This ignores mountains of evidence that shows realtime, synchronous communication makes you less productive due to reducing (or eliminating) your ability to focus.
As an anecdote, this has definitely been my experience. And it's compounded by having numerous different media: phone, text, GroupMe, Slack, email, Facebook, Hangouts, and so on. At this point, there's not a single service anybody can use to immediately reach me, because I've pretty much conditioned myself not to read anything until I feel ready to be distracted. It's a mess.
It's only asynchronous is you have willpower, which is finite and easily exhausted, and if there's no expectation of realtime response on the other end, which there nearly always is these days. Whoever comes out with a viable system that is explicitly async (like mailman, or a good secretary) will really benefit humanity.
It's like normal Facebook, which I don't think even the biggest of addicts treat as a synchronous system. The entire structure of the application is for you to post and consume updates at different times.
You're going to have a hard time convincing me that Facebook is synchronous when the entire power of News Feed (and what makes Facebook so much more powerful than Facebook) is its ability to keep you updated without requiring constant real-time attention.
It does not require constant attention, but in fact it is addictng for users and people do sit and refresh their feeds for extended periods of time, watch the live activity stream on the side, or engage in chat, etc. Facebook wants you to spend a lot of time on Facebook and optimizes for this. They do not expect people to quickly check the site and leave and I would suggest most people don't do that. Or they they do, but they do it so repeatedly (continuous partial attention) it's even worse.
Edit: I would just add that in an environment where every site action has some kind of real time notification tied to it, the async nature/expectation is greatly diminished. Especially in a work context. And so now you have to add 'good job!' and water cooler type notifications to that cognitive overhead too.
Check out TMail21 ("Power Threads for Teams". It is explicitly designed as an asynchronous communication platform. Furthermore, it is being integrated into all of the chat services like Slack, Hipchat etc. to avoid balkanization between chat and asynchronous communication.
I’ve used RescueTime and Freedom at work before joining Facebook, and Facebook at Work when I worked there, and you can filter between the work and the personal services quite effectively with a basic filter.
Facebook at Work actually allows for longer-term communication that are still fairly dynamic and contextual. There is a chatting system (Messenger) but most of the interactions happen through threaded comments in groups.
Absolutely. The biggest offenders which are: people talking on the phone or talking directly to other people when there are other tools for the job or even worse, synchronously engaging several people at the same time (meetings)
