The next three biggest remote working superpowers
This isn’t a space to learn about remote work. There are excellent books and resources on that broad subject already. My focus is on asynchronous work, particularly on agile software development teams. However, some skills that you need for remote work become important when working asynchronously as well. In the previous post, we discussed how written communication is the number one superpower when working asynchronously.
In today’s post, I’d like to add three more superpowers to the list. Think of these as a quartet of abilities that will help you and your team to supercharge your individual and collective effectiveness.
Distraction blocking
Reading and comprehension
Working independently
Let’s look at what each of these skills involves and how you can practice them.
Distraction blocking
A key benefit of asynchronous work is that it reduces interruptions and gives you back time for deep work. Now that is something that happens at a process and institutional level. It doesn’t address the conditioning many of us have developed where we actively seek distractions. This is a well-noted phenomenon that authors like Cal Newport and Johann Hari have written about extensively.
“Smartphones have provided us with a virtually unlimited supply of social stimuli, both positive and negative. Every notification, whether it’s a text message, a ‘like’ on Instagram, or a Facebook notification, has the potential to be a positive social stimulus and dopamine influx.”
We don’t just seek dopamine hits from social media. Checking our email or Slack triggers a similar rush. However, if we give in to these temptations, then we erode the benefits of working asynchronously.
Efforts to deepen your focus will struggle if you don’t simultaneously wean your mind from a dependence on distraction. - Cal Newport
So the ability we all need to build is to block out distractions when we engage in deep work. Here are a few strategies that I suggest you start with.
Plan your week in advance. Set up your days such that you have at least a couple of uninterrupted, three-hour work slots on your calendar every day. Make sure you block these slots out. Apps like Google calendar allow you to define these as focus time, so your deep work slots are visible to your colleagues. You’ll also need to learn how to decline avoidable meetings. Dropbox has some delightful suggestions on how to respectfully decline meetings.
“Thanks for including me! I’m wondering if we could try to solve this over email instead?”
“I’ve been in so many meetings lately, but I’m trying to be more disciplined about my schedule. Could we try to solve this without a meeting, first?”
“I’d be happy to give you feedback on that! Before we schedule a meeting, could I review it in Google Docs?”Ration the distractions. Your smartphones, laptops and tablets all come with a “do not disturb” feature. Be sure to enable that when you’re in a deep work session. On the Apple ecosystem you can use Screen Time to control which apps you can use when, and for how long. Android and Windows devices have similar features as well. It’s amazing how much you can achieve by just introducing a little friction on your devices.
Use an app blocker. While features like Screen Time are fabulous, sometimes you need a heavy-handed, no-way-out solution. App blockers like Freedom allow you to define rules that apply to all your devices and when you begin a deep work session, any app or website you blacklist becomes inaccessible. Whether or not you like it. So even if you instinctively navigate to a distraction - you can’t use it. Yet again, the friction is liberating.
Reading and comprehension
This is a corollary to the first superpower - written communication. The most frustrating thing for any coworker is when they write something up, but the people who should have read it, don’t actually read. Let me repeat something I said earlier.
“If you want to be a technology firm in the 2020s and you’re building a culture that doesn’t read or write, then heaven help you!”
There’s no asynchronous work without writing. And if no one’s reading, the writing is pointless. So you’ll need to set aside time in the day not just to write stuff up, but also to consume writing that someone intended for you. If you’ve lost the reading habit, then this may seem daunting to you to begin with. I have some good news for you, though.
If you have already freed up your calendar, you’re no longer under time pressure to finish reading before that next meeting. Breathe. Slow things down. Read. Take the time you need to comprehend what your colleagues are saying.
Reducing distractions will help build your focus. If you’re working in tech, it’s likely you have latent reading skills from your years of formal education. At the base speed of 200 words per minute, you can read a 10 page document in 15 minutes. And that’s more the exception than the norm. Developing this habit will help you consume a high density of information in short periods of time.
On the personal side, it’ll help to train yourself to read as well. Set aside two slots of 10 minutes each day to read anything that you enjoy - a book, a magazine, articles on your favourite websites. The more you build the reading muscle, the stronger it gets and the more productive your asynchronous work experience will be.
Working independently
Last but not the least, you’ll need to learn how to work independently. This doesn’t mean that you don’t have to collaborate with others. It just means that you can’t be looking for someone to manage you. You should be able to default to action instead of waiting indefinitely. Above all, you’ll need to respect your colleagues’ autonomy and flexibility just as much as you desire it for yourself.
“In an all-remote organisation, we want each team member to be a manager of one. A ‘manager of one’ is an attribute associated with our ‘Efficiency value’. To be successful at GitLab, team members need to develop their daily priorities to achieve goals. Managers of one set the tone for their work, assign items and determine what needs to get done. No matter what role you serve, self-leadership is an essential skill needed to be successful as a manager of one.”
There are several strategies to achieve this, but here are a few I recommend you follow.
Practice self sign-up. Agile teams are by design, management-light. When motivated individuals get together, they will autonomously figure out what they need to do. Waiting for someone to tell you what to do is an anti-pattern - one that you should avoid.
Analyse your tasks well and ask for help early. This is key to asynchronous work. When you self sign up for a task, you expect that the last person who worked on it left enough detail for you to pick it up. You’ll not only need to analyse it well, but you’ll also need to give others the time to help you, in case you need help. That way, if someone needs to help you out, they can plan to spend that time for you or with you.
Communicate progress proactively. It can be annoying if people keep pinging you about the status of a task. Not only does it create interruptions for you, it can get frustrating for you to communicate the same thing repetitively. On the flip side, knowing your progress is important to the team. There may be downstream tasks that depend on the task you’re working on. It’s only fair that people responsible for those tasks know where you’re at, with the work you’re doing. On an async-first team, you’ll need to communicate progress at every logical juncture. That way, you don’t just protect your sanity, you’re also being empathetic of how interdependent work can be in a team. Don’t be afraid to share work-in-progress. Use screen-recordings where necessary to make your updates visual. Communicate in the task's context on your task board - early and often.
When in doubt, execute. We’ve discussed this earlier. If you’re in doubt, choose to be wrong at speed, over being perfect. Asynchronous teams focus on getting things done. You will make mistakes - take that in your stride and use the mistakes to make your process more robust the next time. And when something goes wrong, be sure to refactor and adapt.
Your personal productivity as a technologist has a direct impact on how you work with others on a distributed, asynchronous-first team. As you drive change in your organisation, consider not only how you build these superpowers for yourself but also how you help others acquire these abilities.
While this article and the last one focussed on personal productivity, we’ll soon shift focus to the team. In future articles, I’ll outline some principles for working asynchronously and describe how you can come up with a handbook to steer the team’s way of working.