How Asynchronous Work Helps You Leverage Your Team’s Diversity

Today’s document tools aren’t built for discussion. We’ve seen so many improvements in how you can write docs like collaborative editing, relational tables, fancy blocks, and more. These features are powerful but they incentivize us to polish and present our ideas. We should spend less time writing documents and more time discussing the ideas.

You should protect your team’s “deep work” at all costs. Traditional work environments optimize for rapid-fire communication. Meetings, Slack, text messages, and stand-ups are examples. Levels thinks these defaults are disastrous and reduce the amount of “deep work” its team can do. It does everything possible to protect this time.

Figure out how you set up systems that put everyone in your team in the driver seat of their own productivity, not at the whim of other people’s preferences

At a deep level, meeting inflation is about the outdated expectation that all office work ought to be synchronous, or happening at the same time for everyone. Meetings require synchronicity: Everybody be present now. But most white-collar labor can be at least somewhat asynchronous. We send emails and chats that don’t require an immediate response.... See more