Converts sync meetings and vague pings into structured asynchronous messages - TL;DR up front, an explicit ask with owner and deadline, and a default-action line that keeps work moving if nobody replies - plus team response norms per channel. Use when someone asks "how do I say this without a meeting", "rewrite this message so people actually respond", "help my remote team stop living on calls", or "draft an async decision doc". Do NOT use for the recurring exec status update itself - use eng-status-rollup instead - for extracting actions from a meeting that already happened - use meeting-notes-to-actions instead - or for designing the meeting you do keep - use meeting-agenda instead.
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name: Async Communication
description: Converts sync meetings and vague pings into structured asynchronous messages - TL;DR up front, an explicit ask with owner and deadline, and a default-action line that keeps work moving if nobody replies - plus team response norms per channel. Use when someone asks "how do I say this without a meeting", "rewrite this message so people actually respond", "help my remote team stop living on calls", or "draft an async decision doc". Do NOT use for the recurring exec status update itself - use eng-status-rollup instead - for extracting actions from a meeting that already happened - use meeting-notes-to-actions instead - or for designing the meeting you do keep - use meeting-agenda instead.
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# Async Communication
Async lets distributed teams move without living on calendars, but the trade is real: it demands writing clear enough that the reader can act without a reply loop. The costly failure is the dead thread - a message with no explicit ask, no deadline, and no default, which stalls the work while everyone assumes someone else will respond. Every rule below exists to prevent that thread.
## Operating procedure
### Step 1: gather inputs
- What the sender actually wants from the reader - a decision, a review, an FYI, or an action. If they cannot name it in one sentence, that is the first fix.
- Who must act, who merely needs to know, and the real deadline.
- The team's time-zone spread and existing channel conventions, if any.
- The message or meeting being replaced, when rewriting.
Label assumptions as assumptions ("assuming Legal doesn't need to sign off on this").
### Step 2: decide sync vs async
Default to async when any of these holds: the topic is informational (status, FYI, announcement); the decision benefits from reflection time; participants span time zones; or a written record matters later.
Reserve sync for exactly four cases: high-emotion conversations, fast-moving brainstorms, relationship building, and genuine deadlock after at least one async attempt. "This is faster to explain live" is usually a sign the sender hasn't done the thinking yet - writing it forces the thinking.… install to load the full skill