The pandemic has changed the way we live and work. Before the pandemic hit, our work culture usually consisted of a 9 to 5 job at a designated office space where people from different departments worked together. But what has changed now with the onset of the work from home culture is asynchronous or async work culture. This new style of work has posed more questions than it has answered. Let us try to answer some of them here.
Asynchronous work definition
As opposed to the 9 to 5 culture, async work offers us something new. In async work, people from different departments work at different times, that is, they work asynchronously. That is to say that they work without sync. Thus with async work, employees are allowed to stay flexible while the pressure remains even on the entire team. This work environment is proven to have improved productivity while maintaining a good work life balance.
Tips for working remotely in an asynchronous work culture
The async work culture has proven to be new for quite a few of us. Thus maintaining work from home productivity while working remotely requires a new style of working. Here are a few tips for async work.
1. Find your own routine
With the flexibility of working remotely in an async work environment, we have the opportunity to find our own work timings. This helps us to work only on timings when we are most productive. Working during times and in situations when we cannot be our most productive self, can badly hamper our quality of work. Thus it is helpful to study our work patterns and find out what timings are the best for us.
Apart from different productivity timings, finding your own routine also lets us play with our personal responsibilities. Thus, for example, if you have always wanted to start a morning workout routine but your office timings always come in the way, working from home can be your one solution. As remote work improves your work from home productivity, it can also improve your personal health.
2. Plug off from notifications
We are constantly surrounded by distractions, the various notifications being the main one. Notifications from social media, messages and emails keep bugging us all the time. This is furthermore intensified now that we are trying for better work from home productivity. Thus it is necessary to reduce them for better async work.
Putting these notifications off is the best solution. But putting off notifications comes with its own risk of missing out on important emails. Email management software like Mailman help you by delivering emails to you only when you can handle them. This is done with its Do Not Disturb feature. Hence, Mailman is our main choice for work from home productivity during remote work.
3. Ensure communication with fellow employees
Office culture prior to the pandemic made sure that there was smooth communication between all employees. Coordination between workers is necessary for the betterment of the team. Each one’s work quality is dependent to an extent on their fellow colleagues. Async work, along with work from home, has reduced this communication to a great extent. This has made way for lack of team coordination which can hamper team productivity.
This can be solved by ensuring regular virtual meetups to ensure good relationships. Along with that, various team productivity software can be used to allow the team to be updated with each other’s work. Such software for teams makes sure that even with asynchronous work, everybody is on the same page.
4. Do not forget to relax
Working remotely has exposed us to constant connection with work. Thus the breaks that we usually had away from work are now missing. Even when we are not working, we are still connected to our work culture via phones or emails. Thus we seem to be available and exposed to work 24*7. This can get very overwhelming and stressful as we seem to have no refuge from work.
One way out from this is to schedule break sessions. These sessions would be time periods where you stay completely away from work. This includes turning off any notifications that are related to our work. Along with that, we must practice full focus when we are at work to ensure better productivity and time management. This allows us enough satisfaction when we stay away from work.
5. Take care of your mental health
Lack of break from work, lesser social interaction and constant exposure to the work culture are some of the disadvantages of async work from home. Naturally this can affect physical as well as mental health. Employing the above tips for async work can largely take care of your mental well being.
Meditation as well as yoga exercises can go a long way in helping us regain a mental balance. Regular breathing exercises and journaling have been proven to help you cope with the newness of async work culture.
Get better at async work with these tips
Async work has introduced us to a new work culture that is very flexible. Our ability to customize this work from home culture is responsible for our productivity. At the end of the day, asynchronous work gives us a better chance to grow as a person while maintaining a good work life balance.
FAQs
Async stands for ‘asynchronous’, which means something that does not happen together.
Examples of asynchronous include emails, messaging services, collaborative tools, etc.
Synchronous work is when people work at the same time while asynchronous is when people work at different times.
Asynchronous work environment serves the schedules of all employees alike. Thus none of them feel the pressure of time while ensuring productivity.
