huhn.dev

In Favor of Asynchronous Communication

julian@huhn.dev (Julian Huhn) — Sun, 16 Mar 2025 18:00:00 +0100

tl;dr: Real-time communication is cheap for whoever picks it and expensive for everybody else. That is why I prefer asynchronous communication.

More and more of the people I communicate with, privately and at work, are primarily reachable in real time. They send instant messages, they call, and they schedule meetings. I do not like this development, and I want to be precise about what exactly I dislike. Real-time communication is fine where it fits. What bothers me is that it has stopped being a choice. Most of the time nobody really decides which medium fits the situation. People pick whatever is quickest and easiest for themselves, and that is almost always something that happens in real time.

What counts as asynchronous

Whether something counts as asynchronous depends on two things that are usually treated as one.

The first is technical. Does the medium require both sides to be present at the same time? A meeting, a phone call and a video conference do. Email, ticket systems and instant messaging do not. By that measure instant messaging is asynchronous, and most people would classify it that way without hesitating.

The second is social. What response time does everyone assume? Here instant messaging lands next to the phone call. Push notifications, status indicators such as “online”, typing bubbles and the plain expectation of a quick reply all make it behave as though it were real-time.

That expectation is expensive in two ways. Being permanently reachable is exhausting in itself. And it takes away the main benefit of writing something down, which is the time to think before committing to a sentence. If an answer is expected within seconds, nobody spends any time thinking about what they are actually saying. Messages arrive as fragments, and the rest gets delivered over five follow-ups.

For that reason I do not consider instant messaging to be genuinely asynchronous communication.

It also helps to distinguish two jobs that communication does. One is passing information from one head into another. The other is working out a shared understanding of something that is still unclear, and that is what synchronous communication is genuinely good at. But most of the calls and meetings I am invited to are not that. They exist to pass on information, and that does not require everybody to be in the same room at the same time.

Who pays

If asynchronous communication is so often the better fit, why does everyone keep reaching for the other one? Because it is cheaper for the person choosing.

Say six people need to know something. A thirty-minute meeting costs three hours of their time in total, and it interrupts all six of them. Writing the same thing up properly might take me forty-five minutes, which is longer than the meeting would have taken me personally. But if the six of them need five minutes each to read it, the time everybody invests together adds up to a little over an hour instead of three.

So the email is more expensive for me and much cheaper for everybody else. Whoever picks the medium is systematically the person who saves the most by picking the real-time one. No bad intentions are required, because the incentive is enough on its own. And the largest part of the bill is invisible to the person sending it. A call, a meeting and a message that expects an immediate answer all force the same context switch, and anything that requires sustained concentration does not survive that. But you never get to see the concentrated work your quick question just destroyed.

Attention is not the only thing being spent. People work and live at different hours, in different time zones, with different obligations, and any shared appointment requires somebody to bend their day around it. Asynchronous communication asks that of nobody, and lets everyone take part without giving up their personal or professional commitments.

Put the other way round: real-time communication borrows other people’s attention without asking. Asynchronous communication spends my own so that others have to spend less of theirs. When I write a long message instead of calling, that is not distance. It is the more considerate of the two options, even when it does not feel like it.

My default

In practice I always assume that something will be handled asynchronously, unless there is an explicit reason for the opposite.

If it were up to me, most phone calls and instant messages would be emails, and most meetings would be a recorded video together with a page in a wiki that anyone can read whenever it suits them. Ticket systems and similar tools cover a good part of the rest. All of these leave an archive without anybody having to work for it, so decisions can be reviewed later and people who were not there can catch up.

That default holds in most cases, but not in all of them. Where it does not, I want the exception to be a conscious and considered decision.

And when a meeting or a call really is the right choice, it should still be prepared asynchronously. The time has to be invested beforehand, so that everyone arrives already informed and the shared time is spent only on the part that genuinely needs everybody present. Afterwards the result has to be documented, or it exists only in the memory of whoever happened to attend. Prepared this way, synchronous communication becomes shorter and better.

Making asynchronous communication work

Clear response times: Agree an explicit expectation with the people you communicate with. A reply to a mailing list can take a good week. In a professional context I think 24 hours is fair unless something else has been agreed. Instant messaging only feels synchronous because nobody ever stated the expectation out loud, and an agreed window is what lets me answer in dedicated blocks instead of the moment something arrives.

Complete messages: Ensure that all relevant context is provided in each message, so that recipients can act without further inquiries. Every avoidable round of questions costs time.

Inbox Zero: Asynchronous communication needs a system that reliably surfaces every message. Inbox Zero is that system for me, and I consider it fundamental rather than optional. Trust in a channel collapses the first time something falls through it.

My Motivation Behind Digital Minimalism

julian@huhn.dev (Julian Huhn) — Tue, 14 Jul 2020 17:00:00 +0200

tl;dr: Digital minimalism allows me to regain lost control and increases my quality time as well as time for hobbies and other interests.

What the hell?

In general, people are incredulous when I tell them that I do not own a smartphone. Even though a few people understand my intention, they would rarely commit to doing the same. Therefore, I think I must explain my motivation behind digital minimalism a bit more precisely.

Not having a smartphone is just the first step for me. I want to avoid digital life as much as possible. If, however, digital life is unavoidable, I strictly use only open source software. While this sounds as if I am making it unnecessarily difficult for myself, especially regarding my computer science studies, it is a great relief for me in various ways.

There are different levels of digital minimalism and everyone must find the right dose for themselves. Certainly, my way seems very radical, but small steps are sufficient to feel a change.

You can do without

As mentioned before, I do not own a smartphone. Also no e-book reader, no smart TV, no smart watch and certainly not a fucking smart fridge or anything else that does not need to be smart. I am just using a laptop and a dumbphone. That is quite enough.

My laptop runs OpenBSD and I am cautious to use only minimal programs and do almost everything directly from the terminal to reduce complexity and increase my productivity. The dumbphone is mainly used to be reachable in time-critical emergencies.

Neither my work nor my university studies require any additional equipment. Life requires none at all. Hardly anyone used anything smart before the 2000s. It is amazing how smart devices are now almost indispensable for many people.

Finally, control again

Digital minimalism is not only about the devices you use or do not use, it is also the attitude of how you use them. I do not need social media and I also do not need the 387th account on a service where I am not the owner of my own data. If I register somewhere now, I have thought about it thoroughly before. Unfortunately, countless people lose track of how many services they are registered with. Try to list all your online accounts yourself. You will probably soon notice that you cannot remember all of them.

Every service that you use online generates personal data that can be exploited. Therefore, I want to have control over my data and data flow.

Get rid of the drug

Over time, I realized how addicted I was. I was not only dependent on the infrastructure of others, but I was really hooked. In every free minute I picked up my smartphone and looked up what news there was in the world. First, I updated my Instagram feed, then Facebook and oh look, I got a new snap! The world was always available to me and I was always available to the world.

Not only have I wasted my time, but I have also lost the ability to concentrate. Constant interruptions caused my attention span to decrease. Besides losing time, I was manipulated by countless actors who wanted to monetize me.

Open your eyes

About 3 years ago, I made a radical break and I do not miss anything. I have closed almost all online accounts and sold all non-essential equipment. Only then did I realize how screwed up this society is with its compulsion for self-expression and self-optimization. I never liked the whole nonsense, but I was just too glad to be a spectator.

A lot of people are afraid they will miss something if they got rid of social media, news and so forth. This differs greatly from my experience. Just as long as you can keep scrolling and updating the feeds, you feel like you might miss something. Believe me, you will lose that fear when you separate yourself from all of that.

I now enjoy the time when I am on the road and am not constantly available. When I do something with family and friends, they now get my full attention and I do not let myself be distracted by anything. The biggest gain for me personally was to get time for self-reflection. The time at the bus stop is no longer just another chance to satisfy the addiction, but now serves as time to reflect. To think about everything that is going on in my head at that moment.