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Comment by wnevets | Hacker News Reader

>You can frequently determine the balance of power between any two people in an organization by seeing which one has to read and prepare organized documents and presentations, and which one can simply speak and be spoken to. People want to paint pictures of themselves as being able to synthesize knowledge and ideas instantly, utter commands in real time and see them turned into action. In the other direction, they have no time for reading - you must request an audience with them and survive their real-time verbal sparring and probing questions to have your ideas received and considered.

What if I'm just bad with the async nature of slack and/or email? If I had a nickel for everytime a long drawn out back and forth email thread that was resolved in less than two minutes with a face to face conversion and a white board I would have a shit load of nickels.

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If after “resolving” something you can’t actually write down what was accomplished, nothing was resolved.

I’ve had a lot of 1on1s meant to “get us all on the same page” where a boss just blithers and blathers for an hour without communicating anything. The value in writing is working through the mistakes your brain makes during communication. Going to talking just makes it easier to ignore errors.

> If after “resolving” something you can’t actually write down what was accomplished, nothing was resolved.

It's possible to "resolve" something / determine what to do next without writing anything down.

Often the ideal outcome is simply an agreement that Person X will move forward with approach Y.

>Often the ideal outcome is simply an agreement that Person X will move forward with approach Y.

Which you can write down if you so desire.

On my last team that would result in a JIRA ticket containing the details so approach Y was documented and the reasons behind it were recorded. Then the ticket is assigned to Person X and they go ahead with the work.

I would go as far as to argue that this isn't just your being "bad with" async but rather an inherent drawback of async: namely that it requires way more context switching!

Async requires more deliberate planning to avoid context more frequent switching. Time blocking is your friend and with asynchronous communication you have more freedom to time block. You can create a maker's schedule for yourself rather than the manager's schedule where your day is an endless string of meetings.

Slack and other instant messaging tools may make it feel like you need to be always on and responsive, but instant messaging is at odds with async.

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