This Meeting Could have Been an Email: From Time Suck to Unstuck

So the real point of a meeting, if we're going to meet in person, it's not to brainstorm. The point of a meeting is to gain consensus. That is something that can be done and should only be done in asynchronous format. Welcome to the near and Far Podcast. This is Nir Eyal. How many times have you been in a boring, unproductive meeting and thought to yourself, this meeting could have been an email? Well, that is what we're going to talk about today. How to destroy these unproductive, pointless, distracting meetings that we're all a part of. How do we do that? We're going to talk about that. And let me bring in Nick. Nick, how you doing?

I'm doing great. I'm excited to read this email. I've been that too. This meeting could have been an email. I've said that a lot. And I'm excited to talk about the idea of synchronous and asynchronous communication.

Yeah, let's dive in. So, as always, Nick's going to read out the article and then we'll stop. From time to time, I'll add some color commentary here and yeah, take it away, Nick.

This meeting could have been an email from Time suck to Unstuck End boring, useless meetings once and for all We've all been in a dumb meeting. One that makes you think, this doesn't even apply to me. I'm learning nothing from this. Or worst of all, this meeting could have been an email. I'm sure you've commiserated with colleagues over what a time suck dumb meetings can be. Still, you. You might have resigned yourself to dumb meetings, accepting them as an inevitable facet of the workplace. But dumb meetings are not inevitable. They're totally avoidable. Dumb meetings are a sign of a dysfunctional workplace, and it doesn't have to be that way. Organizations can implement a simple process to filter out all unnecessary meetings, leaving only those that provide value for employees, teams and and the business at large. Use this guide to kickstart a discussion about hacking back meetings at your organization. Pointless meetings are bad for business. Unnecessary meetings are expensive. Not only do superfluous meetings drain morale, but also they cost a bundle in lost productivity. A one hour meeting of five people with an average salary of $100,000 costs $350 multiplied by the hundreds, if not thousands of hours wasted. In dumb meetings, the cost adds up. Even that figure is underestimated, as attendees typically stop working on tasks 15 to 20 minutes before the meeting, virtual ones included, and lose time refocusing on tasks after the meeting, a common effect of task switching. Employees who attend several meetings daily task switch repeatedly and never have an uninterrupted swath of time for focused work. Many people also find themselves driven to distraction during these liminal moments or transitions from one thing to another throughout the day. It's no wonder that Harvard Business Review said time is an organization's scarcest and most often squandered resource. Dumb meetings are a drain on productivity. To stop frivolously spending a resource as precious as time, organizations have to limit their idea of what constitutes a meeting. What are meetings for anyway? The sole purpose of a meeting is to gain consensus. That's it. To understand what necessitates a meeting or not, separate information dissemination into two synchronous and asynchronous. Synchronous communication, or the exchange of information in real time, like meetings, should be reserved exclusively for making a decision. Meetings aren't the beginning of a decision making process, they're the end. During meetings, the team ensures all relevant facts have been considered and commits to a course of action. Everything before the meeting should happen asynchronously. Asynchronous communication includes a lag between when someone sends a message and when the receiver reads and reacts to it, such as emails and slack messages. Information dissemination should happen through asynchronous communication, where people can absorb and digest the facts in their own time. To clarify, meetings are not social engagements, company announcements, or brainstorming sessions. Fostering a positive company culture is essential, but socializing should be its own thing. It's not a business meeting. Company announcements can easily be sent over email. No one needs to hear a colleague say things out loud that could have been read in an email in their own time. And brainstorming sessions are one of the biggest culprits for dumb meetings. If brainstorming sessions are conducted in person, they should be in groups of two or fewer people. Why not a big group? First, when you gather several people for brainstorming, the loudest, highest paid, and most dominant person, usually male, tends to dominate the conversation. Everyone else gets drowned out. And what's the point of hiring employees only to overlook their professional opinions? Second, big brainstorming groups are significantly less productive than individuals left to brainstorm alone. That's why a better approach for brainstorming is to email people the problem and ask them to reply with their thoughts and suggestions by a specific deadline. If you're unsure whether your problem necessitates a meeting, follow this protocol. Better yet, suggest to your manager, that this protocol be implemented company wide.

Yeah. So this is. So before we, we dive into what this protocol is, I just want to reemphasize this point because it's something that really surprised me. You know, I used to think that the best way to get everyone's opinions and make everyone feel included was to get them all together in a big room and let's all have a brainstorming session. And it turns out studies find that that is a really bad idea. That the optimal number for, for a brainstorming session, the optimal number of people in that room should be two or less. That in fact, the best type of brainstorming sessions are done asynchronously, meaning you send out the question, you send out what it is you want people to give you their opinions on. They spend some time thinking about that idea on their own, and then they send the stakeholder those thoughts and facts. Right, the things that they want to add to the conversation. Because what tends to happen in a brainstorming session when people don't have the time to think on their own is that the person who is the loudest, the most dominant, typically the highest paid person in the room, that's who steers the conversation. And people will kind of conform to whatever that opinion is. And so what the heck is the point of the brainstorming session if you don't get a diversity of opinions and people say, oh, we have an open workplace culture, we want people to voice their ideas. But it turns out studies find that's just not what happens. So the real point of a meeting, if we're going to meet in person, it's not to brainstorm. The point of a meeting is to gain consensus. That is something that can be done and should only be done in a synchronous format. But brainstorming should not be done in a synchronous format. It should be done on your own. Give people the assignment, ask them to go think about it. Send the stakeholder their thoughts and their recommendations, and then that stakeholder synthesizes those brainstorming thoughts into an opinion to then gain consensus around. And we're going to talk about how to do that right now.

How to determine if a meeting is necessary. Organizations should have a very high bar for synchronous communication. Meetings should be rare, as they should only be called to gain consensus. And the party calling the meeting should complete three steps before the meeting can happen. First, meeting organizers must disseminate relevant information and ask for feedback through asynchronous channels before scheduling A meeting. Second, organizers must circulate an agenda for the meeting, structuring how attendees will address the problem. No agenda, no meeting. Third, they have to give their best shot at a solution in the form of a brief written digest. The digest need not be more than a page or two discussing the problem, their reasoning and their recommendation. These steps require more effort up front, but that's precisely the point. Calling meetings today is too easy, and that's why we have too many of them. Getting everyone up to speed, asking for their input, circulating an agenda and preparing a briefing document not only saves everyone time by getting to the point faster, but also ensures only the most essential meetings happen. Establishing a procedure for calling meetings is a considerable step organizations can take to make meetings more worthwhile, demonstrate respect for employees time and increase productivity. Cutting down on this meeting could have been an email. Gripes is just one of many steps that managers can take to fix distractions in the workplace.

Exactly. So just to reiterate, what we were trying to do here is to make it less easy, right? We want to add friction to the process of calling meetings because frankly, we all know people today call meetings because they don't feel like doing their homework, right? I don't want to really think about this difficult problem on my own. That's boring. That's hard. That's difficult. So let's have a meeting. Let's, let's talk about this problem. And we want to stop doing that because it's just way too easy. It used to be if we want to have a meeting, we all had to be in the office. Well, today, you know, I can just send out a zoom link real quick. And now I've obligated you to join me in a meeting that you don't really want to be a part of. And so we really want to bring this back as part of company culture. Remember that distraction in the workplace is a symptom of dysfunction. Distraction is a symptom of dysfunction. And so what we find at organizations that struggle with distraction in the workplace, it's not the technology, it's not the ping dings and rings. It's a crappy company culture that doesn't establish these norms, these rules that values people's time, attention and focus. So we need these practices in place. We have to put in these protocols that say, look, if we're going to have a meeting, I'm going to ask you to brainstorm on your own. Right? That's step one. Second, I'm going to circulate an agenda for God's Sakes, did you know that 80% of meetings today, 80% of meetings in corporate America have no agenda? What are we doing? If you haven't taken the five minutes to circulate the agenda, you don't deserve to be able to call that meeting. And third, if you're going to ask people to get together in a synchronous format where we're going to waste everybody's time to sit in that meeting, you damn well better prepare a briefing document that says, hey, I did my homework, this is the best I did. And here's what I think we should do. Here's my recommendation. Can we gain consensus around that idea, commit to it and execute. That is the only reason to have that meeting. And if you haven't done those three steps, you really don't deserve to call that meeting. This just struck me and I remember it drove me crazy. When I used to work in corporate America, I used to work for a consulting firm. And what would happen is you start getting these, these, these repeat meetings, right? Oh, we have a regular standup to talk about project X and Y and Z. And you know, they start piling up. It's, it's like this Dendritis that, you know, you have one meeting and another meeting. Why are we having this meeting? And they tend not to go backwards. Right. Once people start putting that time on your calendar, it takes a lot of effort to take that time off of your calendar. So we want to be really, really careful with how we allocate our time. Because remember, time is a non renewable resource.

Right?

Money, you can always make more money, but you can't make more time. So we need to be very cheap with our time, but perhaps generous with our money.

It's wild to think about. And that idea that the consensus, I mean, there's something to the Jeff Bezos idea of the memo beforehand of doing that. Has there been stuff? Have you spoken about that before?

Yeah. So I completely ripped this off from Amazon. Exactly. So the part around the briefing document is exactly what they do at Amazon. And it's crazy. I mean, they will literally sit there for 30 minutes and have like a reading room around this briefing document where everybody will sit down. I actually just saw Jeff Bezos on an interview the other day. I think it was with Lex Friedman, where he talks about how he knows that or the reason he implemented this practice is that he knows that if he circulated a briefing document beforehand, people might skim it or they won't really devote the time to it. So it really incorporates a few concepts that I've been talking about for years now around timeboxing as well, that he's actually time box the time to digest the document. Right. And so that's in the calendar. It's part of the meeting agenda is time to read the briefing document. So it's not, oh, get to this whenever you can. Well that means that people are probably not going to get to it because they're busy. But if you put that time, if you time box the time to read that, that briefing document in the meeting now, you know, you've allocated the proper time for it.

There was a quote from that interview which was a, there's a good part where he talks about this and I think the quote that I read was I like a crisp document and a messy meeting. And I thought that was nice. The that's required to clarify beforehand and to really put that in place. It's not easy and I think that that's what that memo really drives people to do.

Yeah, absolutely. Because again it's, it's about that striving for consensus. So in that meeting you want people to come with facts and figures that you consider that that's great, that's progress, right? To have one of your ideas shot down, that's fantastic. But again it's, you will never get that unless someone, some stakeholder takes the time to really thoroughly think about the idea and come up with their best shot at hey, here's what I think we should do. And then people come in and say, you know what, with my experience and I did this in the past and I've seen this happen, you know, I would consider a different course of action for these following reasons.

Well, thank you for this great article and episode about how this meeting could have been an email. You're listening to near and Far Business behavior and the Brain. Nir Eyal is the best selling author of how to build habit forming products and also how to control your attention and choose your life. Have you signed up for Nir's newsletter yet? It's amazing. I subscribe. It's also very well formatted and it's not just his articles but it's other productivity, user experience design, behavioral economics and neuroscientist links every single week. Sign up for the free newsletter@www.nearandfar.com. that's www.n I R A N-FAR.com. we'll see you next week.