The asynchronous communication tools preferred by most organizations are exacting an enormous and largely unseen toll.
Stories like the above play out minute after minute, day after day, at organizations all across the world. Millions of “Quick Q”s are sent off as a well-intended way to keep people in the loop without asking too much of them in the moment. But each of those “Quick Q,”s and each of the “re: re: Quick Q”s it spawns, can represent a bottomless and unbounded time commitment to the people who must receive, contextualize, and prioritize them. An email thread that takes less than a minute to start can wind up collectively costing days of productive time before it is resolved or abandoned.
And yet, nearly every organization I’ve worked with is much more concerned about the time they spend in synchronous meetings than they are about the time being lost to open-ended, asynchronous “pings.” In the interest of minimizing the time spent in synchronous meetings (or as a result of being “too busy” for such meetings), I have seen many teams fall deeper into asynchronous communication patterns that ultimately consume the vast majority of their collective time and energy.
