How we work · 4 min read
Working async
Non-linear workdays, written-first by default, and why async is what makes remote humane.
How we communicate covers the tone and the tools. This page is about the shape of the day. Async isn't a communication style we picked for flavor. It's the thing that lets a remote company actually work without quietly turning into a company that expects everyone online from 9 to 5 in one timezone, just spread across the internet.
Your day is yours to arrange
We don't run on a shared clock. There are no fixed hours you're expected to be at your desk, no green-dot surveillance, no assumption that being visible is the same as doing the work. You know when you think well. Some people do their best work at 6am, some at 11pm, some in two blocks with a long gap where they go outside and remember they're a person. Arrange the day around that.
The deal underneath this is simple: we care about the work landing, not the hours you kept while making it. If your work is good and your teammates aren't stuck waiting on you, nobody needs to know or care what your Tuesday looked like.
Offline at 2, back at 8
A non-linear day means you can drop offline at 2pm for a doctor's appointment, a school pickup, or a walk, and pick the thread back up at 8. You don't owe anyone an explanation or a made-up excuse. Just don't leave someone blocked while you're gone: hand off first.
Write so nobody has to be online at once
The whole thing falls apart if the work only makes sense in real time. Write for the person who reads this six hours from now, in a different timezone, with none of the context that's currently in your head.
That means: say what you need and by when. Include the links, the background, and the version of the question that doesn't require a reply just to figure out what you're asking. Make a decision request answerable in one pass instead of a back-and-forth that spans two workdays because you each caught the other's reply too late. If you find yourself writing "let's hop on a call to align," first try writing the thing you'd say on the call. Usually the call disappears.
You've written it well when someone can pick up your message cold and move without you. When that's true, timezones stop being a tax.
What a reasonable reply looks like
Async is not an excuse to go dark, and it's not a demand that you answer instantly. Both of those break it.
A good default: reply to normal things within a work day, roughly a day. That's not a rule with a stopwatch, it's an expectation you can plan around. It means nobody should feel they have to sit on a message refreshing for an answer, and nobody should feel they have to answer at midnight to seem committed.
The exceptions are marked. If something is genuinely time-sensitive, say so explicitly and say why, and reach for something faster than a comment thread. If it isn't marked urgent, treat it as not urgent, and protect your focus accordingly. An unread message is not an emergency by default.
Why this is the humane version
It's easy to frame async as a productivity hack, the thing that gets you long uninterrupted focus blocks. It does. But the deeper reason is fairness.
The alternative, real-time by default, quietly punishes anyone who isn't in the founder's timezone, anyone with kids or care duties, anyone whose good hours don't match the calendar's. Meetings-first remote work re-centers all of that on whoever happens to be online when the conversation happens, and everyone else inherits the decisions secondhand. Async refuses that. It says the record is the meeting, the writing is the room, and you can be a full participant from anywhere on Earth without rearranging your life around a clock you didn't choose.
That's the point. Remote-first only earns the name if you can genuinely live somewhere and be a full colleague, and async is what makes it true. If you want the norms for when real-time is the right call, how we communicate has them, and how we work has the wider picture.