Written communication is remote work super power

When everyone is expected to be available at any point, the cost of interrupting someone and getting an immediate answer is lower than looking for an answer yourself. 

Planning is another culprit. Most people will not go through proper in-depth planning for their tasks ahead of time. They’ll prefer to define the end goal, and discover issues and details as they go. They know they will never get stuck, people will answer their questions on time.

This creates a culture of interruptions in the organization. It feeds itself so deeply, that the organization can’t really operate without interruption. Since the organization as a whole is dependent on that, it becomes part of the culture. Once you have culture of interruptions, even the best communicator in the world will not be able to change it.

Work time flexibility will be broken too. Since everyone is dependent on everyone else to be available for interruptions within the work day, you have a work day.

You must be in sync about your work day times with everyone else. You therefore give up the ability for real work time flexibility.

Working from home and dreaming on picking up your children at noon, hangout with them and get back to some work later in the night? Forget about it. You will get stuck on something very quickly and no one will be there for you. Not to mention you will get your colleagues stuck as you won’t answer their questions on the afternoon.

Writing intentionally for asynchronous communication can solve all the issues mentioned above. Async writing is different from chat messages. It lives longer, targets more potential audience and is easy to discover.

To live longer, the text needs to be aware of a larger reader group context. Where chats often consider just one/two readers that have the context to understand what you talk about, the long live text should consider entire group of potential readers. Now, and at some point in the future.

Async communication allows for self discovery without interruptions:

• You can keep on your flow without waiting for someone to give you details
• You can get into “deep focus” session without context switching that allows for better productivity
• You can work whenever, since you are not dependent on anyone immediately