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by nradov 3344 days ago
E-mail, wikis, discussion forums, and issue trackers are all collaboration tools built from the ground up to be asynchronous in nature. Are you looking for something else?
2 comments

Agreed that all of these can be used asynchronously. However, I would refer to these as "incidentally-asynchronous", in the sense that their design goals were not primarily to be asynchronous (and hence support "Deep Work").

The major determinant of asynchronous deep collaboration efficiency is number of "cycles-to-outcome". (where a cycle is roughly a request/response loop).

Email because of its lack of shared state collaboration generates lots of extra cycles because of confusion on shared state (i.e. attachment nightmare).

Conversely, something like online document collaboration supports shared state collaboration, but is really poor at "what happened". For all but the smallest of documents this leads to compounding "implicit document rot" on every iteration. Alternatively, it leads to ever increasing time to "catchup" once again vastly expanding cycles-to-outcome.

Neither is good with accountability (something that issue trackers are good with). Lack of accountability is another driver of increasing cycles-to-outcome.

A deep collaboration solution that enables Deep Work could be designed from first principles based on minimizing cycles-to-outcome.

Each of these tools has two parts:

- the constraints of the tool itself - the culture of the organization that uses the tool

One organization could use emails and issue trackers completely asynchronously with scheduled twice daily checkins.

Yet another could use them for near instantaneous communication.

As always, the technology is usually something that simply exposes the underlying human behaviors.