Why meetings are the enemy of productivity
I’ve been talking to Phil Libin for some time about his policy of eliminating meetings, which began when he was CEO of Evernote and has continued after creating, during the pandemic, a company, mmhmm, who has led by example with his completely distributed company.
A zero-meeting policy is based on the belief that reunions of more than three people tend to be a waste of time. In a meeting you don’t work, you coordinate, and there are many other better and, above all, more efficient ways to do that.
This was shown during the pandemic lockdowns, when we moved all our activity online and started using tools such as Teams, Zoom, Meet, Webex and others. The reason was clear: even though we were working (and in fact, most often people were working more, not less, during that period), we had the impression that no one saw us working, and so we were looking for ways to “prove” that we were doing something.
The problem multiplied exponentially as we climbed the hierarchical pyramid: for many managers, the pandemic meant being stuck in meetings almost constantly, one after the other, ad nauseam. As the lockdowns progressed, some companies began to find that, in practice, it was much more practical to coordinate via asynchronous tools — instant messaging, Slack, Teams conversations, shared documents and the like — than through…
