In March, we ran an experiment. For one month, we would go fully asynchronous: no recurring meetings, no scheduled calls, no synchronous communication required. Everything would be documented, recorded, or written.
The goal was to reclaim time from meeting hell. At our peak, people were spending 15-20 hours per week in meetings—engineers who needed focus time, forced into calls about calls about calls.
The experiment was supposed to last a month. It's now been six months. We're still mostly async. Here's what actually happened.
The Setup
We're a 45-person company spread across 12 time zones. Even before the experiment, synchronous communication was hard. Our "all-hands" meeting at 9am Pacific was midnight for our Sydney team. Something had to change.
The Rules
- No recurring meetings. If something recurred, it had to justify itself weekly.
- Video calls allowed, but must be recorded and summarized. If it wasn't worth documenting, it wasn't worth meeting about.
- All project communication happens in Gryphin board threads, not Slack or email.
- Decisions are made in writing. No "we discussed and decided"—write down the decision and rationale.
- Response expectations: same business day for urgent, 24 hours for normal, 48 hours for FYI.
Month 1: The Honeymoon
The first month was borderline euphoric. People suddenly had time. Deep work happened. Code got shipped.
Early Wins
- Calendar time: 18 hrs/week → 4 hrs/week
- Feature velocity increased 31%
- Written documentation exploded
- Sydney team stopped being second-class
The Vibe Shift
People were noticeably less frazzled. The constant context-switching of meeting-code-meeting-code disappeared. Engineers reported feeling like they could actually think again.
Month 2-3: The Challenges Emerge
But then, cracks started showing.
Problem #1: Speed on urgent issues
When something went wrong in production, coordinating over async was painful. People were checking their task board while the site was partially down. We had to create an exception: real emergencies get a Slack huddle, no questions asked.
Problem #2: Social isolation
Some team members felt disconnected. The casual chat before meetings, the human connection of seeing faces—that disappeared. One team lead told me: "I realized the only time I saw my teammates' faces was in their Slack avatars."
Problem #3: New employee onboarding
Bringing new people into an async culture is harder than an in-person or sync-heavy culture. There's no "shadow someone for a week." We had to create much more structured onboarding docs, buddy systems, and explicit "you can always ask for a call" permissions.
Problem #4: Difficult conversations
Performance feedback, conflict resolution, sensitive topics—trying to do these async was a mistake. Text loses too much nuance. We made an exception: hard conversations happen synchronously (scheduled in advance).
What We Settled On
After six months of iteration, here's our current model:
Default async. Most work, most communication, most decisions happen asynchronously through documented channels.
Exceptions for sync:
- Production emergencies
- Complex technical discussions where rapid iteration is needed
- Sensitive personnel conversations
- Optional social time
- Onboarding (first two weeks are heavier on calls)
One required meeting:
Weekly team-wide async video update. Everyone records a 2-3 minute video about their week. Others watch at their convenience. This maintains some human connection without requiring everyone online at once.
The Numbers After 6 Months
What I'd Tell Other Teams
Going fully async requires tooling investment
You can't just cancel meetings and hope people figure it out. You need systems for documentation, async decision-making, status visibility. We use Gryphin for all project communication—cards become the single source of truth, and threaded discussions stay contextual. Without that infrastructure, async would have collapsed.
Writing skills become critical
In an async culture, clear writing is clear thinking. People who struggle to express ideas in text struggle in an async environment. We've started evaluating writing skills in interviews.
You have to actively fight isolation
Async solves the time problem but can create a connection problem. Social infrastructure—optional hangouts, team celebrations, intentional face time—needs to be explicitly built and maintained.
Not everyone thrives async
Some people genuinely work better with real-time collaboration. That's okay. We've found that offering both options (async by default, sync available) works better than mandating one approach.
Would We Go Back?
No. Even with the challenges, the benefits are too significant. Our team has time to think. Our global team is actually global, not just "early people in California and whoever else can make it."
But we also wouldn't recommend dogmatic async. The "no meetings ever" religion is as counterproductive as the "everything requires a call" religion. The goal is effective communication, not ideological purity.
Use the right tool for the job. Async for most things. Sync when it actually helps. And build the systems that make async work, because it doesn't happen automatically.
David leads engineering at a fully remote company of 45 people across 12 time zones. He's been thinking about remote work since before it was cool (or mandatory).