Your company made the shift to remote work. Everyone talks about "async first."
You hired people across time zones. You use Slack. You write things down. You embrace flexibility.
And yet, your calendar is still full of meetings.
Standups. Planning. Syncs. Retros. One on ones. Check ins. All hands. Demo days.
If you're supposed to be async, why are you still spending half your day on Zoom?
The Async Lie
Here's the dirty secret: most companies aren't actually async.
They're remote with meetings.
They ditched the office. They hired distributed. But they kept all the synchronous rituals of office work.
They made work location flexible, but not work time.
Why Meetings Persist
Even teams that claim to be async fall back on meetings because:
Meetings feel productive: You talk, make decisions, see faces. It feels like work is happening.
Async feels slow: Waiting for people to respond on their own time creates latency. Meetings feel faster.
Trust is low: If you don't trust people to work without oversight, you schedule meetings to "check in."
Communication skills are weak: Writing clearly is hard. Talking is easy. So people default to meetings.
Culture hasn't shifted: "Let's jump on a call" is muscle memory. Breaking that habit takes work.
FOMO: People accept meetings they don't need to attend because they're afraid of missing something.
The Meeting Creep
Here's how it happens:
You start with good intentions. "We'll only meet when necessary."
Then someone says, "We should sync on this." A meeting gets scheduled.
It goes well. So it becomes recurring. Now it's a weekly ritual.
Someone else sees the meeting. "Can I join? I want to stay informed."
The meeting grows. More attendees. Longer duration. More follow up meetings.
Before you know it, you're back to a full calendar.
The Types That Linger
Even async teams struggle to kill certain meetings:
Status updates: "Let's do a quick sync so everyone knows what's happening." (This should be async.)
Brainstorming: "We need to ideate in real time." (Sometimes true, often not.)
Decision making: "This is complex, let's talk it through." (Fair, but can often be done async with the right tools.)
Standups: "It keeps us aligned." (Async standups work fine for most teams.)
Check ins: "I just want to see how people are doing." (One on ones are valuable, but weekly might be overkill.)
The problem isn't that these are useless. It's that they happen more often than necessary.
The Real Cost
Meetings aren't just time on your calendar. They're:
Fragmented focus: A 30 minute meeting at 2pm destroys the entire afternoon's focus.
Timezone pain: Someone's always attending at 7am or 9pm.
Preparation overhead: Good meetings require prep. Bad meetings waste time without it.
Context switching: Every meeting pulls you out of deep work and requires mental recovery time.
Opportunity cost: The time spent in meetings is time not spent building, writing, designing, or thinking.
For knowledge workers, meetings are expensive.
What Async Actually Looks Like
True async teams operate differently:
Default to writing: Proposals, updates, and decisions happen in docs, not meetings.
Threaded discussions: Complex topics get discussed in Slack threads or Notion comments. Everyone contributes when they can.
Decision logs: When a decision is made, it's documented with context and reasoning.
Recorded updates: Instead of all hands meetings, leaders record video updates people watch on their own time.
Office hours: Instead of scheduling meetings, set open times when people can drop in if they need you.
Rare, purposeful syncs: Weekly or biweekly syncs for bonding and complex discussions. Not daily.
This is what async actually means: communication that doesn't require simultaneous presence.
How to Break the Habit
If you're drowning in meetings despite claiming to be async:
1. Audit your calendar
List every recurring meeting. For each, ask: "Could this be async?" If yes, kill it or convert it.
2. Set meeting office hours
No meetings Monday/Wednesday/Friday. Or no meetings before noon. Protect focus time.
3. Default to async
When someone says "let's meet," ask "could we discuss this in a doc first?" Force the question.
4. Make meetings optional
If a meeting is truly informational, record it and make attendance optional.
5. Shrink meeting length
30 minutes is too long for most things. Try 15. Or even 10.
6. Require agendas
No agenda? No meeting. This alone will kill 30% of unnecessary meetings.
7. Measure meeting load
Track what percentage of time the team spends in meetings. Set a target (20%?) and hold it.
The 1 Meeting Challenge
Some teams try radical experiments: what if we only had one meeting per week?
Everything else happens async. The one meeting is for bonding, big decisions, and things that truly need sync discussion.
It's uncomfortable at first. But it forces discipline. You learn what actually needs a meeting and what doesn't.
Most teams find they can function just fine with 80-90% fewer meetings than they thought.
The Cultural Shift
Breaking meeting addiction requires culture change:
Celebrate async communication. Praise people who solve problems in threads instead of scheduling calls.
Model the behavior. Leaders who decline unnecessary meetings give others permission to do the same.
Protect maker time. Treat focus time as sacred. Don't let meetings fragment it.
Trust by default. If you're scheduling meetings to "check in," that's a trust problem, not a communication problem.
The Bottom Line
If you're async, you shouldn't be in many meetings. Full stop.
A few sync moments per week? Fine. Daily meetings? You're not actually async.
Async means communication happens on everyone's own time. In writing. With thoughtfulness.
Meetings should be rare, purposeful, and reserved for things that truly benefit from synchronous discussion.
If your calendar is full, you haven't actually gone async. You've just gone remote.
And there's a big difference.