Ah, my two pet peeves — meetings and the overuse of email. The perfect place to start a conversation on personal and team productivity.
Meetings
It’s very simple: Less meetings. Shorter meetings. Smaller meetings.
Not less conversation or less communication. Less time spent in (physical or virtual) rooms as an observer, reporting status, and generally not engaged in the activities that move you and the team forward simply because someone else thought you should be there or has booked an hour for a conversation that should take 10 minutes.
Here are some tips for having more effective meetings:
- Use tools for reporting and collecting status. Never meetings.
- Have a 1-on-1 discussion if that will suffice
- Decline meetings that aren’t important for you
- Decline or ask for reschedule of meetings that don’t fit your timeline
- Change the default time for meeting invites to 15 minutes.
- Invite only the necessary people. Three to five people is the ideal size for a meeting.
[NOTE: As group size increases, individual effort decreases, and the effectiveness of the group tends to flatten out and sometimes decrease — the Ringelmann Effect.]
Email is great. It’s the most revolutionary communication tool for office workers since the copy machine. It’s ubiquitous, simple, and well-understood, and that, unfortunately, leads to its overuse in areas for which it’s a sucky tool.
Here’s what it’s great for:
- Formal communication (external and internal)
- Publication / one-way broadcast
- Meeting invites
- RSVP / confirmations
Here’s what it’s NOT for:
- Conversation
- Questions
For internal conversation and questions, or anything in real-time, use chat tools such as Slack/Teams.
Think of email as a library and the chat tool as a coffee shop.
- If you’d say it in the hallway, don’t email it.
- If you need back-and-forth, don’t email it.
- If you need an answer in real time, don’t email it.
Meetings and email aren’t the enemy, but are woefully misused sometimes.
Use them well, and you build trust and productivity. Use them poorly, and you’re just wasting everybody’s time.
