All right, so later we have David Sachs joining us in the studio to answer some questions, but first I wanted to do a deep dive on an interesting study that a tech company did about meetings. So we haven't talked about meetings recently, so let's do a deep dive on the question, could this meeting have been an email?

Is this article, I have this up on the screen for those who are watching on YouTube. The title of this article is, we intentionally canceled every meeting for a week, here's what happened. And it is a recent article, it's from the 6th of November. The company in question here is Zapier.

So I think hardcore sort of world without email fans will know that name, Zapier is used for digital workflow automation. One of these cool nerd productivity companies. All right, so let me point out a few things from this company. First of all, I enjoyed the opening sentence of this article, it reads as follows.

I do my best work when I'm interrupted every 30 minutes for a meeting, said no one ever. That's just writing. That's a funny way to open an article. All right, so the author of this article goes on to talk about the types of meetings. So the ontology of meetings that pulls at her attention, this list includes project kickoffs, syncs, retrospectives, recurring team meetings, and one-on-ones.

I don't even know what most of those terms mean, but it gives you some sense on the proliferation of meetings, especially within these type of high-tech knowledge work firms. So what they decided to try at this company, Zapier, was something they called, Get Stuff Done Week, GSD for short.

The quote here says, "The idea was that by moving from live calls to asynchronous communication, people could spend more time on deep work." You gotta love, I love the references, the commonplace references to deep work, because that means it's pervaded the cultural lexicon. And yes, get stuff done. All right, so this was the idea.

They were gonna just say, let's try this one week, basically no meetings. What are the logistics? They just encourage everyone. The leadership says everyone should cancel their internal meetings. So yeah, if you have client meetings, you'll have to do those. And move the conversations async instead. It's engineer talk for asynchronous.

So instead of live back and forth, documents, email, task systems, et cetera. All right, they did this for one week. Here is some examples of what this particular person did to replace these meetings. So let's get specific. So she said, instead of her weekly one-on-one, which by the way, I don't even know what that is.

Again, I've never had a real job. So a lot of this is sometimes new to me. But instead of her weekly one-on-one, she consolidated questions for my manager and sent them to her in a direct message on Slack. Okay, so I'm assuming a one-on-one is where you get together with your manager and say, "What are we doing this week?" Jesse's nodding his head.

So I have that right? - Yep. - Okay. Instead of a project check-in, all team members shared their updates in the relevant Asana tasks. All right, Asana is a task board. I talk about task boards a lot in a world without email. A centralized transparent place where all ongoing tasks can be seen, organized, and have relevant information attached to them.

So Asana is just a one of these task board systems that's liked by computer programmer types. Instead of a one-off strategy call, stakeholders shared their thoughts in a Coda doc. All right, I don't know what a Coda doc is, but I get what they're saying here is instead of like, "Let's just get on the call and talk about this particular new thing we need a strategy for." They instead wrote down their thoughts in some sort of shared document situation.

And finally, instead of a project kickoff call, our project manager sent a Slack message that shared the project charter timeline and next steps. That's probably the most relevant information from those kickoff meetings anyway. So let's just get that information posted. Why do we have to spend 30 minutes talking about it?

All right, so what was interesting here is this particular employee who is not a manager said, "Hey, this went well. I normally spend between six and 10 hours in meetings." So that's six or 10 hours she got back. But look at this. She says, "From what I can tell, it was even more impactful for managers at Zapier who sometimes spend half their week or more in meetings." So for the technical employees, this is 10 hours back, which you can get a lot done in, especially when you think about the way that the meetings is not the total time, that's not the only toll.

It's also the fragmentation of time. So these meetings might be short, 10 hours might be 20 half hour meetings, and those are sprinkled throughout your week, breaking up long stretches of time so they could eliminate almost any long stretches of time. So the damage of 10 hours worth of meetings is bigger than just 10 hours of work.

But look at this, managers at Zapier could spend 50% or more, 20 plus hours in meetings. So this particular employee talked to her manager and got some quotes. So her manager, Caitlin, said things such as, "Zoom calls tend to rule my calendar, especially doing check-ins." The manager said, "The most surprising part of not having these weekly check-ins was that I actually didn't feel disconnected from my team at all." You're still working and communicating, just differently.

The manager also said, "Instead of cramming tasks into my short stints between calls like usual, I was able to focus on my responsibilities that require deeper thinking, like long-term strategy, team planning, and cross-functional processes." Also, the manager said, "A week without meetings gave us space for more curiosity and experimentation, encouraging us to look at the problems we were trying to solve from a different angle.

For us, a meeting-less week was far from a meaningless week." I feel like the manager maybe practiced that line before talking to her subordinate for this article. I think that's, just think about this though for a second. I mean, I think this is really important. These managers, if you're spending more than half of your hours on Zoom, this is not consolidated.

This is not, "Man, every day I have to do meetings from one to five." No, no, no. These hours are sprinkled throughout the days so that you probably have never more than about 30 minutes free. Maybe occasionally you'll have an hour free without another meeting showing up somewhere on your schedule.

So basically, these managers were in a state of constant context shifting from one meeting to another with these small areas in between to try to do tasks. But let's be honest, tasks mean slack. Tasks means trying to keep up with the deluge in the inbox. So you're wrenching your cognitive context away from this meeting, which probably generated lots of open loops that you don't have time to get to because you have to answer 15 urgent Slack messages before the next meeting puts you into a different context.

From a psychological perspective, that's an almost impossible demand. The exhaustion that would engender is going to be pronounced. And from a productivity perspective, it's gotta be a terrible way to take these high power, highly trained minds and say, "Help us organize all of these brains that are organization and create new original things." What a terrible way to actually try to harness that energy.

So I think this is a fantastic insight of the impact meetings had been having. All right, so Zapier didn't wanna just rely on anecdotes. They did an internal survey. Here's some statistics. 80% of respondents wanna do this again. 80% of respondents achieved their goals for the week. 89% respondents found communication to be as effective during that week as during a typical week.

There's some goals this writer gives. Okay, if you wanna succeed with something like this, there are four goals or four pieces of advice we should say. One, set goals. So having specific goals for what you'll achieve during these weeks, these meeting-free weeks, makes it much more likely that you'll use those hours productively.

By the way, that's super telling. I think we're so used to this react to incoming in between meetings, absurd structure of work, that actually being given open time is something we don't necessarily know what to do with. Like I have meetings and I'm doing emails. What am I supposed to do when I have two hours free?

I think that's interesting that one of the, the number one goal was, plan what you're gonna do with that time. By the way, we have some advice here on this podcast for you right about how to plan your time. All right, piece of advice number two, go async. So they're big on using asynchronous channels.

So that's, you know, where you write something that someone else can come read it later. Future-proof your work is the third tip. So she used extra hours to help put in place systems that in the future will make it easier to not have to use meetings. More on that in a second.

And her fourth piece of advice is figure out which meetings matter. So actually do reflection. If you do one of these weeks, look back and say, what was really a problem that we missed? And what did I not miss at all? And so when you come out of it, if you're still gonna have meetings in your schedule, you have some insight on the, which of those meetings to prioritize.

All right, so I think that's an interesting insight into the reality of life in the sort of a modern high-tech knowledge work firm. I think it's an interesting insight into what happens when you step away from meetings. 90% of the employees at this company said, nothing bad happened. And yet I am sure Zapier is back to what, how things were before.

And this gets to the broader issue with the type of advice I talk about with the type of advice like a meeting-free GSD week. Why, if these ways of operating are universally beloved, way more effective, way less psychologically draining, why don't we do this more often? Why aren't these the standards?

And I think the answer is because it's hard. Just rock and rolling with email, Slack, and be able to throw a Zoom invitation to anyone at any point is, in the space of possible productivity configurations, a low-energy state. It is very easy. It does not take much energy. It's very flexible.

The overhead of implementing that is very small because it's just on the fly, let's go. Organizations will collapse towards this low-energy state unless there is a huge amount of external energy continually pumped into the organization to try to maintain an alternative configuration. The GSD week at Zapier was complicated.

They used many more asynchronous tools, more structures were needed. They were talking about, in this one person's example, they were talking about annotating a sonnet task. They were talking about these CODA documents. They're talking about an alternative kickoff procedure for new projects. None of this is easy, and it would require buy-in from the top down as well as from the bottom up, and a lot of consistent energy being put into, this is how we do it now.

We don't do these type of meetings. So it is easier to just be ad hoc. And I think we underestimate the power of easy. Easy is often bad. Easy is often inefficient. Easy often exhausts people. Easy is often a terrible way to make the most of the assets that a knowledge work company has, but it's also very, very difficult to dislodge.

So to conclude this discussion, I wanted to throw in three random pieces of advice about meetings. We haven't talked about meetings a lot, so let me throw in three random pieces of Cal Newport meeting advice. I'll sort of throw this into the mix along with the advice given in this article we just reviewed.

Number one, to me, the overarching message of what they experienced at Zapier is that all regular collaboration needs a structured process that everyone understands and all relevant stakeholders had a hand in crafting. Structured process that says, here's how the collaboration happens. Here's the information. Here's how the information moves.

Here's how decisions are made. These can be a pain to construct, but once constructed, it can be way more effective than just saying, we'll throw in a Zoom meeting and email or Slack in between. So we saw some structured processes arise in this Zapier example. For example, the annotation of Asana tasks that are reviewed every day, as opposed to having check-in meetings.

The construction of a kickoff document with the project charter and goals, et cetera, that is uploaded to a particular tool called Coda instead of having a kickoff meeting. So these are structured collaboration processes. All regular collaboration, you should try to put in place a process like this that's very clear about here's how the interaction happens.

And to the extent possible, the answer to that question should move away from unscheduled communication that requires you to check an inbox. As much as possible, this should move away from having large blanks of unstructured meeting time. We'll just figure it out when we all get on Zoom. You want more structure than that.

My second piece of advice, to make any of this type of structured collaboration philosophies work, you need a catch-all. This is the biggest thing I saw missing from the discussion in the Zapier article, and probably the biggest source of friction that would bring an end to this GSD experiment if they tried to just extend it week after week, is that there will be small things that pop up that require back and forth interaction that will probably be best dispatched if we could just talk.

And if we're in a remote environment, we need to set up a meeting. And because it's hard to set up meetings that are less than 30 minutes, it's probably gonna eat up 30 minutes of our time. So you need catch-alls for the ad hoc discussion requiring issues that will inevitably arise outside of your structures.

And I think the best catch-all is office hours. Every day, every person has a clearly posted time. My door is open, my phone is on, I have a Zoom room activated, and I'm in it. Short discussions get deferred to office hours. If someone tries to email you or hit you up on Slack with something that's gonna require more than just one message back and forth, you say, "Great, come to my office hours, "we'll talk about it.

"And if that doesn't work, "I'll come to your next office hours to talk about it." If someone throws a Zoom meeting invite at you, you say, "Why don't we just grab me "at a nearby office hours, "let's really see what we're dealing with here. "And then if we need a longer meeting, we can set it." So you need these catch-alls.

The effect of these is significant. And finally, reverse meetings, say a term I coined in an earlier episode, reverse meetings often generate better insight than standard meetings. So in a standard meeting, I gather all of the people that are relevant to something that I'm working on into one place, and we talk about it.

I wanna know what you guys think about it, let's make a plan. In a reverse meeting, me as the initiator, instead of summoning five people to come meet with me, I go and talk to each of those five people one-on-one. And in an environment with catch-alls like office hours, that means I'm gonna go to each of your office hours one by one and talk to you about this issue.

Much greater insight is extracted from reverse meetings because you get rid of the crowd social dynamics of having a lot of people in the same room. You're able to fully extract the thoughts, the feelings, and the expertise of each individual person. You have more time to synthesize this information.

You'll probably come to a better decision having done a reverse meeting. And your overall impact on people's schedule is greatly minimized. If I go through five people's existing office hours, I have added nothing to their calendar that wasn't already there. If I instead make the five of them get together in a half hour meeting or an hour long meeting outside of that, that's five worker hours I've now sucked out of the system.

So it's not only more efficient, but I also think they gain more insight. So those are three random pieces of advice. All regular collaboration has to be structured, have a catch-all like office hours for what doesn't fit in those structures, depend more on reverse meetings than standard meetings for complicated decisions where expertise is needed or nuanced political emotional issues are at play.

You're gonna get much better results with the aggregate of one-on-ones instead of getting a lot of people into one room. Thoughts on meetings. - So with office hours, so say you're waiting around and nobody's there, is that just a good time to do like an admin block? - Yeah.

- Yeah. - Yeah, just be like, okay, I'm gonna go through email or do something lightweight and waiting to see who actually shows up. - Yeah. - I'm hearing from more people who are doing these, by the way. I've heard from more entrepreneurs who are working on these. It used to be the big example was Jason Fried and Basecamp.

Like they were big on the office hours. And when I did a kickoff event for World Without Email, it was me and Jason in conversation and we got into that. But I've heard from other readers since then. It really is effective. It really is effective. Every day, set time, it can consume so many things that otherwise would have been an email or a meeting.

And it's an intermediate between this email meeting synchronous, asynchronous dichotomy that we often see. So the phrase is often, this meeting could have been an email. People really don't like, I have to spend 30 minutes or an hour in a meeting for something that could have been dealt with an email.

But if everything goes to email, you get the hyperactive hive mind. There really is an efficiency to real time back and forth. You and I can figure something out in five minutes that would otherwise take five to 15 messages, each of which generates five inbox checks. And there we have 50 to 75 context shifts created by this conversation.

Or we could talk for five minutes. Office hours mediates between those two. So you get all the advantage of real time interaction, all that efficiency without the schedule devouring overhead of having every conversation have to have its own meeting that holds time on your calendar. So it's like one of the number one strategies for an organizational environment that I think one of the most effective single pieces of advice I have for organizations is put office hours in place.

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