All right, let's roll on. What do we have next? Next question, Dave from DC. I work at a research center where everybody wears a lot of different hats and projects are usually short term, usually six months. And most of us are on a couple at a time. We have been given lots of tools to navigate through this email, Jabber, like instant messenger, Mattermost, open source, Slack, Zoom, and our newest addition, Slack.

My supervisor read your book and then asked if any would like to make a communication policy document to lay out the ground rules on what a communication happens on what platform so we don't get overloaded. I stepped up to make the first cut. Any suggestions? I thought this was relevant to today's topic because communication plays such a big role in the impact of overhead.

And I mentioned one of the two ways for us to tame overload is to tame the way that overhead coordination, the overhead made up of coordination collaboration, how that unfolds. If we could tame how that coordination collaboration occurs so it doesn't spread out so much over so much of your schedule, that would help the overload issue.

So writing a communication plan for your company or team could be a good way of reducing the footprint of necessary coordination and collaboration. So Dave, I'm glad you took on this challenge. Here's some random thoughts off the top of my head. All right, if I was writing one of these things, I would say number one, email is for the following purposes, announcing information that does not require a reply, non-urgent questions that can be answered with a single reply.

Hey, can you remind me what time this is at? Are you coming to this event next week? I didn't get your RSVP. Can you remind me which folder we were putting these files in? Email can also be used for delivering files or other types of content. So you wanted this contract, I attached it to this message, here you go.

Keep email for those things. Anything that requires back and forth interaction. So beyond just answering a single question, this should be done synchronously, real time, we can just talk back and forth to each other in real time. Where should these interactions occur? One option, number one should be office hours.

Everyone has office hours most days, maybe multiple times a day on some days a week. Well publicized when your office hours are. This is the default. If I have something I need to talk to you about that would require more than one back and forth, I will come to your next office hours and we can just talk about it.

I don't care what medium you use to interact during office hours. It could be in person in the office, it could be on the phone, it could be on Zoom, you could just have a Zoom office with the office hours feature with the waiting room open. It could be on Slack, I think it's completely fine to have an office hours channel on Slack where people could just come and start slacking you go.

The key is you want real time synchronous during those set hours. If the interaction requires multiple people, so you're about to use that CC button, you should have regularly scheduled docket clearing meetings for your team probably twice a week. There should be a shared document that accompanies these meetings.

Throughout the week in between the docket clearing, if something comes up that needs to be discussed as a group, you add it to the shared document. When you get to the next docket clearing meeting, you look at the shared document as a group and you go through it piece by piece and try to tackle each of the items.

So this could be a big discussion, we need to figure out a new strategy, or it could be a scheduling decision. We need to set up a strategy off site meeting when is good. Let me type that in our shared document at the next docket clearing meeting, there will be a point where we get to that we say, Okay, everyone, open up your calendars.

Let's find a time right now. So if you need a seat, you would have used a CC message for that has multiple back and forth. Wait till the next regularly scheduled docket clearing meeting. If all else fails, then you can go to the custom scheduled meeting. All right, you and I have to just set up a meeting to talk about this.

We can't do it in office hours for whatever reason. We can't do it in docket clearing. Only then do you fall back on a normally scheduled meeting. You need some sort of automated process for setting up meetings. So either you can expose calendars with available times or just keep I like this method, a text file of available meeting times for the next few weeks.

And you just email that to the person if they select one, you schedule that and take it off the list. It gives you more control. And it prevents the person you're talking to to having to go to a third party app. So I like that method as well. But if you're going to schedule a custom meeting that to can't require more than one message in a reply.

So we're never doing multiple back and forth over email. We're never doing unscheduled slack. Everything happens during a planned time. The custom scheduled meetings will be rare. If you have regular office hours and docket clearing meetings that will cover 80% of what might have been a meeting otherwise, and it leaves the meetings that remain to be quite reasonable.

I would also recommend in the shared communication document that shared documents and folders are heavily used to collect information that needs to be accessed or updated by multiple people. Never ever ever use your email as a knowledge management system. Everything goes to a shared document that you can point people to that people can edit and leave comments.

Other people can come and check. So that technology should be used a lot as well. Do those things. Dave from DC put that in your communication policy, you are going to see the footprint of the necessary overhead, this communication, the coordination collaboration is going to plummet and is going to make the same amount of execution require a lot less time and none of these tools, nothing here is a fancy tool.

Nothing here is you need some whatever you said Jabber or matter most, you don't need anything complicated. You can implement these with the simplest Google workspace, whatever tools, that's not the issue. The issue is the processes that surround them. So there you go. That's my rough draft of a communication policy.

(upbeat music)