problem that needs addressing, you're adding an item to my TODO queue, which can be re-sorted/re- prioritized continuously throughout the day, and allows me to be more effective. I can get to your question when it makes sense for me to do so.

I have my status permanently set to [http://nohello.com](http://nohello.com) to hopefully drive this point home with people, and anecdotally I've seen a lot less drive-by "Hello" messages on Slack. Additionally I've just stopped responding to people when they say "Hello". I just hope that doesn't come off as me being a jerk, though...

</comment><comment><USER25> 20-40% of the stuff you do at work are considered "real work", this is totally normal on-prem, but not remote.

Where do I get the best ideas to solve a problem?

Not when I'm sitting in front of it for 8h a day.

I get them when I stand up, buy groceries, do my laundry, shower, etc.

Does this provide huge value to the company I work for? Totally

Does the people at the company think I cheat them? Many do

Would they feel better if I sat in their office for 8h, have worse ideas, provide lower value and generally feel worse? Somehow many do too

</comment><comment><USER33> An important point about asynchronous vs. synchronous is that it's not just about the communication but about the work processeses. What enables people to work more effectively is removing synchronization bottlenecks in processes. Any kind of synchronization point causes people to do silly things like wait for that to happen, delay activities until after they've happened, or try to organize meetings around these points. The more synchronization points you have, the slower things get. Usually we call this bureaucracy.

Any kind of meeting is a synchronization bottleneck. People synchronize their workday around these. Workdays and office hours are synchronization points as well. They create bottlenecks in our traffic system even where literally everybody is trying to get to work at the same time just so they can be at a standup meeting.

Treat it as a technical problem and get rid of unnecessary blocking activities and things run smoother. It's true for software, it's true for logistics, and it is true for work processes. The same principles apply and you can use similar design patterns (queues, events, etc.). A side effect of non blocking processes is that people can work more effectively without waiting for people to talk to them or meetings to happen. It enables remote work but is just as effective when used on site.

Git was invented to support asynchronous development where independent groups of developers work on their own branches and exchange patches or pull requests when they want to synchronize. Works great for OSS but it is now also common in non remote software teams. Create a ticket, assign it, create a branch for it, do some work, create a pr, pr gets reviewed, ci builds trigger and if you figured out deployment automation, ultimately the change goes to production as well. It's all orchestrated via events that trigger somebody or something to pick up the work for the next thing. It's great. It replaced a work process where people were bottle-necked on central version repositories that required a lot of ceremony around branching and merging because it was so tedious; which in turn made commits a big deal and necessitated commit freezes and lots of communication overhead, meetings, and delays. Git got rid of most of that.

</comment><comment><USER34> If a boss needs to see you in your seat to "know" you're working, it's very likely that said boss cannot actually tell which employees are effective or talented, either.

</comment><comment><USER35> "No expectation of immediate reply"? HA! I SO wish. Slack kills any async expectation. Specially if you install it on your cellphone. Then you're on the clock 24/7.

I guess the article also assumes different time zones when working remotely?

I filed the article under the "rubbish bin". I've worked remotely for several years, and maybe I live in a different planet, because "async" and remote work do NOT go hand in hand for me. If anything, Slack means people can reach me even when I'm taking a dump, and I'm expected to reply at that moment.

<comment><USER36> How do you know people expect you to answer immediately? I haven't noticed that expectation.

<comment><USER35> They ask questions which imply "I'm sitting on my hands until you answer me".

<comment><USER37> Is that your problem? Why?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Anecdotal but I'm the opposite. I hate working from home and love having a team around me, sharing goals and ideas and hyping each other. Different strokes etc.

<comment><USER39> "sharing goals and ideas and hyping each other"

I will be cynical but this does not sound like some work is being done there. Reminds me of the guys of the gym who spend 90% time here just talking.

<comment><USER40> To me it sounded like the other 10%. While the 90% will be there and not all will necessarily interrupt on purpose (they can be guided to increase the 10%), you focus your most productive interactions with the 10%. From time to time you work with the other 90%, and that helps everybody up the game.

I prefer to work/live alone, but to deny the benefits of camaraderie and relationships with a high-performing team? Absurd.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> The article starts by simply assuming its conclusion in a complete non- sequitur: that all the listed benefits of remote working stem from asynchronous communication.

Sharing the space with your children or partner? Asynchronous communication. Being able to take short breaks in your own space? Asynchronous communication. Not being distracted by people chatting about their weekend? Asynchronous communication.

One of the major benefits of remote working, for me, is just not having other people around. It's not much a matter of communication but simply of the relax and focus I get when I don't have to be aware of others.

</comment><comment><USER42> I work remotely for about 80% of the workweek. I am most effective at home. At work people talk to me and interrupt me quite often. You get interrupted by people walking by etc or just striking up a conversation.

At home this obviously never happens for me. The only distraction I have is Slack and my dog that reminds me that it's time for a walk.

So I can attest to this.

<comment><USER43> I could work from home 80% of the time if I wanted, but actually prefer working at an office because I find it less distracting. The office is a 'clean' space where I'm only surrounded by work related thing. I have my work computer on my work desk with my work setup, and nothing else. There is pretty much nothing else to do here other than work. Home is cluttered and I'm surrounded by all kinds of 'distraction' not related to working.

<comment> keymon-o Remote work boosting is becoming a company shaming trend for not allowing workers to escape company rules, routines and procedures. Sure, remote work should be promoted, but in a way to give companies useful resources on how to analyze the neccessity and implement in their workflow.

Instead of writing arguments how remote work is just awesome, it would be more useful to have statistics on how many people are actually capable and accountable to work from home, and what do people really want out of their workspaces or by asking for remote work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> It is easy to make a case for either synchronous or asynchronous communication just as easily as making cases for on collocation or remote work or office landscapes or individual rooms. But what is most often missing us the context. And it is quite naive to believe one way is always better than the other.

I can recommend the work on Dynamic work design by Nelson P. Repenning to make a case for both in what context either is best but even more importantly, when and how to move back and forth between different work modes. Here is a good introduction: [https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/a-new-approach-to- design...](https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/a-new-approach-to-designing- work/)

</comment><comment><USER45> I think I am not really well-adapted for async communication.

I can't really do "fire and forget" messaging. When I ask something I want the reply to arrive as quickly as possible because I don't want to lose the context that I have in my mind right now and load it again later when I receive a reply. On an async channel this results in compulsive checking for replies which of course kills productivity. Almost-sync channels like Slack are the worst - who didn't experience the frustration of their chat partner suddenly disappearing without a word in the middle of a discussion?

On a related note I very much prefer a focused half-hour meeting to a whole day of async back-and-forths.

Inbound messages are problematic too because they provide the same kind of addictive random gratification that social media is infamous for.

Any tips for dealing with these problems?

<comment><USER46> Nobody is adapted to asynchronous communication, it's always going to make you less productive. The key is that your immediate request is forcing someone else to put down their thing to help you, the same way that other people interrupt you when they message you. In optimizing for team performance, we don't get individual maximums.

Mostly, try to reduce switchyness. Not all input is blocking, sometimes you can put a question out early and have hours/ days/ weeks before you need an answer. Work on identifying potential hangups early and often. Try to handle your communication in batches. Respond to urgent messages faster, but spend time between deep tasks or in the lame duck part of the day doing email.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> The benefits you get from implementing asynchronous communication with your organization are huge. This is exactly why I felt the need to resign from my job last year to go build a platform that is designed from the ground up to support this.

As a remote team, implementing the async communication style will allow you to never have to depend on fixed calendar meetings. No need to have to organize everybody together in a room, at a specific time, to just make a decision.

I wrote a bit about how to do this within a remote team, which is a guideline into how to set a basic async comm process for a remote team. Hope you find it helpful:

[https://standups.io/blog/a-basic-guideline-for-async- communi...](https://standups.io/blog/a-basic-guideline-for-async- communication/)

<comment><USER48> > _I wrote a bit about how to do this within a remote team, which is a > guideline into how to set a basic async comm process for a remote team. Hope > you find it helpful:

> I wrote a bit about how to do this within a remote team, which is a > guideline into how to set a basic async comm process for remote teams. Hope > you find it helpful.

> I wrote a bit about how to do this within a remote team, which is a > guideline into how to set a basic async comm process for remote teams. Hope > you find it helpful:_

Joke about async communication or copy-paste error?

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> A thing to consider is that these remote methods are not bound to remote workers. I had a job were I had two choices when a certain situation occured that stopped me from finishing work:

1\. Find the person involved, talk to them and try to resolve it right away

2\. Write a mail to them, print it out, clamp it to the related paper and hang it on the wall.

We were a very tiny 7-person company with rooms in the same building and still the approach outlined in point 1 rarely was more productive than just waiting for them to reply. For situations that happened more often I created email templates so there was even less work.

Another advantage of method 2 is that unresolved work in the end of the day is already taken care of and if you are working in shifts the handover is easier then.

</comment><comment><USER50> I think an asynchronous workplace (remote or not) is mostly a good one as people tend to be more effective without interruption.

Anyways, I think a big barrier to this dream are the tools that can promote and sustain asynchronicity.

It's really hard to keep communication open and job responsibilities/deliverables clear without being mircomanage-y. Lots of leaders will have to give up control - which is going to be really hard, to say the least. Software tools will need to be security-blankets for managers as much as performance trackers for employees. Give them a little pat on the head that "it's all ok". That's going to be hard to accomplish.

</comment><comment><USER51> The reason people don't like remote workers by instinct isn't because they don't realize that they people COULD be more productive at home.

Its because they worry that it creates incentives that could lead to a decrease in productivity over time.

I think the root of it really is the first line Management. These guys need to be really good at their job in order for WFH FT to be more productive. If these aren't all that efficient to begin with, that will make it much more visible in a WFH situation. I think all parties intuitively feel this.

</comment><comment><USER52> my office is hell to work in. everyone simply shows up next to your screen and starts talking. that is why async comms from remote locations has been a blessing for me. i can simply queue the non important messages for later. once they've realised that i won't answer for a couple of hours they started being a lot more aware of what messages they're sending. thus comms improved greatly once everyone started working from home. the occasion call takes care of any face2face situations. overall major win

<comment><USER53> I have this issue as well. People will show up at my desk to get something done. Yes it should be in some sort of ticket, but then they are in a queue and might get another admin, so if they just show up they will probably get their stuff done so they will leave me alone and i can get onto other work (it is not that i don't want to see people, but i have lots of work usually).

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> Their tool Twist is the result of their own problems while developing their app (Todoist) , and they use it internally. Usual tools made by companies that use it (dogfooding) use to be better.

</comment><comment><USER55> Personally I think flexibility is the future. Allow employees to decide or work inhouse or remotely. I work in a very large financial services technology company. I value to closeness to colleges and the quick, sharp interactions that can happen with that - but - there are times when I am wokring on something larger I would be more effective at home or a remote location where sales etc can physically come to my desk and suck my time.

<comment><USER40> I think this is key, but it costs a lot from companies (and also people), culturally, economically, and sometimes constrained by law.

Should you keep all seats even when 20% of your workforce prefers to work remote? What do you do with those seats when they are empty? It's possible, and it's great when it's there, just not as simple as choosing one option or the other.

I happen to prefer to work alone, but I recognize those times when meetings or pair programming are truly valuable and needed, and I jump to it at once when needed. It's about recognizing the pros and cons of each approach, and minimize the impact of the cons as much as you can.

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> This article conveniently overlooks problems when remote workers need supervision to keep them in line with expectations. I've had both good and bad experiences managing remote teams. The difference seems to be the quality of the remote workers. The quality of a remote persons work is inversely proportional to the supervision they require.

</comment><comment><USER57> > It leads to lower quality discussions and suboptimal solutions. When you > have to respond immediately, people don't have time to think through key > issues thoroughly and provide thoughtful responses. Your first response to > any given situation is often not your best response.

I feel like this is the main benefit.

</comment><comment><USER58> Management here doesn't like remote employees because they cant order them around like they do us. Also they don't like the fact that those employees don't stay in the office longer and are not bonding with other people here.

</comment><comment><USER59> Oh it's quite simple, I don't get interrupted. At work I might get 15 minutes of work done before there is someone at my desk, and headphones are the international sign of "hey lets bother that guy".

</comment><comment><USER60> If remote workers are more productive, why aren't most office jobs remote?

</comment><comment><USER61> It works very well when you need a clear documented interface for communication. It will not work on a culture which demands more facetime.

And more often, the answer is somewhere in between, and it's hard to generalize.

</comment><comment><USER62> Productivity depends on the phase of work. Simplisticly put there are two phases of mental work such as programming: i/o bound and brain bound.

If you're in the i/o bound phase remoting is often hard. You need to talk to people, pull answers from them, communicate, coordinate, reach agreements and nail down development plans. You can't do anything anyway unless you agree on the next steps first.

Conversely if you're brain bound all you want is a laptop and being alone at home because it's way more efficient to focus on a problem when you can forget about everything else. You can't plan ahead anyway unless you dig down in the code and see for yourself first what will work and what needs to change.

These phases alternate in worklife, maybe based on projects, time of the month, the whatever happenstances take place in the progress of development. Usually when you're stuck in one phase you really need to spend time in the other phase for a while. This is normal.

This has consequences. People working remotely tend to maximise their time on what they're efficient at, i.e. brain bound programming. At the office it's easier to invite people to meetings through the week to get work done that way because you can't really be brain bound at the office anyway. Thus remote types and office types tend to inflate their favourite phase as much as possible.

This inflation happens because these two phases are inherently incompatible with each other, and crossing the gap to switch phases is tedious.

But if you only ever work i/o bound you begin to wonder how could people work remotely at all. After all, everything happens in the office anyway so maybe working from home could work if only we add enough meetings to keep the remote people more tightly in the loop... And people working steadily from home begin to fathom, in time, whether it's possible at all to work at the office as all you have is constant breaks, meetings, people coming to ask about stuff and you can't ultimately get any _real_ work done.

Different things begin to become important for people who don't alternate. So there's a slight confirmation bias in how people flock to the position and environment that maximises the kind of work they're really good at. But the caveat is that in doing this that you could be comfort-siloing yourself. So natural and healthy alternating between phases is what keeps you open and able to adjust to changes in work life and work projects.

On the other hand, people who alternate too often begin to get nothing done. You need to allocate batches of time for both phases in some moderate proportion. How to balance that is more of an art than anything else.

Sounds familiar, anyone? This is a dynamic I've observed in my own work life over and over again.

<comment><USER63> Communications can often be _better_ working from home. Open offices really inhibit conversations because you don't want to disturb your neighbors. At home you can talk to whoever you want for as long as you want as loud as you want.

</comment></comment><comment><USER64> I think there is a component of selection bias here. Only productive workers will be allowed by their bosses to work from home.

</comment><comment><USER65> good old email is King when working remotely. I think most IM apps are used as monitoring tools. Maybe there is a better solution for that

</comment><comment><USER66> How do I upvote this harder!

</comment><comment><USER67> I wonder where they get productivity data.

An owner of a company I'm close with found her employee was abusing work from home. This same employee was formerly a Superstar or so we thought.

Maybe bad management, but I found myself calling a 7 hour work from home day 8 hours too.

<comment><USER68> For the same pay, would you rather have one person get a lot done in 6 hours or another person get little done in 9 hours? If an employee was underperforming for 10 hours a day, would your friend keep them on? Truthfully, the only things that matter from the company's perspective are the output and the price. It's wrong to misrepresent your hours worked, just as it's wrong to lie about the color of your pants, but a rational company wouldn't ask about either.

</comment></comment><comment><USER69> (promo) - For builders we have created [https://www.yourtempo.co](https://www.yourtempo.co) to help you manage e-mail and only process / reply once or twice a day.

</comment><comment><USER70> I don't get it why the workplace is viewed as only a place to work. We spend 8h of the day there. That would be a sad life if you only worked in those 8h. The workplace is actually a place to socialize, to do the things that you love, chat with your friends, have fun.

I bet most people from those 8h work a maximum 4. The rest is chatting and socializing. I like it.

<comment><USER71> > The rest is chatting and socializing. I like it.

The problem I have with this is that I don't really get to choose who I can chat and socialize with -- I like my work colleagues, but they're not my main social circle and never will be because I find it unhealthy if your colleagues are your core friends since if you ever want or need to leave (or get fired), it makes it all the more painful and makes an already stressful situation even more stressful. I'm a firm believer that you should enjoy the company of the people you work with, but that you should have a strong social life outside of work too so that you don't feel socially trapped in that job.

<comment><USER70> depends on the type of work. if you're in tech and you change jobs every 3 years, yes that's harder. but in medical people stay much much longer, 20-30 years. Most of my team has been here over 10 years. It's seems stupid not to create strong friendships.</comment></comment></comment>


Guesstimate of the payoff matrix for startup versus finance - <AUTHOR> http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2011/04/banker-pay.html

<comment><USER2> this reminds me of one of PG's articles where he says something to the effect of - pursuing a startup is like taking a lifetime worth of work and condensing it into a short period of time. In the end you hopefully end up enjoying more of your life by getting all the work out of the way.

banking is essentially the opposite; Longer hours, better odds, stricter dress code.</comment>


NSA tracking cellphone locations worldwide, Snowden documents show (2013) - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/nsa-tracking-cellphone-locations-worldwide-snowden-documents-show/2013/12/04/5492873a-5cf2-11e3-bc56-c6ca94801fac_story.html <comment><USER2> The thing that bothers me most about this as a European is; I have zero say in this, in the US you can strike out against surveillance, you can write to senators, protest against terrible legislation. Actually have a voice, however faint it is. Whereas I don't get a say but the exact same treatment from your country. The Five Eyes have made me paranoid and the only escape seems to be downgrading your phone to a brick and carrying it in a Faraday cage. We may as well just go back to plain old telephones.

<comment><USER3> I was happy to see the disgust people had for the CIA black sites operated in other countries when that came to light during the Bush presidency. Not because of the torture, but because people here expected alleged terrorists to have the same rights as detained American citizens. I feel this is important to note, because we have a large population of young voters who I feel have concern for everyone - not just the US. This is very different from how my grandparents vote and I do think it's split along generational lines. In regards to overreaching surveillance: It's not ideal, but we over here do think of you when we vote.. I do.

<comment><USER4> unfortunately you're part of a minority. The mere fact that the election will happen between Clinton and Trump makes me think that mass surveillance and lack of respect for other countries are going to continue and probably worsen.

Clinton: [http://time.com/4150694/hillary-clinton-calls-for-more- surve...](http://time.com/4150694/hillary-clinton-calls-for-more-surveillance- to-fight-terror/)

Trump (not that it's really necessary): [http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot- box/presidential-races/26167...](http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot- box/presidential-races/261673-trump-sides-with-rubio-over-cruz-in-nsa- surveillance)

<comment><USER5> I'm hesitant to consider the next presidential election's results as a harbinger of the state of politics during the 2020 or 2024 races.

The Baby Boomer generation's influence is waning and I'm optimistic that the next generations who did not grow up in a period of extreme mutual distrust like we saw post-WW2 and during the Cold War will be better suited to lead.

It's going to take us, as a global group of people on the planet, a long time to unwind a lot of the hawkish and nationalist policies that have evolved over the past 150 years. Certainly there will be periods where charismatic leaders with latent agendas drag us backwards and temper the progress, but ultimately if each successive generation is even just a bit more inclusive and globally considerate than the last, we'll find a way to make this work.

<comment><USER6> That sounds nice. It won't happen, but it sounds nice.

Every generation has felt they could do things better than the previous (old people shouldn't be allowed to vote has been stated lately), until they learn what it was the previous generation had to deal with. The mutual distrust among certain parties do go away after time, look at all the countries that were at war in WW2 that are now allies. But there is always somebody that jumps in to take advantage of the newfound peace and harmony to further their agenda. Sometimes it leads to a return of mistrust, sometimes it leads to war.

What you are describing is every agency of authority agreeing with each other across numerous nation-states, economies, cultures, and more. Some of which are directly opposed to each other, possibly violently.

The human race is simply not ready for that level of cooperation and will not for a very long time. Losing sight of that will only lead to hardship and suffering. Likely the only way for such a thing to happen is for it to be forced among people with violence. Then that status maintained for multiple generations until the old ways have been forgotten.

But your way is a nice thought and should be attempted at least.

<comment><USER7> > old people shouldn't be allowed to vote has been stated lately

Really? I'd be interested to see a source on that. Not questioning the validity, I so many of these college aged kids calling for restrictions on speech and political organization of people they disagree with. I'm not surprised that this would come up.

Looks like we can expect a mommy-state as much as we can expect a liberalization of out-dated baby boomer policies.

<comment><USER6> I've seen it in connection with the Britain leaving the EU vote.

I wasn't implying I've seen it here, so I hope it didn't come across that way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Man I will forever be grateful for the eye opening insights Snowden has provided to us. I now check for https and use tor and always block cookies. How is there not a monument in every city dedicated to this hero?

<comment><USER9> So you think using any of that protects you from the Chinese, KGB, etc.? Did you forget to block localStorage, too?

<comment><USER10> The KGB ceased to exist in 1991 with the break-up of the Soviet Union, a full three years before HTTPS was invented.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KGB](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KGB)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTPS](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTPS)

<comment><USER9> Has nothing to do with my point. Quit pretending the Russians don't have a spy agency.

<comment><USER11> Maybe if you're trying to make a point about spy agencies, you should learn what they're called first.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> How would America respond if it found out that say the UK is tracking cellphones worldwide, except for British subjects of course, but including all Americans on American soil?

<comment><USER13> They probably are, so the NSA can request such data from them if they need it.

[https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2013/aug/01/nsa-paid- gch...](https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2013/aug/01/nsa-paid-gchq-spying- edward-snowden)

[https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2013/jun/21/gchq-cables- secre...](https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2013/jun/21/gchq-cables-secret-world- communications-nsa)

And so on.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Apart from the political conversation I've always tried to encourage a technical conversation about how our mobile phone infrastructure is _really terrible for privacy_ on many levels.

CCC events have had many presentations about this in the last few years, about IMSI catchers and mobile crypto attacks and abusing roaming mechanisms and databases. And it seems there's more where that came from; the system is wide open in many respects to exploitation by a sophisticated attacker, governmental or not. (I read somewhere that people in China are buying and deploying IMSI catchers in order to send SMS spam to passersby.)

Some of the privacy problems are a result of economic factors including backwards compatibility and international compatibility goals. Some of the bad decisions for privacy were made by or at the behest of intelligence agencies, and some of those decisions _are continuing to be made_ in standards bodies that deal with mobile communications security. Ross Anderson described some spy agency influence in early GSM crypto conversations (which is one reason A5/1 is so weak), and it's still happening at ETSI now.

I support political criticism of surveillance activities, but at moments when people feel overwhelmed and powerless, there is another front, which is trying to clean up the security posture of mobile communications infrastructure, or provide better alternatives to it.

We can find lots of reasons why this is hard ("Bellhead" communities are much less ideologically committed to privacy and opposed to surveillance; communications infrastructure is highly regulated in many places, and it's hard to get access to radiofrequency spectrum; people want worldwide compatibility; there's a huge installed base on both the client and server sides; many of the infrastructure providers around the world are directly beneficially owned by governments; spy agencies do actively try to influence standards-setting in this area, plus sabotaging implementations and stealing private key material) and it's probably going to stay hard. But maybe some of the people reading this are going to some day be tech billionaires or working in or running companies that have significant influence in the telecommunications space, and be in a position to personally make future generations of communication technology take privacy and security seriously.

</comment><comment><USER15> > The NSA cannot know in advance which tiny fraction of 1 percent of the > records it may need, so it collects and keeps as many as it can — 27 > terabytes [...] The location programs have brought in such volumes of > information, according to a May 2012 internal NSA briefing, that they are > "outpacing our ability to ingest, process and store" data

27TB doesn't sound much, even by 2012 standards. The article doesn't specify if this is the total size, just the delta over some period of time, or something entirely different? Certainly not something NSA would "struggle to ingest"?

<comment><USER16> Well if each (lat,lon,cell#,imei) record takes, say, 500 bytes and they take a measurement every minute, 27TB is enough to record every American for 4 months. That's pretty hefty surveillance even if the raw size doesn't impress.

<comment><USER15> I don't dispute that, but instead the tone of the article that makes it sound as if it's such a huge quantity of data that NSA is struggling (or was struggling) to capture it all.

<comment><USER17> I agree that 27Tb doesn't sound too big for the NSA, but perhaps they are doing very deep and involved "processing" on the data, making the output size orders of magnitude larger than the input size.

Better give them more budget, then they will be able to handle all the data!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Okay I hate to be the one to break the news to everybody here, but if you have a GSM phone this is quite trivial to do.

The NSA hasn't done anything groundbreaking here, except maybe a Google search.

<comment><USER19> A measured reaction? Good God! We can't have _that_.

<comment><USER18> Sorry to disapoint. Please resume panic

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> This shows clearly that Putin is a dictator, that China is communist and that the USA spys the entire world to protect its citizens freedom. /s

<comment><USER21> The "communist country" has a capitalist economy.

The "free country" has total electronic surveillance.

The "federation" is run like an empire in a dictator-like fashion.

And north korea, the "democratic republic", is the most oppressive regime in the world.

What a world we live in.

<comment><USER22> Seems like labels are not always telling the truth. It's a bit like in the supermarket, if something is called 'Premium' it's often nothing like that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I'm on mobile and don't have any links handy, but it's fairly well known that you can ostensibly track every. single. handset. in the world if you can gain access to any one carrier's infrastructure. You can bet every spy agency from every country is doing this.

<comment><USER24> To get a feeling for the size of the problem, the carrier logs all handset accesses on all transceivers. To do location tracking you have to get the carrier to give you access to those logs and you have to have the storage and processing to get finer-grained location based on overlapping transceiver accesses and precise times. It's a bit more than the carrier themselves would do for network quality monitoring, but not even 10X more. With this data your daily routine and divergence from that routine can be learned and detected. With this plus payment information, you've got enough to tell who is doing something interesting in real time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> If Americans (of which I am one) and the US government believe that it is self-evident that all men are created equal, then surely they should apply the principles that they have enshrined in their constitution to all equals when dealing with them, regardless of whether or not they are a US Citizen or where on earth they are.

<comment><USER26> I think a good number of us do and a good number do not. There is a world divide right now and you may have laid your finger on what the difference is. Ironically, those who believe all men are created equal are loathe to divide from the rest, so it's an awkward divide.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Not long ago you could buy SIM cards from kioskos, corner stores, etc. This is becoming increasingly rare, even in places with otherwise poor infrastructure. The shift was rapid but noticeable.

<comment><USER28> As soon as you start using them, that's when you become an interesting subject.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> And why we still have terrorists?

<comment><USER24> Because terrorists establish normal-seeming patterns of movement that do not diverge from that pattern until it is too late.

Whereas if you take some time off from work to attend a protest, the FBI knows to come knocking on your door to ask pointed questions about your friends.

That's what's pernicious about these programs. They're not good enough to focus on terrorists, but there is plenty of fodder for harassment of protesters.

<comment><USER30> Also I'm thinking they don't use smartphones that leak all kinds of other data and instead cycle thorugh simple, cheap/pre-paid, disposable phones which would make establishing long-term patterns more difficult.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> they are tracking our every single movement, and aspire to track our every single thought

we have a duty to resist this totalitarianism by any means possible or necessary; fascism is here, and free men can't delude themselves with hoping for gradual change to the contrary any further.

<comment><USER9> How many government employees does it take to track and analyze my every movement?

<comment><USER32> A couple of engineers, depending on the situation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> So now they can detect the location of the "target" and send a drone to kill them from the convenience of their office, before going on lunch break.

This really sickens me. They are inferring so much and therefore many innocent people are and will suffer.

To me this system is pure evil however much the nsa try to sugar coat or spin it. Who gave them the right to do this, to track people around the world and in many cases perform extra judicial assassinations.

<comment><USER34> > Who gave them the right to do this

Before Snowden, themselves.

After Snowden, the silent citizens/voters that we are did (and continue to do).

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> I am really amazed that more people are not outraged at this. When things like the Pentagon Papers came out or when Watergate hit the news, people reacted and change happened.

Today everything gets buried in a sea of noise and entertainment. Long term this cannot be good for the general health and welfare of society to not ponder on and discuss.

</comment><comment><USER36> I wonder if they manage to track my cell phone more accurately than my cell phone manages to track itself.

My phone rarely seems to be sure what country it is in, let alone which town.

Simply lost count of the number of times I've been like, "yeah, I'm sure the weather is lovely where I was a week ago, but I'm more interested in where I am now".

Must be quite depressing for the NSA analysts stuck in their cubical watching people run around the world having fun while they stuff another donut down their fat american face.

<comment><USER19> Actually, most of the smartest people I've ever known have worked for NSA, in both analytical and other capacities. Some of the fittest, too, for "does century rides on the weekends for fun" values of "fit".

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> ..And people ask me why I don't have a cellphone in 2016.

</comment><comment><USER38> Please edit the title to reflect the fact that the article is dated December 2013.

</comment><comment><USER39> Well, in fairness, that's actually more aligned with their actual mission, not to mention legal under American law.

This isn't great news as a non-American but from their perspective, surely this is just the NSA doing their job?

<comment><USER40> Right, so fuck the US even more.</comment></comment>


Former valve employee tweets his experience at valve - <AUTHOR> https://www.reddit.com/r/valve/comments/8zmp07/former_valve_employee_tweets_his_experience_at/e2kbsg6/ <comment><USER3> How do so many people again and again get roped into obsessing about their companies? I realise there is a bag of tricks to keep people on their toes (frequent waves of firing, impostor syndrome, friend cliques), but how do they fall into the trap initially?

</comment><comment><USER4> Has any one here worked at a non hierarchical company? It seems very alien to me to have an organization set up that way.

<comment><USER5> I'm currently working at a company with no upper management, and peer reviews. It's not by design, but I suppose it's "flat" because of this - <USER2> management have left or quit, or they haven't been able to find them. Lots of infighting.</comment></comment>