For ten months I worked from Nairobi with the partnerships team of Latitude59, Estonia's flagship tech conference. Our partners and stakeholders sat across Europe and Africa, and the team itself was split between countries. What kept us moving was a habit more than a tool: we worked async by default.
Async means the work does not wait for everyone to be online at the same time. People write things down, decisions live where everyone can find them, and meetings are for the few things that need a live conversation.
Why it matters for African teams
More Kenyan professionals now work with teams in Europe, the US and across the continent. Time zones are one problem. Power cuts, patchy connections and busy commutes are others. A team that depends on live calls loses hours to all three. A team that writes things down keeps moving.
Five habits that make async work
1. Write the update before anyone asks
Every day or every week, depending on the team, each person posts a short update in one channel: what moved, what is blocked and what they need from whom. Three lines is enough. It removes most of the messages asking for an update, which interrupt everyone.
2. One home for every decision
At Latitude59 I built the team's documentation in Notion. Proposals, partner notes and processes all lived in one place. When a partner asked a question, anyone on the team could find the answer without waking someone up.
3. Make the pipeline the source of truth
The partner pipeline ran in Salesforce. Every partner had an owner, a stage and a next step with a date. The weekly partnerships call became a short review of the pipeline instead of a round of status updates, because the status was already written down.
4. Write requests that can be answered in one reply
Give the context, the question and the deadline in one message. Link the document. Suggest an answer so the other person can just say yes. A request that needs three back-and-forth messages costs a day when you are in different time zones.
5. Keep calls for what needs a call
Some things need a live conversation: a hard decision, a conflict, a partner relationship at risk or a new person joining the team. Everything else can be a written update or a short recorded video.
Tools matter less than habits
You can do all of this with Google Workspace, WhatsApp, a shared drive and one tracker. Paid tools help once the habits are in place. Without the habits, a new tool becomes one more place to check.
What async is bad at
Async work has limits. New team members need more live time in their first weeks. Trust between people who have never met takes calls, and sometimes a trip. When a relationship with a partner is tense, pick up the phone. Writing is for keeping work moving, and people still need to talk.
A starter kit for your team
- One channel for written daily or weekly updates.
- One document home, with a page per process and per partner.
- One tracker for the pipeline or project, with an owner and a next step on every row.
- One weekly call, 30 minutes, run from the tracker.
- A team rule: every request includes the context, the question and the deadline.
Questions about working async
How do you handle something urgent?
Agree on one urgent channel, usually a phone call or a direct WhatsApp message, and keep it for true emergencies. Agree as a team on what counts as one.
Does async slow down decisions?
It speeds them up once people write clear requests. A decision that used to wait for a meeting next Tuesday can happen in one written reply the same day.
How do new team members learn the culture?
Give them more live time in the first two weeks: a buddy, a daily short call and the document home to read. Then move them to the written rhythm like everyone else.
The same habits run the programmes and communities I work with today, where members and partners are spread across the country and the continent. Read how I write SOPs people follow, or get in touch if your remote team is drowning in calls.
