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For the inaugural issue of Protocol's Workplace newsletter, editor David Pierce writes an increidbly succinct summary of what async-first collaboration looks like at Doist:
Amir Salihefendic, CEO of Doist, prides himself on having a nearly empty calendar. "Being in meetings all day long, resolving things via meetings, that's not really an effective way to scale and grow," he said. Instead, he's become a loud evangelist over the last year of the idea that remote and asynchronous work — or async — are the future.
- Async boils down to this, Salihefendic said: "When you send a message, you don't expect a response right away."
So what does a truly async day look like? For Salihefendic:
- A couple of hours with his kids in the morning before walking over to a co-working space.
- He tries to do deep work all morning, take time in the middle of the day to recharge and then spends the afternoon catching up on messages and the rest.
- If there's something hugely time-sensitive — which Salihefendic bets is true less often than you think — he turns to Telegram, or (gasp) a phone call.
The way this works at Doist is with the expectation of a response within 24 hours, even if that response is a thumbs-up emoji or an "I'll get to this Thursday."
- Since nobody expects Salihefendic to be around every second, he said, nothing bad happens when he's not.
- When he has something to say, Salihefendic will post something in Twist, the communications app Doist developed as an async-leaning alternative to Slack. "We have threads that are hundreds of comments long, discussing a specific thing," he said. Eventually, he'll identify a DRD — a Directly Responsible Doister, a play on Apple's Directly Responsible Individual — who is in charge of executing the task.
Doist does have some meetings, but Salihefendic said they're often for team-building. Team is synchronous, work is asynchronous. "We just calculate how much we'd spend on office space, and just use that on retreats instead," he said.
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Ambition & Balance
