Asynchronous communication — end of meeting filled days, packed calendars and conference rooms wars

Sunil Jain
Sep 9, 2018 · 6 min read

If you ask most as to what they would like to see improve in their daily schedule — it would be availability of uninterrupted blocks of time. To catch-up on some of the work they have been wanting to do.. to think clearly about a problem. Whether sitting down to really understand something from fundamentals, (instead of cutting-n-pasting to get the next task done)… Or to catch up on interesting tech talk …

We all wish we had more of these blocks of time available to us during normal working hours.

This is true for engineers and for managers alike. No one will call it a productive day, when most of the day is spent in hopping from meeting to meeting. Getting interrupted in unplanned way random times of the day. Role of manager is transitioning more towards being thought leaders. Someone who remove roadblocks from team’s path, who arranges more of uninterrupted time for the team, instead of micro-managing them.

Only when you have such blocks of time, will you be able to write clear, concise, efficient code. With less bugs, that takes less time for other people to understand.. may be more elegant code. When there is a performance problem in a system, unless you know where the bottleneck is, you can be throwing resources in a wasteful way.

We could be coming up with shallow solutions to our problems, which have not been thought through. It is a chicken and egg problem — lack of time to do deep and thoughtful analysis of problems results in more issues, which results in more troubleshooting type of meetings.

Real-time communications — not as useful as you think

First let us see how see how synchronous(real-time) methods of communications are inherently inefficient and wasteful. One example of synchronous communications is a meeting, where every one is required to be present at exactly same time. Another one is direct Slack(IM) message, where the expectation from the “pinged” is to respond immediately. Another one is walk-up.

There is great benefit to having face-to-face meeting, as well as to stop by someone… to quickly clarify something or to get a quick answer via Slack/IM ping. These are awesome tools and when used correctly, can save time. However it is the frequency and how these are used that can suck lot of our uninterrupted blocks of time. A meeting involving 3 or less people, as well as 1-on-1s are excellent tools and should be used often.

Lot of times meetings are setup as first recourse to a problem. Idea is to bring everyone involved together. That way all questions are answered…and everyone is on same page. However that is probably the most inefficient way to go about it. Here is why: if it is a 1 hour meeting involving 5 people, then it effectively is a 5 hour meeting(5x1). I borrowed this example, as well some ideas, from a popular blog(thanks for leading on this, have pasted the links at the bottom).

If it is run as a typical meeting, chances are, not every one will have answers to every thing asked of them. Most likely some of them will have to go back to their team/s and revert back. Which will result in another meeting. Most likely 15 mins before and 15 mins after the meeting, you can not just switch gear and focus on anything meaningful. That effectively used 1.5 hours of everyone’s time.

If there is no clear agenda and achievable defined, most of the time is spent on discussions without any solid conclusion, thus resulting in another meeting. Lot of times no notes are taken, sometimes multiple people are taking similar notes. And if someone is taking note, they often send it out via email or just keep to them, which is very difficult to tie back to the meeting itself later on.

Some people may not have correct or in depth knowledge about topic being discussed yet they will offer either incorrect or shallow answer — especially manager only meetings. Which will actually do more damage to the topic being discussed.

Quite often in the spurt of the moment, someone will say something which they think is witty. Instead it will offend someone or the other. And more time then will be spent on clarifications. Not to mention, how difficult it is to find a slot which works for everybody (because everyone’s calendar is full of meetings)…and equally difficult is to find a conference room on popular times. As number of participants increase, so does the wastage.

Write up first

Do all parties really needed to be present at that precise hour? For most of the recurring, status update type meetings, do all the participants really need to know that information at exactly in the same time slot? It will be OK, if some of them get that information at a later time. If information really needs to disseminate to parties involved at same time, then it is OK to call for that meeting.

Another purpose of a meeting is to bring all involved partied on the same page. And have all the questions answered in that meeting. That is very useful aspect of a meeting. However, it comes at a huge cost, as pointed out earlier. Lot of times, if done properly, same can be achieved more efficiently by putting up agenda on a central location, accessible to all, modifiable by all concerned, ahead of time(Confluence, Sharepoint, Basecamp etc).

Concerned parties can post their thoughts and suggestions in advance. This can be done at a time which works best for the recipient, and the sender. They can think through, do necessary research, gather information from team and then post comment, with links to external references. All the information related to topic, along with comments is in one place for any one to refer to any time. If meeting is still needed, significant time is already cut down because rich, relevant information is available when folks meet.

Meeting notes can be put in same central place. That way all relevant information is in one place. Which can be referenced any time in future, by any one interested. This will reduce need for further meetings in future, as some one who was not involved in that decision making process can access it anytime. When some one new joins, they will have complete context on how that decision was made. And complete decision making process around that topic is self-documenting…as we all know no one likes to document after the fact.

Here is how Amazon applies write first approach : http://www.businessinsider.com/bezos-admits-amazon-has-the-weirdest-meeting-culture-2018-4

Flip it up side down..

We should flip the way we use different communication methods. For the reason mentioned above, we need to give top priority to asynchronous methods of communication. Anything important should be written down first in a central place, where people can comment. That way if and when meeting is at all needed, it will be more informed and efficient.

Order of communication should be:

  1. Central place where agenda is posted ahead with ability to comment
  2. Email
  3. Slack
  4. Meeting

Make email important again.

Email is much maligned in this day and age of social media. However it’s a great asynchronous communication medium. You can respond to email at a time which works best for you. It has a subject, which means by looking at subject you know if it needs to be looked right away or not. And can be sorted by any field (time, subject etc). Messages can be organized in different folders. Even with gazillion messages, it will return you precisely what you want based on your query. You can apply rules to park messages in different folders.

When you see that “Red” dot on your Slack/IM, you don’t know whether it is about an important issue or just a water-cooler type discussion. Urge is to respond right away. Try doing a search for something in IM… good luck finding what you want and the whole context.

This write-up describes pain points with chat systems really well https://m.signalvnoise.com/is-group-chat-making-you-sweat-744659addf7d

Think of it like this — email provides you with great flexibility to respond at a time convenient to you..but if you do not respond in a reasonable amount of time, it will turn into an unplanned ping/walk-up…which then will turn into a meeting. Effectively using email requires some adjustments, else we can drown in too much email. This one better lays out guidelines for effective use of email : https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/communication/#email

Slack/IM is better suited for troubleshooting or running maintenance/deployments though(instead of email).

More priority we give to email compared to a meeting or a walk-up, more we will salvage those blocks of uninterrupted time for us.

What others are doing?

Pinetrest has meeting free days https://medium.com/@Pinterest_Engineering/three-day-no-meeting-schedule-for-engineers-fca9f857a56.

Asana has meeting free day: https://wavelength.asana.com/workstyle-no-meeting-wednesdays/

Written by

Director of DevOps @ Core Digital

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