Peter Sorgenfrei argues that written communication beats meetings for clarity and speed. He estimates 60% of meeting time can shift to structured written threads, and 90% of standing meetings are unnecessary. A clear topic, decision needed, and suggested action let teams review and comment asynchronously.
Fewer meetings leads to better communication. And actually, it's not a paradox or a misconstrued sentence. It's actually very deliberate because when people are not meeting physically as much as they may have been used to, and you kind of ask them to communicate in some written format asynchronously on Slack or Teams channel or whatever software you use, maybe it's through email, it kind of forces everyone to think about, all right, what am I going to say? How am I going to say it? How might it be perceived by the other side? Is it clear? Can they understand what it is that I'm trying to accomplish? So the quality of what is uttered, the quality of what gets down on paper is higher than in a meeting where anybody at any moment can raise their hand and say, like, actually, I think this, that, and the other, and it becomes more random. And now I know there's a lot of people watching this who are going to be like, but Peter, on Slack and everything, people are just like, hey, what's up? And then you start chatting and then you get distracted. And that is also true. A lot of these fast communication channels have led to people kind of just typing along something and then I don't want to say waste other people's time, but essentially it takes longer to get to the point. So none of this comes without having kind of a protocol or a culture of if I'm going to say something or write something, have I thought it through and understood what it is, how I'm going to do it, and whether the person I'm writing or communicating to can actually understand and take action on what I'm saying? So whenever I'm involved in any organization, the first thing I ask to do is I look at the founder or the CEO's calendar and I say, okay, how much time do you spend in physical meetings or virtual meetings with people? So live meetings, essentially, right? Do you feel that that's a good use of your time and why? And in the vast majority of cases, people say, no, it's not a good use of my time. In some of these instances, Because we talk too much, we, all these other things. And so the first thing we do is we say, all right, well, let's think about which meetings you do not need to be in. Let's think about which meetings could be emails or communications instead. And then let's think about what are the high-quality meetings that you should be in. And most often, 60% of their meeting time can be taken out and turned into written communication in a structured fashion. And it starts with us saying to the teams, All right, I'm no longer going to participate in these meetings because I think that we can reach the same conclusions more effectively if we do it in a different way. And here's how. There is a topic, there is a sort of a description of what it is that we need a decision on, and then there is a recommended course of action from whomever posts anything in the channel. All of it is open to everyone so we can discuss everything together, but we do it in a written form. Most of the time, a meeting, like an hour meeting, where out of which would not necessarily come great conclusions, can be done in 5 minutes, 10 minutes max of individual time in an asynchronous manner. Of course, there are meetings that require us to get together, certain types of brainstorms, certain times of thorny issues, when there's conflict, those kind of things. By all means, have those meetings. All the standing meetings that you have, most of them, is my argument, are not necessary. I've written about 90% of meetings are unnecessary, and I actually think we're getting very close to that number. So the quality of communication, the quality of decision-making goes up the more you do it asynchronously and the more that you institute a culture of saying, think about what you're writing, then write it, then consider whether or not somebody can actually take action on what you've said. Those 3 things are there, then you're fine. And you'll find yourself having much more time doing things that are more important to you, such as thinking about new products and services, taking care of customers, engaging with your colleagues in an informal manner, and not running from meeting to meeting to meeting and not feeling like you get anything done.
