Slack alone isn’t working for your team; meet Threads, your new asynchronous workspace
Let’s talk about productivity software.
Asynchronous productivity software.
The recent surge of assorted productivity software has either knowingly or unknowingly triggered the race to the future for asynchronous work.
How?
With the power of the note. The power of shared knowledge that retains value over time.
Either knowingly or not, most modern productivity tools are designed based on a note-taking format where knowledge can be stored until it’s needed.
You don’t have to reply to that Slack message right away, or hop into the feedback session on your upcoming ad campaign right away. Asynchronous work tools help keep this knowledge stored until you can respond. On your own time.
The Big Problem with Asynchronous Work.
In spite of all the advances async work is bringing into modern work, not least the remote working revolution, async work is still deeply flawed.
From the start, async working tools came off as revolutionary pieces of tech that transformed the working landscape, working independently to achieve their goals.
But as async work has gone more mainstream, these tools have largely remained standalone pieces of tech.
With the need to jump through various working suites to get work done, collaboration software tools end up getting in the way of optimum worker focus — with the need to skip through tabs to connect with your team’s work.
Contribute to a Slack thread, jump into Asana and follow through on pending task items, add a bullet point to the team Marketing Ops wiki in Notion.
While jumping through several productivity software to get work done, we unknowingly defeat one of the biggest benefits of async work.
Mental coordination that helps you do deep work.
Modern collaboration tools, while asynchronous, are inherently fragmented and as a result, end up canceling the mental focus required to do deep work.
So, long story short: what is the solution to the inherent fragmentation across modern productivity tools?
Coordination. Coordinated asynchronous productivity.
A simple concept that requires productivity tools to easily and intelligently flow knowledge across to wherever you need it.
With coordinated asynchronous work, you can easily transform team musings from a wiki into a mind map, a to-do list, or whatever format you need it at the moment, effectively bridging the knowledge gap without stringing together complicated tools that were never built to integrate.
The very concept of coordinated collaboration requires knowledge to be where you use it and to be easily accessible wherever else you intend to. In optimum format. And while a few tools (attach Google Docs and Drive files in emails, transform a table format content calendar in Notion into Kanban format) are forward and center about making knowledge easily accessible across wherever teams work, there’s still a huge gap to be closed to make asynchronous work truly coordinated.
Perhaps it’s a tall order to expect several productivity tools to sync seamlessly. But what if one tool could do all that? What if there was one asynchronous productivity suite that effectively coordinated teamwork right in one place so that we can spend more time in deep work, vs. skipping through Chrome tabs?
Threads is doing just that.
I peeked at Threads a while ago and with some observation, it’s easy to see how it’s set to transform asynchronous productivity.
While Slack, Notion, Paper, Doist, and most tools within the spectrum of asynchronous collaboration focus on doing just one thing well, they essentially contribute to the knowledge gap we discussed earlier. This leads to having to skip through several tools and set up fragile integrations that can break at any moment and cause considerable hold-ups.
Threads, on the other hand, focuses on uniting discussions and decision-making into one place so you can work more coherently and seamlessly. Not just that, Threads helps teams coordinate and collaborate more effectively by allowing knowledge to be accessible, with no friction no matter where you are.
Asynchronous work is the future of productivity for smart teams. This is simply because async work offers an avenue for workers to create on their own schedule, pace, and style. This is what puts Threads ahead of other asynchronous productivity tools, as there is a focus on both individual and team freedom.
To break this down even further, Threads helps teams to:
Create on your own schedule, and,
With Threads, you can add to, or act on, knowledge your team has put together in any format.As a team, it’s easier to adopt an async culture with a tool that’s designed from scratch to retain knowledge for anyone to contribute to or use at any time. That’s where Threads wins other async work tools;
Create at your own pace.
Threads is natively built to integrate.
The entire concept of Threads appears to be built on uniting work for increased mental coordination, and they currently offer a seamless integration with Slack as a way to pair with the world of synchronous communication.
Slick UI.
With a little hands-on spinning around with Threads, there’s an immediate observation — the team put in the work making a truly clean and low-demand UI where it’s easy to work your way around without lengthy guide articles.
Minimalist design for easy adoption/switch
Switching to newer working tools can be tricky when you’re slowly working your way around, seeing what works and what doesn’t. And it only gets worse with many modern work apps that require in-depth experiences for users to ever make it work.
Threads offers a smooth UX so you can get started with minimal effort, thanks to intuitive controls that do what you expect them to. Threads works off of visual controls that simplify the learning curve for first-time users so you can begin creating with little friction, learning as you move along.
Flawless workflow management
Above all, Threads does a spectacularly good job of managing your knowledge coordination needs right in one place so teams can stay on the same page with minimal friction.
To recap, Threads appears to be:
- Breaking the knowledge barrier so teams can have information wherever they’re at and in whatever format they prefer
- Simplifying async work so it’s easy to work at your own pace and disconnect for deep work — without getting run over
- Creating a long-term storage of knowledge, so everyone on a team can track wherever they left off and join right back in without getting left out
Looking to try better-coordinated work, like Buffer and Brex already do? Then give Threads a try today.
