Seth Godin on fake async:
Over time, async creeps toward sync. It’s ironic that Slack messages, texts and email which succeeded because they were async, now create an expectation of real-time response. These are async tools used with sync expectations, so you get the interruptions of sync without its energy.
Personal discipline can’t solve this one. You can block two hours for focused work, but if your team expects an answer within minutes, that block won’t survive. The expectation belongs to the team, so the team has to change it: agree which channel is for what, and what really counts as urgent. Then async can be async again.