When you hire most agencies, the first thing that lands is a calendar invite. We do it differently. We work asynchronously by default, which means your project runs over email and messages, and you reply whenever it suits you.
It sounds like a small detail. In practice it changes how the whole project feels.
Meetings quietly eat the week
Meetings have a habit of expanding. Research published in Harvard Business Review found executives now spend close to 23 hours a week in them, up from under 10 hours in the 1960s. The authors point out that chopped-up schedules are what stop people doing focused work, so they end up starting early or working weekends to find quiet time.
Microsoft’s own workplace research found something similar: employees are interrupted roughly every two minutes across meetings, emails and chat, and spend 57% of their time communicating against 43% actually creating anything.
If you run a small business, you feel this more sharply than anyone. An hour on a call is an hour you weren’t serving customers.
The interruption costs more than the meeting
This is the part people underestimate. Gloria Mark’s research at UC Irvine found it takes an average of around 23 minutes to properly return to a task after being interrupted, because you rarely go straight back to what you were doing.
So a half hour call isn’t a half hour. It’s the call, plus the time before it when you can’t start anything meaty, plus the time afterwards spent finding your place again. Book two of those in a day and the day is basically gone.
Written answers tend to be better answers
When we send you a design to look at, you get to sit with it. You can open it on your phone at 9pm, think about it properly, and reply the next morning with what you actually think.
Compare that to being put on the spot in a call, where people tend to say “yeah, looks good” and then realise a week later that something bothered them. Considered feedback makes for a better website, and it usually gets there faster.
Everything stays written down
Briefs, decisions and feedback all live in writing, so there’s a record. Nobody has to remember what was agreed on a call three weeks ago, and nothing gets lost because one person’s notes were thinner than the other’s. If you want to check what we said about your contact form, it’s right there.
It fits around your actual day
Every year Buffer asks remote workers what the best part of the arrangement is, and every year the answer is flexibility. Being able to work at the time that suits you beats almost everything else.
Your website shouldn’t need you to be free between 10 and 11 on a Tuesday. It should fit around the school run, the shop floor and the busy season.
We’re not strict about it
Async is our default, not a rule. Some things are easier said out loud, and if you’d rather talk something through then just ask and we’ll sort a call. The point isn’t to avoid you. It’s to make sure you’re never sitting in a meeting you didn’t need.
You can read more about how an async project runs from brief to launch, or tell us about your project whenever you have a spare five minutes. No calendar invite required. 😺