I’m a startup co-founder, so day to day can be a lot of different things. But it’s something like this:

1. log on to Slack in the morning and see if there’s anything that needs attention. We use slack as a central hub. All of our tools funnel activity into slack. My team is small (3 full time, 2 part time contractors). Most of my team works over night and into the morning (very different time zones). Typically when I wake up, there’s a few PRs for me to review, or questions to answer on a ticket in linear. We also have a check in bot that runs once per week. No real need to do daily checkins.

2. After I catch up and respond to any questions (which most likely will be read by people that night or the next day) I see if I have any sales meetings. Since we’re a startup it’s still founders in sales mode. I might have a demo or 2 each day. This is probably my only non-async activity.

3. Outside of sales work, I also write code, review design work, and field customer support questions. So the rest of my day is a buffet of random stuff.

As far as politics go. There really isn’t any. The team is pretty small. We might have a disagreement on how a feature should be implemented or something like that, but I’m the deciding factor and everyone is a professional so it’s not a problem.

As someone who has been fully remote the past two years, and in a team that is gradually exploring/adopting more async work practices over the past year, I would be curious to hear more too.

Our team stopped having a standup meeting- we just have a daily automated post in our chat, and we comment in the thread whenever it makes sense. If we’re working on the same thing for days with no blockers, it’s not a big deal to not provide an update.

We’ve reduced our synchronous communication by quite a bit. Some weeks I don’t have a single call I join. If you document everything well enough, you don’t really need to. I find myself on calls when I need to extract information from an architect that is just too busy to write everything down, or I’m mentoring a teammate. Or I’m in my monthly 1-on-1 with my manager.

Working outside of regular business hours is not off the table, but it is new. It helps that some of us are in the US and some in Poland. Normally, just blocking off time on the calendar and marking your status (out of office) is sufficient.