There's Got to be a Better Way to Work
- Work Deserves a New Look
- A Better Work Environment for All of Us
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
6:25 am |
Nita pulls herself out of bed, having pushed snooze on her alarm five times already. Oh boy, she’s late! She shakes her son, Abin, awake. They barely have 30-odd minutes before they drive to school. Dang it—she has to drive. She’d much prefer to take the scooter, but it’s pouring outside. If only she could control the Indian monsoon. |
|
Okay, 30 minutes. Freshen up, make some coffee, and get Abin’s lunchbox ready. Drat! She forgot to order a milk delivery. Thank heavens she has some milk powder. She hustles to get a couple of sandwiches ready as she fries some eggs so Abin can have breakfast. |
7:45 am |
That wasn’t the start Nita was hoping for. Life as a single mom is hard. She barely got her son to school on time. She’d have liked to wake up early and stay on top of things, but she went to bed late and didn’t get a good night’s sleep. Work doesn’t begin till noon. Maybe she can sleep now? Or maybe not. She’s got to cook, get ready, take out the trash, and put away the dishes. That won’t happen by itself, will it? |
12:00 pm |
Nita works a midday shift. Work at home in Bangalore begins at 12 pm and, with an hour’s break thrown in, ends at 10 pm. She works for a client in Boulder, Colorado, and some of her American teammates are based out of Boise, Idaho. This is the only way she gets an hour to overlap with them for meetings. She tried getting 30 minutes of shut-eye before starting work, but she ended up just tossing and turning in bed. The day has barely begun, and she already feels tired. |
2:30 pm |
Time to pick up Abin. There goes 40 minutes of her break time. Lunch was already at breakneck speed—coffees and dinners will probably need to be at the worktable. Sigh. |
5:00 pm |
As a designer, Nita is trying to build some wireframes for a new feature the team is scheduled to deliver in an upcoming sprint. But she has a meeting with the team’s business analyst in 15 minutes. On some days, Nita wonders if she’s getting any work done at all. The last four hours consisted of two hours of meetings—one meeting to onboard a new team member and another meeting to discuss the sprint planning meeting later this evening. She tried to make some progress independently, but there wasn’t enough contiguous time or enough available information for her to start. |
9:00 pm |
Abin got back from cricket coaching, showered, and warmed up dinner. He’s a good kid. Before heading to bed, he hugged Nita and kissed her goodnight. “Tomorrow will be an on-time start,” he promised. Nita’s been powering her day with coffee. The team is now in a sprint planning meeting with the folks in Boise and the client in Boulder. One more hour to motor through. Thank heavens for that coffee. |
10:00 pm |
Aargh! She’s not done yet. The client asked for some changes to the proposed iteration plan. Nita now has to finalize wireframes for user stories that are kind of ready but not quite. The team huddle is in 15 minutes. |
11:00 pm |
Finally, time to get some sleep. Uh-oh! Hold on. She’s got to put the milk bag out and double-check the milk order. Abin wasn’t as good a boy as she thought, either. He didn’t clean the kitchen before heading to sleep. Time to roll up her sleeves and clean up. |
|
She gets the job done, changes, brushes, flosses, and gets into bed. Try as she might, she just can’t sleep. Too much caffeine in the system? Too much of that bright screen? Who knows? Her attention shifts to her phone. The team is discussing the change in sprint plans. Maybe she should tune in until she feels sleepy. |
Work Deserves a New Look
Phew! That day, unreal as it may be, is commonplace for many remote-working technologists operating across continents. Nita’s character is fictional, but I know plenty of people who live and work like her. Of course, work hours can differ depending on the time zones the team is distributed across. But context-switching and highly interrupted days are common regardless of time zones.
In 2020, the global pandemic sped up the shift to remote work. To be sure, that was a change in the right direction. In a time of powerful computers in our pockets, great tools for online collaboration, and reasonably good internet connectivity in most places, it was strange to make people go through hours of commuting just to be in a noisy office every day. People made considerable sacrifices in their personal lives to have a career. For those with a single-minded devotion to that career, it was fine—but there were others who were looking for balance in their lives. And so, remote work came with the promise of restoring that balance. It gave organizations a way to tap into talent pools they hadn’t considered before, simply because they didn’t have offices in that area.
If you can now work from anywhere, an organization can employ you from anywhere. Knowledge workers are always more in demand than the supply, so being able to widen the talent pool gives employers a way to scale despite the constraints.
The purpose of this book isn’t to extol remote work, though. There are plenty of other books to do just that. The question I like to ask is about Nita—is there a better way to work? The shift to remote work in 2020 was so abrupt that many organizations never had the time to consider if the same work practices that felt effective in an office are also relevant for remote work. As a result, you see many individuals, such as Nita, continue to make compromises to their work–life balance, their mental and physical health, and their ability to do deep, meaningful work. There’s got to be a better way to work.
This book articulates a new way of working, especially for software development teams. That way is to embrace asynchronous collaboration. “What is that?” you may ask. The best way to define it is to combine a few definitions I’ve derived from Catherine Tansey and Marcelo Lebre.*
Asynchronous work is the practice of working on a team that doesn’t require multiple people to be online simultaneously. You do as much as you can with what you have, write things up clearly, transfer ownership of the work to whomever needs to pick it up next, and then work on something else.
If that sounds quite different from the way you collaborate with your team today, let me explain why you should consider making the shift to this way of working.
Complex Problems Need Smarter Collaboration
When I started my career in IT, the problems we solved for clients differed greatly from the problems we solve today. For example, few clients expect us to build simple create, read, update, delete (CRUD) applications—low code platforms have disrupted that space. How about simple storefronts? Services like Shopify have disrupted that space by simplifying it for noncoders. With services such as managing large data centers, the hyper scalers such as Azure, GCP, and AWS have made it easy for in-house IT teams to manage infrastructure.
The work we do today is far more complex—we build platforms and data meshes and deep learning and neural networks. We modernize decades-old legacy systems to give incumbents a way to compete with digital native disruptors. We explore new ways to develop the human–machine experience. It’s impossible to run these kinds of projects with any of the following problems:
An overdependence on meetings, conversations, and tribal knowledge
A lack of good written communication
No commitment to deep, uninterrupted work
Asynchronous collaboration comes with the promise to meet only when necessary, to make conversations productive, and to give people time so they can actually work.
The Promise of Flexibility
In April 2022, I surveyed more than 450 Indian employees in a leading software development unit of a global IT firm. I asked them what they dislike about their work. These were the top two responses from more than 50 percent of the respondents:
Long contiguous hours
Late hours
This is almost antithetical to the promise of remote work. Luke Thomas and Aisha Samake, in their book The Anywhere Operating System, outline this promise:
When coworkers say, ‘I love working from home,’ it’s about when they work instead of only thinking about where they work from. That’s the secret hiding in plain sight!
Indeed, less than 5 percent of the people I surveyed recently want to go into an office every day. Sixty percent of the respondents preferred to work “regular, daylight hours,” i.e., nine to five. Twenty-eight percent wanted a flexible schedule where they could do their eight hours, their way. And these expectations are changing. This observation bears itself out in Future Forum’s research, which surveys a broader audience than my own:
Knowledge workers who say they have little to no ability to set their own hours are 2.6x as likely to “definitely” look for a new job in the next year (compared to those with moderate schedule flexibility).
While the job market and economic conditions at any point may or may not afford such opportunities, it’s clear where people’s preferences are. Asynchronous work allows people the autonomy and flexibility they desire by allowing them to work during the hours that are most productive for them. More important, it lets managers and employers project a shared sense of trust and empowerment.
Escaping the Shallows
As a product manager and an aspiring designer, I was always at sea in an open office. If the constant white noise wasn’t bad enough, the fact that I was “right there” implicitly meant that I was available to be interrupted. I got little joy out of my working day, especially when I needed to get work done for the team and needed time with my head down. I craved what Cal Newport terms deep work—the ability to concentrate without distraction on a cognitively demanding task.
When we started working remotely, though, I could cut out the white noise. Suddenly, I had my corner office. Except, of course, it was a room in my house. What didn’t change were the interruptions. The across-the-table interruptions now became video meetings and all-day back-and-forth messages on our instant messaging platform. Like Nita, I’ve struggled to get time to do deep work because my day would get cut up into little one-hour chunks. Paul Graham noted this eloquently in his 2009 essay “Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule”:
When you’re operating on the maker’s schedule, meetings are a disaster. A single meeting can blow a whole afternoon, by breaking it into two pieces, each too small to do anything hard in.
Asynchronous collaboration advocates for “meetings as the last resort, not the first option.” If your current collaboration practices need loads of meetings, I understand this sounds radical. Asynchronous collaboration advocates for using communication tools thoughtfully. The sentiment I’d like you to empathize with is that interruptions have a cost—not just in terms of the time spent in the interruption but also as a fallout impact on productivity. Mihaly Czikszentmihaly, in his bestselling book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, speaks of a state that most of us want to get to at work:
… a state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter; the experience is so enjoyable that people will continue to do it even at great cost, for the sheer sake of doing it.
Here’s the killer, though: while 97 percent of the 450-odd people I surveyed claimed to care about “flow,” only 12.5 percent—i.e., one in eight people—claimed to achieve it with regularity. Asynchronous work promises to give people a better chance at achieving flow.
The other benefit of deep work is the ability to have deep interactions with co-workers. In his landmark book Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman outlines two systems of thinking. System 1 is an intuitive and fast way of thinking. You call on System 1 for the answer to your parents’ names, for the result of 2+2, and for how you navigate your own home. Anything that needs slightly deep thought—double-digit multiplication, for example—needs slower thinking. Kahneman calls that kind of thinking System 2. System 1, being as instinctive as it is, can help us decide at speed but is also prone to biases and errors. An effective approach to work should combine both System 1 and System 2 thinking.
A culture that defaults to meetings as a way of working lives in the realm of System 1. There’s barely enough time to slow down, go a few levels deep, and analyze things. You lionize responsiveness and presence, but deep work becomes the casualty. Asynchronous work prioritizes good analysis and thinking. When you do meet, people have given enough thought to a topic and are meeting for a specific time-boxed purpose that needs intense collaboration. You can now make the deep work you’ve done so far deeper.
A More Inclusive Workplace
The people I surveyed were in offshore development teams in India. Their unit served clients in North America. Many people were straddling time zones with up to a 13-hour time difference. You don’t need me to tell you that this is hard. And if something is hard for most people, it’s usually harder for historically under-represented groups such as women in IT. (Even after years of conversations about the topic, women’s representation in IT was just 33 percent in 2022. In technical roles, that goes down to 25 percent.)
For example, a tight schedule with loads of meetings isn’t easy for anyone, but it’s especially hard for women, who bear a disproportionate burden of household and childcare responsibilities in most societies. Now let’s imagine a workplace without arbitrary start and end times, where people work in schedules that make sense for them and when we don’t have the pressure to cram all communication into those specific eight hours. Getting rid of those constraints can help more under-represented groups find a way into the workplace. We can’t change society overnight. What we can change is the workplace—and that’s the promise of being asynchronous.
While we’re on the topic, consider the diverse personalities in the workplace. There are introverts who will rarely be the first to voice their opinions on a topic. There are people who are non-native English speakers who may be deep thinkers but lack the confidence to articulate themselves. Asynchronous communication allows them to have the space to share their thoughts and ideas at a pace convenient for them. Modern writing tools allow non-native English speakers to correct their spelling and grammar. Introverts now don’t have to be the loudest voice in the room. If diversity is being invited to the party and inclusion is being asked to dance, asynchronous work helps that inclusion.
Defaulting to Action
In software engineering, there’s always a choice between waiting to be perfect and being wrong at speed. When everyone was in one office, sitting at one large table, people could ask for or offer help by just tapping someone on the shoulder and talking to them. Never mind the fact that the person who needed to help you might have lost their own flow. Still, you were one step closer to being perfect. Using the same approach in a remote setup creates many problems. It’s hard to keep track of who is free, who is busy, and who you’re interrupting when you’re giving each other a shout. Remote.com speaks of the concept of “defaulting to action” in such a situation. Sure, interrupting someone can help get your work closer to perfection, but you can’t overlook the impact it has on the person who is unblocking you. Instead, you choose to be wrong at speed. It’s okay, if you have to backtrack at a later point, but it’s better than waiting to be unblocked.
There are many times when work isn’t ready for us to tackle, tasks aren’t planned, decision makers aren’t online, etc. In these times, successful teams execute, even if they later have to refactor and adapt, they don’t waste time “waiting.”
—Marcelo Lebre
Defaulting to action optimizes for speed and throughput, but it also encourages thoughtful communication. For example, a well-written requirement may preempt the need for a ceremonial kickoff, where a developer, product owner, and tester discuss its implementation and testing approach. A simple screen recording attached to such a requirement can allow a developer to continue development while giving the product owner and the tester a way to review the implementation, without interrupting what those two might be up to. Sure, the trio may meet up to iron out some sticking points, but the mantra of “meetings as the last resort, not the first option” works well here. If the developer does have to backtrack, it’s also feedback for the user story. The product owner can incorporate this learning into the next set of user stories they write. When in doubt, teams that adopt asynchronous communication just execute.
Improved Knowledge Sharing and Communication
Asynchronous collaboration isn’t black magic. Getting time back to do deep work isn’t a freebie. In return, people must be clear communicators—mostly through writing.
Many of us find it daunting to write. I admit we all must get better at this skill, but for now let’s focus on the potential benefits. Daily writing brings with it many advantages, including the following ones:
A regular record of project decisions that helps anyone understand your project’s current state effectively.
Easier knowledge sharing and project ownership transfer.
Reducing fear of missing out (FOMO) because everyone can now know what’s happening in any part of the project. There’s no need to attend a meeting to learn what happened in the last meeting!
As projects and organizations scale, tribal knowledge and a system of “he said, she said” don’t scale. Effective writing and thoughtful curation have a better chance at helping you scale, even as tenured people leave and new people join your team.