Remote work is about async collaboration

Remote work is less about async communication and more about async collaboration.

What is the difference?

Let me explain.

Even office workers can do async communication.

They can message their boss they will be late. They can message their co-worker they need their help with a certain project.

But office workers don’t do async collaboration. That is, they don’t collaborate asynchronously. They need to be physically or virtually present at the same time to collaborate.

Whereas with remote work, you have to do async collaboration.

Send co-worker the various questions you need help with. Explain your thinking in detail so that you get the resolution in one shot.

Then the co-worker gets around to your questions at their own time.

In the meanwhile, you work on something else or take a break.

This workflow has some HUGE advantages.

Firstly, the individual freedom it gives is unmatched.

Your time is not bound to another individual or group.

You can drop your kid, attend an event, go to the gym, or read a book at any time and still get work done.

Also, employees are more careful of other people's time. So people are not pulled out of the zone unnecessarily.

Async collaboration is delayed in nature so it forces people to carefully think about what they discuss with others.

This often results in them self-realizing the solution and thus avoiding the need for communicating. This saves time and also improves one’s understanding of the problem.

Then, with the limitation of async collaboration, everyone is forced to assign work such that it can be done atomically, with as less inter-dependences as possible.

Finally, these individual atomic assignments come with more accountability since you have no one to blame.

So better work is done.