On Async Work

Most people experience documentation as a tax.

Something you do after the real work, to satisfy a process, to cover yourself. I think that’s exactly backwards.

I document everything. Not as a record but as a discipline—closer to journalling than filing.

Before I start something I write down what I’m doing and why.

When I make a decision I write down what I considered and what I ruled out.

When something changes I write down what changed and what it affects.

The result is that my work is visible without me having to perform it.

Anyone can see where things are, what was decided, what’s coming. Nobody has to ask.

That’s async work done properly. Not a communication style, but a way of thinking.

The thing synchronous work does is make everyone lazy. Not in output but in thinking.

If you can walk over and ask, you don’t have to formulate the question properly first.

If you can call a meeting, you don’t have to write down what you actually need from people.

The friction is low so the thinking stays shallow, which means things get missed, misunderstood, relitigated.

The meeting to fix the meeting is a sync work invention. So is the thread of thirty messages that could have been one clear document.

Context switching is the other one.

The interrupted flow state, the question at the wrong moment, the thing that takes thirty seconds to ask and forty minutes to recover from.

Async removes the inopportune moment almost entirely.

You work in bursts—proper focused bursts, not the performance of being available—and you communicate in your own time with enough thought behind it that it lands right the first time.

The hours stop being the metric. The work becomes the metric.

The resistance to this is real and it usually comes dressed as concern for collaboration or team cohesion.

Sometimes that’s genuine.

More often it’s something else—a management model that derives its value from knowing where everyone is at any given moment.

Regular check-ins, status updates, the visibility of the team as a measure of control.

Async doesn’t just change how work gets done. It makes that kind of management unnecessary, and that’s uncomfortable if coordination is the only thing you feel you bring.

The objection is process. The anxiety is replacement. Most people making the argument don’t know that’s what’s driving it.

The skill argument matters here too. Async fails when people treat it as an absence of communication rather than a different kind.

Under-documented, under-communicated, assumed rather than stated—that’s not async work, that’s just neglect with a label on it.

The teams that tried it and failed mostly failed there. Not because the model doesn’t work but because nobody trained for it.

Writing clearly, thinking before communicating, making decisions visible—these are skills. They can be learned. They just require more upfront effort than walking over to someone’s desk, and in the short term that feels like more work.

It isn’t. It’s just work that compounds instead of repeating.