Templates

The useful part of time blocking is one sentence: decide in advance what a stretch of time is for, so you are not deciding at the moment you sit down. That is the whole mechanism, and it is worth doing. ...

A meeting budget works when it caps the team’s recurring load, counts in person-hours, and has one named person who says no when it is spent. It fails when it is written as a per-person quota, because then the person with the least power in the room is the one who runs out of budget first and has to decline a director to stay inside it. ...

Before you write a core hours policy, do the arithmetic. A team spread across four time zones from Central Europe to the US west coast has, on a standard nine-to-five, no overlap at all — not a narrow window, none — and the policy you are able to write is decided entirely by that number rather than by what you would prefer. Teams skip the arithmetic, announce core hours of 10:00 to 15:00 in a time zone nobody names, and find out in week two that it means 06:00 for one person and 22:00 for another. ...

A no-meeting day is not hard to announce and not hard to keep for a fortnight. It dies somewhere around week seven, from exceptions that were each individually reasonable and that nobody counted. So the rollout is mostly one thing: deciding what the exceptions are before anybody asks for one. Everything else — the announcement, the enforcement, the review — takes about ninety minutes of work in total. The exception list is what makes those ninety minutes hold. ...

A meeting policy that is still working in month three has three properties the ones that die do not. It is written down somewhere a new person finds it without asking. It has an exception process that existed before the first exception. And somebody senior has been visibly inconvenienced by it, in public, at least once. ...

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. ...

There is a specific meeting this post is about. Everyone in it privately thinks it has stopped being useful. Nobody will say so, because saying so means telling the person who set it up that the thing they set up has stopped being useful. So it runs every Thursday, at reduced attendance, and it will run until someone leaves the company. ...

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. ...