I'm the founder of FutureWork IQ where I spend my time assisting businesses to improve their climate literacy so as to understand the projected impacts from the expanding climate crisis and how to adapt their workplaces in the face of these impacts.

Today most businesses that have been forced into a “remote work” situation have simply tried to replicate the in-office experience, online. That seems like a logical thing to do, however replicating the office online sadly often replicates the distractions too:

> “Shoulder tapping” interruptions
> Meetings
> Noisy co-workers

If you listen to the chatter online at the moment this is all exhausting people, and a drop in productivity is being experienced.

How do you solve this? Get yourself into an asynchronous work mindset. One of the best ways I have seen how to do this comes from the team at GitLab. Their suggestion is to ask yourself this question: “How would I deliver this message, present this work, or move this project forward right now if no one else on my team (or in my company) were awake?”

If no one in your team was awake, you can’t “shoulder tap” anyone, you can’t call a quick Zoom or Teams meeting, you can’t be chatting live with team members in Slack. So how would you do it? The answer to that question is how you open the door to asynchronous work!