Without a more formal process, it was hard to make sure the team actually dedicated their time to "attend" the async meeting so having clear expectations and guidelines helped make it more like the meetings we would attend in real-time where you know you have to show up and bring your full attention.

The other challenge was with ad-hoc items added to the async meeting later in the week, so that also caused us to come up with the rule that you should not add anything that's non-urgent to this week from Tuesday to Friday, just Mondays.

We've been remote from the start (2018) with members originally from the US (Mountain Daylight Time) and Europe (GMT+2).

However, as our team grew bigger in 2020, we started to increasingly experience the challenge of scheduling live meetings without inconveniencing someone's early mornings, late evenings or even... nights. This is particularly true for my team (support team) - we aim to provide 24/5 support coverage, so some members never really have any overlapping time zones.

People adjusted right away to these new principles.

Before we added Principle 1 (always reacting to posts), we weren't quite sure if others have seen, read and acted upon the items added to the agenda.

The async meeting has gone through a lot of iterations and somehow this is the version that has worked the best for us, but as Principle 7 says - it's a living document and it's still probably not the final or the best version it can be!

If you're using this artifact in Whimsical, it's a good idea for everyone to turn on comment notifications. This way, whenever someone pops in a new topic, you'll get an email notification, and you can even reply to it directly from the email.
(Here's a help article about how to enable comment notifications: 

https://help.whimsical.com/article/568-commenting-in-whimsical-files

)

To make sure "Archive" doesn't become bigger than the ongoing meetings, you can stack the weekly cards on top of each other. You'll still be able to find all the discussions and announcements via Whimsical's search feature (

https://help.whimsical.com/article/687-searching-in-your-whimsical-workspace

).

Lastly, don't hesitate to tweak the artifact to fit your needs.
For example:


1. If you're already having check-ins on Slack or another platform, there's no need to double up. We've tried check-ins in various places, and I'm still on the fence about the best place. I like that you can add comments and images to these Whimsical cards - it adds a personal touch, which can sometimes be missing in a remote and async setting. This personal connection is really crucial for us.


2. Maybe a weekly cadence is too regular or too short? No problem, just change it.

While the artifact might look a little scary and overwhelming at first, it's actually quite simple since all you have to focus on is the items in the "Current week." The rest of the sections won't matter much once you start using it.

At the beginning of the week:

1. Shift unfinished tasks from last week to this week.
2. List down new announcements or discussions.

During the week:

1. Continue to list down new announcements or discussions.
2. Be informed about what others are doing, have discussions and made decisions.

End of the week:

1. Finalize your decisions.
2. Add your check-ins.

A few observations I've made since using this format:

1. We don't have to sacrifice our evenings or mornings just to have a meeting. Each of us can have deep and calm work during regular hours without any disruptions from real-time meetings and decide when's the best time to focus on the async meeting.

2. Everything's documented a lot better. During real-time meetings somebody always had to be the facilitator and write down meeting notes and action items. Now, everybody's participating and there's a reliable and consistent paper trail (the Archive) from our meetings.

3. There's definitely less ambiguity about decisions. Since items added to the board are well-considered, they're concise and targeted, helping us avoid the typical "meeting about a meeting" scenario.

Darta Rina Türkmen

This framework allows our team, which is spread over 20 time zones, to have asynchronous meetings while allowing everyone to contribute.

Async Team Meetings for Remote Distributed Teams at Whimsical

Async Team Meetings for Remote Distributed Teams

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