On Meetings

Too many meetings is a known problem. We all know that. But if we don’t do enough of those, then we inevitably start drifting apart, and work communication becomes a problem. That’s also a given, so what can we do to solve both?

Step one is of course — recognise the problem — having two meetings a few hours apart in the the middle of the workday, completely wrecks a creator’s day. Nothing significant can usually be accomplished and by the time you can focus you’re already so spent that what little you can produce is inadequate. That’s an exaggeration of course but most creators have had days like this.

A breakdown of communication is the other problem that needs to be recognised — creators can go into the deep end doing stuff that’s not really needed, just for the fun of it. I’d argue that those bouts of inspiration are in fact positive overall, can be channeled in a productive direction and are absolutely vital for the mental health of said individuals. Without those a burn out is a real possibility. As one who’s experienced those creative days on occasion I can tell you it’s the sense of mastery and completeness that are usually key for me — you want to finish something you’re proud off.

So having defined those lets think of how we can go about addressing them.

Idea 1 — Scheduling

Never schedule meetings at random. Compress them both in a single day and through the week. You can have one day dedicated to meetings and the rest for focused work, and if several meetings are needed bunch those up with maybe 30 minutes or an hour to freshen up. Combine them by topic or by people participating. And recognise that for deep creative work those should be considered a “day off”. Where the “free time” could be spent on other administrative / mentoring / writing etc. tasks.

Idea 2 — Assisted creativity.

Finding out what you need to do — e.g. gathering of requirements, figuring out what works etc. is fundamentally different than the creative aspect of the work — e.g. finding a solution within those requirements. So if persona A, which we can call feature owner can help a creator with defining, clarifying and translating requirements to a simple brief first, then the magic can happen really, really fast. Having another person do that / help with that is also very beneficial as switching modes between “gathering requirements” and “implementing a solution” can take up hours and is very mentally taxing. This can be done with processes, tools and roles, but the gist of it is that a creator needs to be able to do all of his decisions on the spot, and to have the data gathered / analyzed for them so they can make those decisions. Having to “wait for input” is a real productivity drag.

Idea 3 — Quality tasks

Creative people love quality, it’s how they can measure themselves against other creative people. So having some of the tasks be explicitly about quality could boost morale quite a lot. Imagine if you’ve had a task that was specifically about what can we do better. Not “more profitable”, not “more user friendly”, not “faster” … just better. Now it will usually help in most other areas as well, but that’s not the point, the point is to be able to show off something you’re proud of, at least once in a while.

In programming we have some old cultural jokes about measuring the wrong thing — the manager who started measuring “lines of code written” to determine programmer performance, and the inevitable downfall of people disregarding quality, maintainability, performance etc. and just shipping more lines that do nothing. And in the end you’re left with giant monstrosity of a program that does not work at all, has a very very significant “line count”.

The same can be said about companies that only measure performance by money earned. That sure helps the company in the short term, as everyone is trying to boost the bottom line, but you end up with a lot of broken unmanageable stuff and a bunch of burnt out disgruntled employees. So a task to “clean things up” once in a blue moon will do wonders, and would most probably help the bottom line in the long run.

Idea 4 — Pull vs push of information

Having someone “push” information to you is never nice, even if you are deemed to need it. It is paramount to organise information to be easily searchable and digestible. It should be possible to read and understand it out of context. And it has to be concise and quick to read. So you never need to “remember some memo that someone sent you a while back” but whenever you need the info to be able to easily find it. Of course this is very hard. Throw-your-hands-in-the-air-and-give-up kind of hard. But we could at least try to go in that direction. This can be a company wide effort to improve information flow, to learn how to write more easily digestible information, and how to write less of it.

Idea 5 — Asynchronous public information

In a remote organisation, every meeting should have digest notes, Every talk should have a blog post. All the discussions should be public and discussions should have conclusions written in a “source of truth” kind of place about the topic. Now that’s a lot of “shoulds” but every single one of those helps a lot and if done on a big enough scale, could have a culture shift that’s beneficial to all. Nobody likes to trudge through old chat threads to find out what really happened, or miss an important talk by a founder and have to try to piece out what was communicated by nagging busy people to try to remember correctly. If I could have a nickel for every time when something was decided in a meeting and then everyone involved sort of forgot about it… Well I wouldn’t be that rich but I’d have quite a lot of nickels.

Those five ideas can hopefully be a start in the right direction for every company, and there can be way more, better ideas. But I hope people can at least appreciate the problems themselves and to try to figure out a workable solutions, so countless creative individuals can find solace in their work.