This page is part of The Toolbox by Danny Smith.
If you’ve read about Asynchronous Working you’ll know that remote organisations should be trying to do as much work as possible without video meetings. But it can sometimes be hard to break the “meeting habit”.
Async Weeks are a useful forcing function to help teams build their async communication habits.
How does it work?
On a regular cadence – usually one week in every 6 – hold and Async Week. The rules are simple…
- All recurring meetings are cancelled.
- No internal meetings except for Social Calls and long Pair Working sessions).
- Absolutely no “can we hop on a call to discuss” unless something is on 🔥
- As few external meetings as possible – if you can move non-urgent ones, do so. (This obviously doesn’t apply to teams who primarily do their business synchronously – sales, support etc)
- Encourage folks to turn DND on in Slack as often as possible.
The week before
- Remind everyone what async working is all about.
- Encourage folks to reread your documentation on asynchronous working, documentation etc.
- Ask people to block out large chunks of their calendar so external folks can’t book meetings.
Afterwards
Run a quick survey asking about:
- How decisions were made, and what was different (usually via Writing Proposals)
- How much reading and writing they did (usually a lot more)
- How they felt at various points during the week.
- How much focus time they got (usually a lot more)
- What broke and why (usually a good indicator of where improvements cold be made)
- etc.
