The agile movement was about freeing developers from the baggage of Dilbertesque corporations. But in the 2020s, “doing agile” often comes at the cost of agility. Teams and companies sacrifice common-sense at the altar of a hustle culture, that looks agile, but is far from the spirit of the movement.

The sooner a new team can norm, the sooner it delivers value to its stakeholders. This article provides a recipe for leaders of distributed teams to accelerate team norming.

Writing the book about “async-first” collaboration doesn’t mean that I’m immune to the status quo. I screwed up on my own rules recently, by taking a “sync-first” approach instead. And boy, did that hurt!

If you adopt asynchronous work, everyone should be able to work on a schedule that’s convenient to them. But that may not be the case from day one. You must first build your deep-work muscle.

It’s tempting to extract the last bit of productivity from our work schedules. However, busyness isn’t the same thing as productiivity. Let me explain why cutting yourself some slack, is a better idea.

Unpredictable days are shapeless days. This represents the classic maker-manager paradox. Makers need contiguous blocks of time to achieve meaningful outcomes. A calendar driven schedule is amongst the worst blows to a maker’s productivity. We can’t be proud of this way of working.

To move away from the office mindset, then we’ll need to unlearn a few unhealthy habits we’ve picked up over the years. In this post, I want to share four of these habits. Benign as they may seem, they are pernicious obstacles in your path to being an async-first team or organisation. Let’s explore each of them and the problems they create. As we do so, I’ll outline a few alternatives to these behaviour

In the previous post, we discussed how written communication is the number one superpower when working asynchronously. In this post, I’m adding 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.

1. Distraction blocking

2. Reading and comprehension

3. Working independently