Sitting through the 7th meeting of the day, where your co-workers get distracted, and the agenda drifts apart from its original intention, is its own kind of hell.
Meetings used to provide valuable information- a method of organizing the team and aligning priorities. But now, daily check-ins and meetings about meetings and meetings about increasing productivity and meetings about increasing the bottom line eat up time that could be spent producing real work.
But, someone argues, that meetings are necessary so that the work is moving in the right direction and no one is slacking off. That is, meetings about the quality of work; meetings that exist to hold the team accountable.
Now, the question isn’t whether meetings should be eliminated or not- they can’t be. We are creatures of habit, and communicating with each other is one of the oldest. But the question now becomes: what can a team do to stay aligned while reducing the number of weekly or daily meetings?
Let’s try to answer this question.
Meetings are no one’s fault, but they are an organizational bottleneck that is hard to solve.
Organizations find themselves in a unique spot: chasing productivity. Everyone has now woken up to the fact that speed and production quantity don’t mean much if the service/product does not solve a real problem.
However, to find that real problem, which is usually complex- teams always have to stay on the same page. And to do that, they need to communicate with each other.
The necessity for cross-functional work is directly correlated with the number of meetings taking place in a day. That’s why business leaders are always in the back-to-back meeting loop.
Your manager needs to talk to managers of other departments, and then they need to report back to you, so that you are aligned. Your manager is in more meetings than ever, and now, because of that, so are you. This constant coordination challenge is also why many teams now rely on sales prospecting tools to centralize workflows and reduce communication gaps.
You need to talk to Tiffany in customer success if you want to know why your product is not flying well with the ICP. And Josh from marketing really needs you to add this one extra feature so that he can differentiate with a POV.
Everyone needs to talk to everyone.
The Culture of learning is what a meeting ideally promotes.
Asking questions, taking accountability, and acting on your ideas is what makes good work. But this can be derailed by a simple habit: making your own decisions.
What we believe is good for the bottom line doesn’t mean the same for the salesperson, developer, or anyone else. The perspectives that exist in an organization are vital and no one will can be imposed on the collective whole.
Meetings, if and only if they are held democratically, lead to a culture of cross-learning and acceptance of ideas and the revelation of how to move towards the goal together. But many meetings go nowhere and end up teaching nothing.
It’s like every meeting becomes one led by Michael Scott.
Moving forward, let us take this point into consideration: a meeting provides the opportunity to learn.
Meetings hamper deep work.
Deep work has become sort of a buzzword- what exactly is deep work? As defined by Cal Newport, deep work is: “Professional activity performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that pushes your cognitive capabilities to their limit. These efforts create new value, improve your skill, and are hard to replicate.”
And meetings hamper this deep work because they offer more distractions. Some people are even distracted by the fact that there is a meeting in a day! And what is “new value” from an organizational perspective?
Is a developer working on a product feature that they feel needs implementation, or deep work? What happens when that feature is not needed in the larger context? That is also a waste of time and money.
Deep work is a sacrifice for alignment.
So teams implement Asana, or Trello, or go back to the basics, to a kanban board, so that they can balance deep work and alignment. But ask yourself: has this worked, or has that added another layer of complexity? Similar challenges also emerge when organizations struggle to connect productivity efforts with measurable business outcomes, much like the issue discussed in full funnel measurement.
A meeting about productivity might become the norm.
So now, deep work is necessary to create value, but alignment is necessary to create value that affects the organizational bottom line positively.
Optimizing meetings seems to be a zero-sum game. Can we (the people) break it?
Optimizing Meetings Is a Managerial Problem
Every article that has been researched for this piece usually ends up the same way: set an agenda or time block, or some other form of solution-non-solution.
Because they fundamentally assume human work is linear. When have you seen linear work? All work has depth, width, and height- work is a sphere. One where you must construct a perfect one or one close to it. But, even under ideal conditions, geometrically, a perfect sphere is not possible.
Work will always have distortions.
Thus, meetings become tools to reduce these distortions. This can be done by upskilling or facilitating the flow of information to the right people.
But now, if work is a sphere and meetings are tools to reduce the distortions, what must managers do?
First, ask yourself and the executive team: Does more information equal better decision-making?
or
Are these meetings to fill the enormous amount of time gaps that leaders usually have?
Based on the answers to these two questions, you might find a lot of bloat that can be reduced.
Therefore, to optimize meetings, managers must do the hard work of elimination. If speed is what the old guard focused on, new managers must focus on quality and reducing the time between action and execution.
But what does it mean to reduce the time between action and execution?
Because no organization has unlimited access to resources, nor do people work uniformly like ants. Every interest collides with the next- Josh from marketing isn’t getting any new leads. He blames the developers and UI/UX folks for the website’s slow performance and counterintuitive design.
If Josh wants a better website, there must be a chain of command to be followed. Budgets need to be approved, and manpower must be allocated. Can this happen without a meeting? Not in most organizations. This is especially true when teams are trying to improve lead generation while balancing multiple priorities across departments.
One possible solution here is for tools like Linear, which are amazing at what they do, i.e., reduce friction between cross-departmental teams. Josh has to submit his data and get it approved by the stakeholders.
Yes, but this needs discipline from all parties involved because it requires active participation. Something is missing in most meetings.
Brainstorming vs Brain-Rotting
Most participants in the meeting have checked out unless it’s a confrontational or politically charged meeting. Async tools like Jira, Asana, and other ticket-based productivity tools usually fail because they describe the work rather than clear it. The same issue often affects sales and marketing teams that depend heavily on prospecting tools without improving collaboration processes.
Kanban is good when things are moving in ideal conditions- when approvals are timely, and there are no competing interests on the board. But that is not the case.
Therefore, an async tool or strategy will require two things: –
- The Discipline of an IC, manager, and executive to make and analyze the case in question. In an AI-dominated world where intelligence becomes a resource, this type of thinking will empower all three to think problems through. Organizations that adapt faster to changing workflows are often the ones investing in better optimization strategies across their digital operations.
- Automation to detect whether changes are required or the consistent updates are telling the story the organization wants to tell.
What does that last point mean exactly?
If you use a tool to async, whether that is Loom or Linear or anything else, are these async in line with what you are building towards? Can you create data points to make managers and executives understand if the ship is going in the right direction?
Currently, there are no tools that do this because data is siloed. But it is a powerful idea: imagine a strategy that describes in clear detail, using past and present data, whether the organization needs meetings or not. Similar concepts are shaping how businesses improve visibility through answer engine optimization.
It would be the CEO’s dream. But it requires cognitive buy-in: first from collaborators to take ownership across functions and be responsible for certain work “elements”, second, for managers to be ruthless with their team’s time, and third, for executives to have the discipline to judge what has been passed on.
With this strategy, we believe that meetings and deep work can become one. By empowering thinking across teams, and enabling collaboration.
