[tmail21]

Ever increasing distraction and "real-time" communication and collaboration are reaching a point of diminishing returns and actually decreasing our productivity.

The book Deep Work, by Cal Newport is a start on identifying the problem and a possible solution (i.e. isolate yourself for stretches of time to accomplish Deep Work).

Unfortunately, we live in a world where collaboration is necessary. So, what's the solution?

One possibility is to come up with a collaboration solution that is built from the ground up to be asynchronous in nature. (Deep Collaboration as the enabler of Deep Work)

Such a solution would complement our real-time collaboration solutions.

[nradov]

E-mail, wikis, discussion forums, and issue trackers are all collaboration tools built from the ground up to be asynchronous in nature. Are you looking for something else?

[tmail21]

Agreed that all of these can be used asynchronously. However, I would refer to these as "incidentally-asynchronous", in the sense that their design goals were not primarily to be asynchronous (and hence support "Deep Work").

The major determinant of asynchronous deep collaboration efficiency is number of "cycles-to-outcome". (where a cycle is roughly a request/response loop).

Email because of its lack of shared state collaboration generates lots of extra cycles because of confusion on shared state (i.e. attachment nightmare).

Conversely, something like online document collaboration supports shared state collaboration, but is really poor at "what happened". For all but the smallest of documents this leads to compounding "implicit document rot" on every iteration. Alternatively, it leads to ever increasing time to "catchup" once again vastly expanding cycles-to-outcome.

Neither is good with accountability (something that issue trackers are good with). Lack of accountability is another driver of increasing cycles-to-outcome.

A deep collaboration solution that enables Deep Work could be designed from first principles based on minimizing cycles-to-outcome.

[L_Rahman]

Each of these tools has two parts:

- the constraints of the tool itself - the culture of the organization that uses the tool

One organization could use emails and issue trackers completely asynchronously with scheduled twice daily checkins.

Yet another could use them for near instantaneous communication.

As always, the technology is usually something that simply exposes the underlying human behaviors.

[kentt]

Deep Work is great! I agree that after reading it the collaboration part is very difficult. Unfortunately the best solution that I've been able to come up with is to work on projects that can be accomplished by myself alone. It's obviously not ideal and dramatically limits the types of fun projects of otherwise take on.

[pravula]

"Unfortunately, we live in a world where collaboration is necessary. So, what's the solution?" - There are specific examples of Deep Work collaboration in his book. Deep Work =/= No collaboration.

[Toenex]

Which is one reason why email is still such a key collaboration tool.