In Favor of Asynchronous Communication

tl;dr: Real-time communication is cheap for whoever picks it and expensive for everybody else. That is why I prefer asynchronous communication.

More and more of the people I communicate with, privately and at work, are primarily reachable in real time. They send instant messages, they call, and they schedule meetings. I do not like this development, and I want to be precise about what exactly I dislike. Real-time communication is fine where it fits. What bothers me is that it has stopped being a choice. Most of the time nobody really decides which medium fits the situation. People pick whatever is quickest and easiest for themselves, and that is almost always something that happens in real time.

What counts as asynchronous

Whether something counts as asynchronous depends on two things that are usually treated as one.

The first is technical. Does the medium require both sides to be present at the same time? A meeting, a phone call and a video conference do. Email, ticket systems and instant messaging do not. By that measure instant messaging is asynchronous, and most people would classify it that way without hesitating.

The second is social. What response time does everyone assume? Here instant messaging lands next to the phone call. Push notifications, status indicators such as “online”, typing bubbles and the plain expectation of a quick reply all make it behave as though it were real-time.

That expectation is expensive in two ways. Being permanently reachable is exhausting in itself. And it takes away the main benefit of writing something down, which is the time to think before committing to a sentence. If an answer is expected within seconds, nobody spends any time thinking about what they are actually saying. Messages arrive as fragments, and the rest gets delivered over five follow-ups.

For that reason I do not consider instant messaging to be genuinely asynchronous communication.

It also helps to distinguish two jobs that communication does. One is passing information from one head into another. The other is working out a shared understanding of something that is still unclear, and that is what synchronous communication is genuinely good at. But most of the calls and meetings I am invited to are not that. They exist to pass on information, and that does not require everybody to be in the same room at the same time.

Who pays

If asynchronous communication is so often the better fit, why does everyone keep reaching for the other one? Because it is cheaper for the person choosing.

Say six people need to know something. A thirty-minute meeting costs three hours of their time in total, and it interrupts all six of them. Writing the same thing up properly might take me forty-five minutes, which is longer than the meeting would have taken me personally. But if the six of them need five minutes each to read it, the time everybody invests together adds up to a little over an hour instead of three.

So the email is more expensive for me and much cheaper for everybody else. Whoever picks the medium is systematically the person who saves the most by picking the real-time one. No bad intentions are required, because the incentive is enough on its own. And the largest part of the bill is invisible to the person sending it. A call, a meeting and a message that expects an immediate answer all force the same context switch, and anything that requires sustained concentration does not survive that. But you never get to see the concentrated work your quick question just destroyed.

Attention is not the only thing being spent. People work and live at different hours, in different time zones, with different obligations, and any shared appointment requires somebody to bend their day around it. Asynchronous communication asks that of nobody, and lets everyone take part without giving up their personal or professional commitments.

Put the other way round: real-time communication borrows other people’s attention without asking. Asynchronous communication spends my own so that others have to spend less of theirs. When I write a long message instead of calling, that is not distance. It is the more considerate of the two options, even when it does not feel like it.

My default

In practice I always assume that something will be handled asynchronously, unless there is an explicit reason for the opposite.

If it were up to me, most phone calls and instant messages would be emails, and most meetings would be a recorded video together with a page in a wiki that anyone can read whenever it suits them. Ticket systems and similar tools cover a good part of the rest. All of these leave an archive without anybody having to work for it, so decisions can be reviewed later and people who were not there can catch up.

That default holds in most cases, but not in all of them. Where it does not, I want the exception to be a conscious and considered decision.

And when a meeting or a call really is the right choice, it should still be prepared asynchronously. The time has to be invested beforehand, so that everyone arrives already informed and the shared time is spent only on the part that genuinely needs everybody present. Afterwards the result has to be documented, or it exists only in the memory of whoever happened to attend. Prepared this way, synchronous communication becomes shorter and better.

Making asynchronous communication work

Clear response times: Agree an explicit expectation with the people you communicate with. A reply to a mailing list can take a good week. In a professional context I think 24 hours is fair unless something else has been agreed. Instant messaging only feels synchronous because nobody ever stated the expectation out loud, and an agreed window is what lets me answer in dedicated blocks instead of the moment something arrives.

Complete messages: Ensure that all relevant context is provided in each message, so that recipients can act without further inquiries. Every avoidable round of questions costs time.

Inbox Zero: Asynchronous communication needs a system that reliably surfaces every message. Inbox Zero is that system for me, and I consider it fundamental rather than optional. Trust in a channel collapses the first time something falls through it.