"Welcome to Not-Together Time."

Introduction

Realtime (Sync) meetings on Zoom are good for SOME things, like socializing and team bonding. There are also sensitive situations that need face-to-face interaction (emergencies, alignment, separations). But Vlogr is a global company with people in many time zones. This makes sync meetings/huddles inefficient for routine work. The person you need could be asleep or enjoying downtime. If we waited for syncs to decide or act, we would be too slow to be competitive. The answer is to avoid sync methods for most work and use asynchronous work methods instead.

What is asynchronous work?

Asynchronous work is the stuff you do at your own pace and order, not during a meeting or huddle. This amount of freedom can be daunting. We need everyone even, swift, and nimble; in other words, able to get the right things done without waiting for others. Async methods help you focus on, document, and communicate this work to the team. We've broken our best practices into three parts - Multiplexing, Communication, and Action

• Multiplexing - Be ready to select and work on more than one project at a time.
• Communication - Use the right tool at the right time. Include the right people at the right time.
• Action - "Always Default to Action!"

It is all about ‘Concentration’

Why do we do it this way?

Humans aren't very good at going from a state of total focus on task A to total focus on task B without loss (as depicted in the following image). For example, when you're deep in a book and get interrupted with something. It'll take you a moment to get back into the book.

In Example 5 we see a time-based chart, where Time and Productivity are the axes. This example depicts the timeline of a backend developer that gets interrupted twice, first by a frontend developer about the payload of an API request and second time from a new team member about setting up the project's database locally.

Example 5

The backend developer spent some time focusing on the task at hand (1) and later transitioned to a state of focus (2). This (2) is what we want to maximize and where we get the best out of our super creative and powerful brains. Then, when interrupted, the developer spends some time to address the question from the frontend developer (3) to then get back to the task (1). Unfortunately as the developer was focusing again (2), a new interruption occurs (3).