About to kick off an "Async Week" next week at @Close within Eng/Product/Design.
We work pretty asynchronously normally and don't have a ton of meetings, but we use Async Weeks to flex our async muscles further with 0 prescheduled meetings during the week.
The idea is to encourage deep work and be extra thoughtful about our communication.
After doing a couple test runs, the team overwhelmingly agreed we should do these Async Weeks regularly. We follow a Shape Up inspired product development process with 6-week Cycles and 2 week cool downs, so we're doing Async once every couple months.
Managers are also encouraged to have an async (written or @Loom) 1:1s during that week, which has been a nice forcing function to encourage questions/answers that may require reflection vs. an off-the-cuff answer.
Some good questions (that I stole)
Biggest hesitation heard was "we already don't have many meetings". Also very common for new hires to tell us we work much more async than their previous companies. I think these are good things!
As our team grows (EPD now at 35) we'll continue to experiment with how to work.
What would you get done if your calendar looked like this?