Doist founder Amir Salihefendic explains why his remote team doesn’t try to do everything in real time

Does working from home have to mean sitting in a chatroom all day or always being available for a video call?

Real-time chat and video platforms are great for building camaraderie and maintaining a sense of connection with remote teams, but when you need to focus for a few hours, it can be tough to tune out the endless GIFs and notifications.

Some of the most successful fully remote companies (like GitLab, or Zapier) have promoted the benefits of asynchronous communication — a fancy way of saying that not every conversation needs to happen in real time. Your server is down? You probably need to have that conversation now. Brainstorming a new feature? That might work best when everyone has a bit more time to think between responses. The key is acknowledging the strengths of both synchronous and asynchronous communications — and finding the right mix.

Doist co-founder Amir Salihefendic has been an async advocate for years. After leading a team spread around the globe to build popular task management tool Todoist, he set out to build Twist, a tool specifically built for conversations that deserve a longer shelf life.

I chatted with Amir last week to hear his thoughts on the strengths and weaknesses of both approaches, how he balances the two (and handles emergencies) and why he has focused heavily on making async a part of his company’s culture. Here’s a transcript of our chat, lightly edited for clarity and brevity.

TechCrunch: How big is Doist now?

Amir Salihefendic: I think we are about 73 people spread around 30 different countries now. [We’re on] most of the continents around the world.

Why’d you go remote in the first place? What made you make that call?

I was living in Chile — I’m actually still in Chile. I usually live in Barcelona, but right now we’re in Chile, because my wife is from here. When I was here… it was really, really hard to hire developers and designers. This was like 10 years ago; there were very, very few that could actually do the work that I needed, so I started to hire remotely.

Also, probably like yourself, I grew up on the internet. So for me it was kind of very natural to just, you know, work together in a virtual setting, without going to an office.

Got it — you wanted to stay where you were, but needed to find more talent.

Exactly, yeah. We started to hire even more people, and were spread even more around the world, and we’d find more issues. For instance, synchronous communication doesn’t really work that well when you work across many time zones.

A lot of companies aren’t really aware of this — even, you know, most of the current remote companies. They’re usually spread across just a few time zones; not like us, where we have people all around the world.

I know you’ve been a pretty big proponent of asynchronous communication in remote work. Can you explain that concept to me a bit?

What we’re doing right now [chatting over a video call], it’s synchronous communication. You ask a question, I answer [immediately]. And that works, and I think it’s a great way to communicate… sometimes. We just don’t feel like this should be a default way for organizations to communicate. 

In asynchronous communication, the major point is that you don’t expect an answer right away. You don’t expect people to be online all the time. I can send a message and somebody can respond tomorrow — and I will be fine with that, because our culture is built around that concept.

Most of the biggest current remote-first companies — like Automattic or GitLab — they are asynchronous by default. That said, you still need to have meetings with people, you still need to meet people face-to-face sometimes. It should just not be the default way that you communicate. And if you have kids, and if you work across time zones, but you want to have a lot of freedom… asynchronous communication is the way to go.

Are there downsides?

In some situations… you need [people] to be online and resolving issues, like if a server goes down and you need to react. But this is not an everyday thing.  

If you need to be attentive and shutdown a fire, then you need to have synchronous communication — asynchronous communication, in this sense, doesn’t really work, because you can wait a lot of hours before somebody gets online and looks at the problem.

Okay — so in those scenarios… say your server goes down, or your site is getting hacked… in an asynchronous environment, what do you do?

We have a blog post about this; it’s basically a pyramid. At the top, we have phone numbers of everybody. I’ve actually never used the phone numbers to call anybody — but in extreme cases, we have phone numbers and can call people. We also have a Telegram group that I use… This is our “red alert” — like, “you need to come online right away.” This is used a few times per year, I’d say.

Even in asynchronous communication as default, you need some ways to communicate directly with people when you really need that. And some stuff, like one-on-one meetings where you want to provide personal feedback, it’s much better delivered in person than, you know, via text message.

So it’s not a matter of working completely asynchronously, it’s just about shifting it over — 80%, 90% async versus everything happening in a real-time chat system.

Exactly. That’s the main, core thing. Actually, we’ve tried to go 100% asynchronous and it doesn’t really work. [Laughs] I would definitely not recommend doing that; you need to go 70%, 80%.

What about working with other companies that might expect immediate answers? Is it harder to work with others?

Honestly, we have lawyers, accountants… like everybody we work with is doing it asynchronously, and it works nice. A lot of times, like, if you need to have a lawyer involved, it can wait a day. Of course I can just call them if it’s very, very urgent, but most matters just aren’t that urgent. Honestly, we don’t have any issues with that.

Even companies that are like… service companies. They can also work in an asynchronous way — you just need to make it clear from the beginning that it’s actually how you prefer to work. […] We have a lot of experience with that. Lawyers, accountants… I think most knowledge work can be done in an asynchronous way.

Would you say it impacts your speed or agility as a company at all? Does it make you slower, or faster, or is it kind of just a wash?

I’m not sure if you’ve read “Deep Work” by Cal Newport. It’s a great book. Basically, it will be a massive competitive advantage for companies that work asynchronously first, and work on communicating in a more deep manner instead of just one liners and meetings all day long.

In a lot of these things that we do — for instance, development, or design, or writing — you need to actually allocate a lot of hours and really think through the issues that you’re having. Interruptions are just a huge problem in this environment. I think you’ll actually produce much better work if you’re asynchronous first; people can block time [better] if they’re not in meetings all day long.

As we go along this journey… there are very few organizations that are asynchronous by default, but as they move over, I think they’ll have a massive advantage. Someday, I hope, we can be an inspiration, an example of what you can achieve if you’re asynchronous by default.

Can you walk me through your company’s tool stack a bit? What makes async work for you?

One of our biggest core values is communication, and especially written communication. People really need to be good writers; they need to be able to convey ideas well. It doesn’t matter if you’re a designer, or a developer… we have a ton of content. Internally, everything is documented.

There’s a lot of discussion, as well, and it’s not like, chitchat. Some of our specs are like, 30 pages long. It’s a very different environment, maybe, from the usual one where a lot of the documentation and ideas were inside people’s heads… for us, they live inside documents, and inside text.

We use Twist as the underlying platform — a tool that we built. Then we use Dropbox Paper, we use Google Docs, and our developers use GitHub. We also use Figma/Abstract for the design team, and a lot of other tools that different teams use — Zendesk, for example, for our support team. And we don’t do that many meetings. Even in my position, I don’t have many meetings per week. Maybe a few.

With there being so much documentation, as you mentioned, how do you get new hires up to speed? Is that tough?

Honestly, the feedback I’ve received is that it’s actually much easier to join Doist than other organizations that [people] have joined because everything is transparent. You have access to everything — even, like, leadership discussion. It’s all public.

Some teams, like GitLab, take this to even more extreme… but basically, [for] a lot of these remote-first, asynchronous companies, transparency is a huge value. And everything is transparent — I think the only thing that isn’t transparent for us is our salaries. Some other companies like Buffer… they make their salaries transparent, so there’s nothing that isn’t accessible to people.  

So as a new person you can basically join a channel and see all the past discussion, and just browse through that. I think people find that fun. You can see how decisions are made, how the discussion/arguments are made. It’s a very different environment than a company that makes decisions mostly in meetings.

As an already remote-first company, what’s changed for Doist as a result of the COVID-19 outbreak?

Honestly, I think everybody is kind of super-stressed. Even us; we’ve been doing this for 10 years, you know? But you have people dying, and you have this fear of getting the virus, and you’ve got kids at home, you’re quarantined, you can’t go out. 

It creates a very bad environment. We’ve kind of just accepted that this won’t be our most productive [time]. We’ve always been very people-first, so we have just accepted that this won’t be our finest hour. We need to cope, and get through this together. Even as a remote-first organization, this isn’t like…a normal setup.

I get it. I’ve been working remotely for around a decade now, but it all feels different right now. It’s impossible. You want to refresh the news every five minutes, you want to check on your friends, you want to call your family.

Honestly, I have so much sympathy for people that are just [now] being thrown into remote work. They have this stress and everything else related to COVID-19, but they also have to rework how they actually get stuff done, and that probably creates a lot more pressure.

I think preserving our sanity, and getting through this… it’ll be quite tough. But we have survived worse than this in the past; I’m pretty sure we’ll survive this as well.

I know it’s a weird time, but any advice for founders looking to start a remote company right now?

I think there’s a huge amount of opportunity in this, as well. We’re basically redoing so much stuff. Like, education. I have some family in Bosnia, in a small town of like 5,000 people. They’re using Zoom to coordinate having classes. My nephew, who’s eight, finds that very fun! 

Education hasn’t been innovated for a long time… and right now, a lot of innovation is happening, and a lot of new stuff is being tried.

It has to, right? The whole thing has been turned on its head.

Yeah! And the same thing goes for the workforce. I think a lot of people will be shocked by being thrown into this remote environment… but a lot of people are finding out that, yeah, you can actually work in this environment, you can get stuff done, and it’s quite nice. I’m pretty sure this will be a huge moving factor for remote.

So what’s next for Doist? 

Something that has really surprised us is that our numbers have grown — both for Todoist and Twist — in a significant way. So that’s very good. It’s affecting us in kind of a positive way, which is kind of insane given the circumstances… but it’s too early to say. I also don’t think the recession has really kicked in yet, so I don’t know the long-term aspects.

But we still just want to create the best organization tools. We still want to push for this remote-first movement; to make this the best way you can work together with a lot of people.

We also just want to make asynchronous communication as a default, and mainstream. Right now you see most organizations just doing synchronous — but if you have kids at home, and you need to be in many meetings per day… like, our head of marketing’s neighbor is spending like five hours, at least, in meetings per day. That’s so, so bad for parents. You can’t even manage to do like a 30-minute meeting without interruption, without having to take care of the kid… imagine five hours! And then, on top of that, you’re stuck in Slack or Microsoft Team rooms all day.

So for us, asynchronous as default… it’s just the way that work can become much, much better. People can do better work, and have much more freedom. It’s kind of niche, we don’t have a lot of support in this. But it’s a core belief that we have: this is the right way to do this.