Radical idea: Get stuff done without yet another meeting
/
My teams are trying something new in August. We’re going to have no meetings on Fridays. Deep work. Flow state. That’s a good Friday!
I can already hear you saying: People will just book meetings with me anyway! Indeed. You need to work on the environment before you work on individual behaviors. Otherwise you‘re sending people to fight a losing battle.
To help with that I sent a meeting request to every person to help them block out the entire day in their diary. And the other IT portfolios in our division are following suit. It’s a coordinated attack on meeting overload.
We don’t think having no meetings on Fridays is a silver bullet though. It may even cause people to have more meetings Monday to Thursday.
But importantly, forcing ourselves to try get our jobs done on a Friday without meetings will help us - at least for one day a week - to think differently. Fridays are an opportunity to kind of exercise these “non-meeting” muscles.
The big question is: How do we get things done without a meeting? Here are some radical ideas:
Pick up the phone and have a quick chat. Send a message instead. Or heaven forbid, make a judgment call without waiting for 10 other people to give you "permission".
Jason Fried wrote an thought provoking article explaining how it is natural - but not optimal - to initially just port "in office" practices over to "work from home". It’s worth a read.
To help with that I sent a meeting request to every person to help them block out the entire day in their diary. And the other IT portfolios in our division are following suit. It’s a coordinated attack on meeting overload.
We don’t think having no meetings on Fridays is a silver bullet though. It may even cause people to have more meetings Monday to Thursday.
But importantly, forcing ourselves to try get our jobs done on a Friday without meetings will help us - at least for one day a week - to think differently. Fridays are an opportunity to kind of exercise these “non-meeting” muscles.
The big question is: How do we get things done without a meeting? Here are some radical ideas:
Pick up the phone and have a quick chat. Send a message instead. Or heaven forbid, make a judgment call without waiting for 10 other people to give you "permission".
Jason Fried wrote an thought provoking article explaining how it is natural - but not optimal - to initially just port "in office" practices over to "work from home". It’s worth a read.