Async

The honest summary: one credible study of 76 large companies found that introducing no-meeting days improved autonomy, communication and satisfaction and reduced stress and micromanagement, with the best results at three days a week rather than one. It is a survey of companies that chose to do it, measured largely through pulse surveys, with no control group described. That is a real finding and a weak one, and almost everything written about the no meeting day overstates it. ...

The asynchronous meeting is not a meeting. It is a document with a deadline attached, and the useful question is not whether your team is async-first — it is which of the eleven recurring meetings on your calendar survive being written down, and what each conversion costs somebody. ...

Almost every team meeting agenda is written for a room that has already been decided. The invite list came first, the agenda came Tuesday night, and the agenda’s job is to fill the hour the room was booked for. Written that way it can improve a meeting, but it cannot change who is in it. ...

Getting out of one standing meeting is a personal manoeuvre and the exit message covers it. This is the other thing: reviewing the whole recurring set on a schedule, as a team, so that meetings stop accumulating by default. They accumulate because creating a standing meeting takes four minutes and ending one requires somebody to volunteer an opinion about somebody else’s work. The asymmetry is the entire mechanism. No individual meeting is the problem; the absence of any moment at which the set gets questioned is. ...

A meeting you dislike is not evidence of anything. A meeting that fails one of four specific tests is, and each failure has exactly one sensible repair. Run the four questions, take the repair they point at, and if the meeting fails the fourth one, stop repairing it and end it. ...

Most meeting advice offers two options: attend, or decline. Almost everything useful happens between them. The reason to care about the middle is not squeamishness. It is that a partial exit is often the better outcome on the merits — you keep the part of the meeting that was doing something and drop the part that was not — and it is granted at a far higher rate, because nobody has to concede anything. An organiser who would refuse “I’m coming off this” will readily agree to “I’ll join for the budget item”. ...

There are six types of work meetings, and every entry on your calendar is doing one of those six jobs. Once you can name which, the question of whether to keep it stops being a matter of taste. The reason this is worth twenty minutes is that meetings get judged by how they feel. A meeting you enjoy gets defended; a meeting you dread gets targeted. Neither is a signal about whether it should exist. The status meeting you like because it is the only time you talk to that team is still a status meeting, and the review you dread may be the only thing preventing a quarterly disaster. ...