Remote work promised us freedom — flexibility, focus, no commute, the ability to hire from anywhere and work from everywhere. And yet a lot of remote professionals feel just as drained as they did in the office. Sometimes more. 

Here's why: most of the real benefits of remote work are locked behind asynchronous communication norms. 

Without them, you're just doing office work from your couch. Same interruptions, same back-to-back calls, same waiting-on-a-meeting bottlenecks — just with a shorter walk to the coffee machine. 

Companies that go remote but keep synchronous communication as the default end up with the overhead of distributed work and none of the upside. And individual professionals who never learn to work async-first find themselves tethered to their screens all day, wondering where the "flexibility" went. 

The unlock isn't remote work itself. It's how you communicate once you get there. And the gap between synchronous-by-default and async-first is where most of the lost productivity, delayed decisions, and unnecessary burnout lives. I call that gap synchronous debt.

Synchronous debt sneaks up on you in three ways.

Your calendar becomes a traffic jam for decisions. When every meaningful decision requires a meeting, work becomes hostage to the availability of the busiest people. Work pauses while everyone waits for "the meeting." The meeting finally happens and turns into another meeting because nobody prepped. Work can't flow because decision-making can't flow.

The decisions that do get made are worse. People think and communicate differently. Some need time to process. Some write better than they speak. Some won't fight for airtime in a room full of extroverts. Making every decision live in a meeting means sacrificing the input of exactly the people who might see the problem most clearly.

"Collaboration" becomes an always-on nervous system. Constant pings, constant context switching, constant low-grade stress. Remote work gives people back the two hours they used to spend commuting — but synchronous debt steals it right back as meeting marathons and notification fatigue.

Async-first doesn't mean async-only. Meetings have real value for debate, sensitive conversations, creative collaboration, and relationship-building. The key word is first. Before you schedule a meeting, ask: could this be resolved without one?

Here's what that looks like in practice.

Use decision docs before decision meetings. Before scheduling a call, write it down: the decision to make, two or three options with tradeoffs, your recommendation, who decides, and a deadline. Set a 24–72 hour comment window. If there's no conflict, decide at the deadline. If there is, then meet — but now you're resolving a specific disagreement, not "getting everyone on the same page." You just turned a 60-minute alignment session into a 15-minute conversation.

Move status updates out of meetings. If the purpose of a meeting is "tell people what happened," that's async by default. A weekly update doc, a project page, a quick Loom. When you free up synchronous time, the meetings you do have actually become valuable — you're solving problems instead of reporting on them.

Default to the lightest tool. Most meetings should be emails. Most emails should be Slack messages. And most long Slack threads could be a 30-second video. Video messages are wildly underutilized — faster to create than a written doc, easier to follow than a wall of text, and they double as documentation because AI can transcribe them.

Put a real constraint on meetings. Not "be mindful." Something enforceable. No meeting without an agenda and desired outcome. No meetings on certain days. Cancel recurring meetings by default and add back the ones you actually miss. It almost doesn't matter what the constraint is — merely having one forces everyone to be more thoughtful.

The remote-first teams outperforming their peers have made a critical shift: from synchronous-by-default to async-first-by-design. They spend less time coordinating and more time doing the work that coordination was supposed to enable.

Async-first isn't about eliminating meetings. It's about earning them. When you stop defaulting to "let's hop on a call" and start defaulting to clear, written communication, something shifts. Decisions happen faster. Deep work gets protected. And the time you do spend together actually means something.

Your calendar will thank you. So will your team.