This article was written by Ken Leaver who comes from a product & commercial background. He has founded multiple companies and held senior product positions at SEA tech companies like Lazada and Pomelo Fashion.
Now Ken runs his own agency that helps early stage startups with content and traction called End Game.
Guest Author: Ken Leaver
I was sitting in my office on Friday morning creating my day’s to-do list and looking at how much stuff I needed to do. There were a lot of balls in the air.
And in my system there is only a single layer of management with all these freelancers I use (15-20 at the moment)…. me.
But then I checked my calendar and wrote down my meetings for the day and smiled. I had only two meetings…. a catchup with someone from the investor’s team and a call with a potential agency we were considering using.
A total of one hour of meetings.
Then I opened my Clickup and looked at the 100+ notifications awaiting me (which had accumulated from the previous evening)… and started blasting.
Two hours later I was caught up and had unblocked the whole team. Now it was time to create some new tasks and set some new priorities for the team going forward.
I smiled again. This system f’in rocks.
I do not have any recurring meetings with my team
That’s right.
I don’t do 1-1’s.
I don’t do team meetings.
And I find it amazing.
I made this switch a couple of years back and it has been transformative.
But you cannot just get rid of all your meetings… because they do add value.
Rather you need to replace them with something.
Otherwise chaos occurs.
The ingredients to being able to replace recurring meetings
I find that there are just two main ingredients to being able to replace your recurring meetings.
Ingredient 1: You need a way of staying on top of what everyone is doing (ie. updates, unblocking, setting priorities going forward, etc.)
Ingredient 2: You need a way of collectively getting inputs to align on a key decision (eg. brainstorming, steering, etc.)
That is all.
That is all I think you need to be able to do to get rid of recurring meetings.
How do you replace these two ingredients?
This is what I replace those two ingredients above with:
Ingredient 1: You need a way of staying on top of what everyone is doing
I replace this ingredient with my “Everything is a task” methodology.
Note that I am using Clickup (a project management tool) with my team and generally have kanbans setup for everything.
There are two simple rules that I apply:
- Everything in the company is a task. If there is no task, you do not do it. Because it does not exist to me.
- Any work that is done by absolutely anybody is an update to a task. No update = I assume no work was done.
Here is an example of some of my boards to give you a sense for what this looks like in action.
Also key is the fact that I have an automation where I’m automatically added as a follower to all of these tasks. And so I see the updates that folks make and can react quickly if:
- They need to be unblocked or going in the wrong direction
- If they are working on something that is not a priority
- etc.
Note that I also clear all notifications every couple hours all the time, which is absolutely key to the system. And this is enabled by the fact that I have no recurring meetings that I am stuck in.
Ingredient 2: You need a way of collectively getting inputs to align on a key decision
I replace this ingredient with my “Collect inputs task” method. By this I mean that any time I want to get inputs from a group of folks I do the following:
- step 1: I create a Clickup task in the relevant folder. And I usually have folders for things like strategy, GTM approach, etc.
- step 2: I write a clear context & goal to the issue that I want inputs on.
- step 3: I add followers to the task. Basically everyone I want inputs from.
- step 4: I set a due date on the task for when I want all inputs by.
- step 5: I make a comment asking for everyone to provide their inputs by the due date. And remind them that each new thought should be a separate thread. So they can either start new threads of reply to others’ threads.
- step 6: Everyone that is added to the task (including me) spends the next few days starting threads and replying to each other. A rich discussion occurs.
- step 7: On the due date I (or whoever is the decisionmaker) closes it off with a decision based on the discussion.
Here is an example of a board from my Techzi media project with these types of ‘strategy’ input tasks.
A few great things happen when you do this:
- People provide well thought-out inputs because they have the time to.
- The discussion is not driven by those who speak the loudest or are most vocal. And so you get far more inputs.
- It takes less total time from each person than a physical meeting… because it is very fast to skim through what people wrote.
For example on average I would say that I spend 10 minutes aligning on a decision that would have typically been an hour-long meeting (ie. I save 80% of my time)
And the discussion/decision would have been richer.
So that’s it… that is how you completely remove recurring meetings
I’ve now shown you the two ingredients you need to remove all recurring meetings.
And if you’ve digested what i’ve written… I have basically provided alternative ways of getting the same value that you would normally get out of a recurring meeting.
And note that I am not saying this will be easy… this transition is hard, uncomfortable and takes time. I’ve been working on fine tuning how this system works for the last few years.
But the other point that I want to drill home is the ‘why’. Why bother doing all this?
Answer: Because it is immensely powerful to be without these meetings. You:
- get a lot more done with your team
- make better decisions faster
- free your calendar up so you can react very quickly to anyone in the team
- and thus make your team extremely efficient and agile
I’d put my way of working up against pretty much anyone out there in terms of getting shit done fast/effectively with the least amount of resources… and feel pretty confident wagering on myself.
Why does this work? The power of ‘skimming’
If you think about what i’ve written above… I am basically throwing the whole traditional way of working under the bus. And saying that I can kick it’s ass.
But why?
Any major efficiency improvements need to be exploiting some source of inefficiency.
And one major source of inefficiency that I am exploiting is the fact that humans are very good at ‘skimming’ through information.
Sit through a meeting and spend 60 minutes…. but skim through the notes of that meeting in 2 minutes. Does that sound farfetched?
No, you’ve probably done it a ton of times.
The same thing with my tasks…. it sounds crazy to track all the work updates of say 30 people each day.
But because I can skim through this quickly… I can digest their updates and even react to them all in a couple hours per day.
Try to do the same thing by meeting each person and verbally discussing it…and you have no chance.
So there you have it…. how you axe recurring meetings. And the secret source of power that enables it.
