Why I love async working (and why your small business probably needs more of it)
Async working. Asynchronous communication. The art of not needing everyone in the same (virtual) room at the same time to get things done.
I want to talk about something that changed how I work, and honestly how I live, more than almost anything else in my career.
Async working. Asynchronous communication. The art of not needing everyone in the same (virtual) room at the same time to get things done.
How it started for me
My introduction to proper async working came during my time at Herrmann International, where I worked with colleagues based in the US. Different time zones, different working patterns, a team spread across continents. Meetings were expensive, not just in time but in the mental overhead of coordinating schedules across multiple time zones, and we quickly worked out that we couldn't run the business on calls alone.
So we started doing things differently. Short video messages instead of "let me jump on a call." Project conversations kept inside the project itself rather than scattered across email threads. Sticky notes on a shared Miro board that people could respond to in their own time. Updates posted in Slack so the whole team could see progress without needing to ask.
And then the company trialled a four-day working week. People took either Monday or Friday off. Suddenly async wasn't just useful, it was essential. If your colleague was off on Monday and you needed an answer, you either left it in the right place for them to find on Tuesday, or you figured it out yourself. Both outcomes were fine.
What I discovered during that period was that async working didn't slow things down. It often sped them up.
The magic of waking up to a reply
With async working you send a message to a colleague in a different time zone at the end of your day. You close the laptop. You do the school run, cook dinner, watch something on TV. You go to sleep.
You wake up. There's a reply. They worked on it while you were asleep. You read it over your morning cup of tea and crack straight on.
Compare that to booking a meeting for two weeks' time because that's the first slot both diaries have free. The async version is faster, calmer and doesn't require anyone to be available at the same time.
I've experienced this in both directions. At one company I'd often work late in the evening after the after-school clubs were done, drop something into ClickUp for approval or review, and wake up to find my colleague had responded first thing in the morning before I was even at my desk. By 9am I was already iterating on something rather than waiting for the day to get started. Our marketing and social media ran seamlessly because of it. Automations set up, content queued, approvals done, all without a single meeting.
The tools that make it work
Async working is only as good as the tools that support it. Here's what I've used and loved, along with the tips that actually make them work in practice:
Slack
The heartbeat of async communication done well. At one company I worked with we kept email for clients only and used Slack for everything internal. It was transformative. At another, Slack did something else too. It made a small remote UK team feel like a team. Fun channels alongside work channels, random messages at random times of day, a genuine sense of connection even when everyone was working different hours for different clients.
Tip: Set up dedicated channels for specific projects and topics so conversations don't get lost in a sea of messages. Get the desktop app, mute the notifications, and just check your messages in dedicated chunks of time when you're ready. You stay focused, you don't miss anything, and you're in control of when you respond.
Asana, ClickUp and Monday.com
The real game-changers for project work are project management systems. At one company, without Asana I genuinely don't know how the project management function would have worked. At another, ClickUp ran our entire content and social media operation with automations, approvals and scheduling all built in. Monday.com is another favourite of mine for how easy it is to use.
Tip: Keep the conversation about the task inside the task. Not in a separate email thread. Not in a Slack message that gets buried. Right there in the task itself, so anyone who picks it up has the full context without having to hunt for it. This single habit changes everything.
Miro
Not just for planning (though it's brilliant for that). I’ve used Miro asynchronously too, dropping sticky notes, adding comments, building out ideas on a shared board that people could contribute to in their own time.
Tip: Use Miro to map out processes, projects or ideas before a meeting rather than during one. People contribute in their own time, come to the meeting with their thoughts already in place, and the conversation is immediately more productive.
Not every team has the budget for a full suite of tools, and sometimes the simplest solution is the right one. In a current role where the team are all fractional consultants juggling multiple clients, the last thing anyone needed was yet another platform to log into. A WhatsApp Community works well. Working groups, project updates, team comms, all in one place people already use.
Tip: Get WhatsApp on your desktop. Mute the notifications. Check the blue number when you're ready rather than picking up your phone. You can type faster, you stay in work mode on your laptop, and you're not disappearing into the black hole of your mobile screen mid-task.
When I'm working from the side of a sports hall
I have two daughters with very full after-school schedules. Gymnastics. Swimming. The kind of clubs that involve sitting in a draughty sports hall or the car with no wifi.
I often take my laptop. I tether to my phone, load up whatever I'm working on, and get things done while my daughter does her thing. It's not perfect. Sometimes the signal drops, sometimes I have to work offline and sync later. But it works because of async. There's no meeting I need to be in. No one waiting for me to respond right this second. I can schedule emails to go out at a normal working hour, post updates when I'm back on wifi, and nobody needs to know I was sitting on a plastic chair watching a floor routine.
That flexibility is the whole point. Work fits around life rather than the other way around.
The one thing async needs to work
I won't pretend async is perfect or that it works in every situation. It needs one thing above everything else: everyone has to be in on it.
If one person in the team doesn't respond to async messages in a reasonable timeframe, things stall. If someone insists on a meeting for everything that could be a message, the system breaks down. The whole thing only works when the team collectively buys into it, understands the tools, and trusts each other enough to work independently without constant check-ins.
When it works though, it really works. And when meetings do happen, they're better. They have an agenda. They have a purpose. They generate decisions and actions, not more meetings. Because everyone knows that if something can be handled async, it will be.
What this means for your small business
If you're running a small business with a remote team, associates, contractors or freelancers, async working is worth taking seriously. You don't need an enterprise tech stack to do it. You need the right tools for your team size and budget, a shared understanding of how to use them, and the discipline to keep conversations in the right places.
The payoff is a business that keeps moving even when people are in different time zones, working different hours, or sitting in a sports hall with patchy mobile signal.
If you'd like help thinking through how your team communicates and works together, that's part of what I do. Get in touch here and we can have a conversation.
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Victoria Lincoln is a fractional operations partner helping small businesses, start-ups and purpose-led organisations get their systems, processes and day-to-day running properly sorted. Hands-on delivery, without the overhead of a full-time hire. Working remotely from Devon across the UK and Ireland. Find out more at The Efficiency Partner.
