How Ashby Maintains 35 Hours of Weekly Focus Time While Scaling

The Anti-Slack Movement

While most startups drown in Slack messages and endless meetings, Ashby, a recruiting software company, has taken a radically different approach. The company maintains just 13 permanent internal Slack channels and averages 250 messages per team member weekly. Compare that to reports of power users sending 1,000 Slack messages daily at other companies, and the contrast becomes striking. Abhik Pramanik, Ashby's co-founder and VP of Engineering, wrote candidly in August 2021 about how the company maintains what he calls "unreasonable productivity" with a small team working 40-hour weeks. The secret lies not in sophisticated AI tools or productivity hacks, but in deliberately designed communication friction. Every medium, from Slack to email to meetings, has strict usage guidelines that place the burden on message senders rather than recipients.

Focus Time as Competitive Advantage

The results speak volumes. Ashby's engineers maintain 35.5 hours of focus time per week and 4.1 "focus days" where they have six or more uninterrupted hours. These metrics improved even as the company grew, inverting the typical pattern where team expansion correlates with fragmented attention. Written proposals replace recurring coordination meetings, and Slack channels serve only urgent needs or ephemeral celebrations. The communication framework extends beyond productivity mechanics. Ashby discovered early that strict asynchronous guidelines risked isolating remote team members. Their first remote hire didn't have casual conversations with some teammates for over a month. The company responded with structured social activities: weekly virtual office hours, monthly team games, holiday book exchanges, and semi-annual physical meetups.

The Remote Work Paradox

This balance reveals a fundamental tension in modern startup culture. Asynchronous communication enables coordination across time zones, yet human connection requires synchronous moments. Ashby's approach recognizes both needs without compromising either. Team members share personal updates in Monday standups and gather in virtual offices on Fridays, creating deliberate social spaces while preserving focused work time.

The discipline starts at the top. When co-founder Benji Encz posted to the #ping channel late one evening, the team called him out publicly. When Abhik scheduled a recurring monthly meeting instead of building an asynchronous prioritization process, Benji pushed back. These moments reinforce that communication guidelines aren't suggestions but cultural cornerstones.

For AI startups navigating explosive growth in 2024, Ashby's framework offers a counterintuitive lesson: the best communication strategy might be communicating less. With Slack expected to reach 38.8 million daily active users in 2024, companies face mounting pressure to match communication volume with headcount. Ashby proves the opposite works better.

The Productivity Paradox of Instant Messaging

Ashby's co-founders Abhik Pramanik and Benji Chen identified a counterintuitive problem: even with just two people, constant interruptions through instant messages and impromptu questions killed productivity. In a detailed blog post, they explain how they built communication guidelines that now enable their growing team to work reasonable 40-hour weeks while shipping extensive product features. The team sends just 250 Slack messages per person weekly, compared to reports of power users sending 1,000 messages per day. The company restricts Slack to genuinely urgent matters, with only 13 permanent internal channels for a team that has now grown to around 100 employees following a $30 million Series C funding round. Most communication flows through email for threaded discussions, Quip for collaborative documents, and their wiki (Slab) for permanent knowledge. Meetings are reserved only for decisions that truly require synchronous input. As the company notes, recurring meetings for collaboration often waste time because "there is always more time to talk than there is time to implement."

Measurable Results Against Industry Trends

The framework delivered concrete outcomes that contradict typical organizational growth patterns. Engineers at Ashby maintain 35.5 hours of focus time and 4.1 focus days (with 6+ uninterrupted hours) per week. These metrics improved between 2020 and 2021 as the team scaled, precisely when most companies see focus time erode. Research by RescueTime found that knowledge workers typically have only 1 hour and 12 minutes of uninterrupted productivity time daily, spending 40% of their day multitasking between communication tools and actual work. The approach demands intentional friction: written proposals instead of spontaneous discussions, documented decisions instead of ephemeral Slack threads, and explicit reinforcement when team members revert to old habits. Pramanik shares examples of founders correcting themselves publicly when they violate guidelines, like scheduling an unnecessary recurring meeting or sending non-urgent late-night Slack messages. "Inefficient communication is the default state," the post acknowledges, requiring ongoing discipline from leadership.

Remote Work Without the Isolation

Transitioning to remote work during the pandemic revealed a gap in the framework. Purely asynchronous communication isolated employees, with one early remote hire going over a month without casual conversations with some teammates. The company added deliberate social mechanisms: weekly virtual office hours in Gather, coordinated meal times across time zones, monthly team games, and holiday traditions like book exchanges. Personal updates became part of weekly standups, creating ongoing glimpses into colleagues' lives. The tension between focus and relationships reflects broader challenges in distributed work. As Buffer's research on asynchronous communication emphasizes, written communication refines thinking and provides context but requires intentional social scaffolding to prevent isolation. Ashby's evolution demonstrates that productivity optimization cannot ignore human connection.

Decoded

Ashby's detailed documentation of their communication practices arrives at a moment when the remote work honeymoon has ended and companies grapple with Slack fatigue and collaboration overload. With 47.2 million expected daily Slack users by 2025 and neuroscientists calling it a "scary offender" for workplace focus, the recruiting software maker offers a replicable counter-model. Their willingness to publish internal practices and metrics (rare for private companies) suggests confidence in their approach as a competitive advantage. For AI and tech startups racing to ship products with lean teams, Ashby's framework presents an evidence-based alternative to the always-on communication culture that dominates Silicon Valley. The company's 6x revenue growth since their Series B, achieved while maintaining these constraints, indicates that thoughtful communication design may be less of a luxury than a fundamental requirement for sustainable scaling.