WARNING: This is a 1,000 word email, so feel free to save this to read later. I promise it’s a good read though!

I want to share a story of when I removed all meetings at EntryLevel and my learnings from that experience.

I hit a point in 2022 where I felt like 40-60% of my time was in meetings as the CEO. For half of them I was bored out of my mind and felt like I was wasting my time.

• 1on1s with each of my 6 direct reports → 3-6 hours. Sometimes these 1on1s became a really long call about a litany of problems (personal and professional)

• Department Syncs (Marketing, Product, Learning Design, Operations) → 4 hours

• General Strategy Sync → 1 hour prep and 1 hour running it

• Friday Retro → 1 hour

• Monthly Board Meeting → 1 hour (per month)

Then all the unscheduled meetings that were called for various things such as product feature kick offs, agency meetings, huddles etc. If you then compound them with all the external partner calls - it became a virtual meeting prison.

I remember speaking to my friend Will from NewCampus and I saw his calendar was packed with literally dozens of 15-30 minute calls throughout the week. Predicting that I was well on my way there, I decided enough was enough.

So I wrote a document called “Death By Meetings” to send to my team. Yes I was being a little dramatic but this is where I felt I was going.

Here is the exact memo I wrote:

Trialing a Semi-Async Week (2 Week Trial)

Rules of Engagement

→ All team members must commit to writing and reading a lot more! It’s way more efficient than a meeting so please make sure you do this.

→ We will only use slack huddles from now on. This helps us get used to the fleeting and quick nature of meetings. It won’t feel like we have to do a meeting for meeting's sake.

→ When we do have meetings, we will have 5-10 min of reading time and only spend the rest of the time asking questions. This has worked really effectively in other meetings. Listening to people read out stuff is pretty time-consuming.

Meeting Structures for Next Week

• Async CEO Weekly: I will post on slack. Everyone must comment once they have read and digested it.

• 1on1s: All done Async. Please fill in your 1on1s and your manager will review and give you any comments via slack message. Hop on a quick huddle IF needed.

  • Aim to get your updates done by 4 pm AEST

  • Comments and Reviews will be done by 5 pm AEST

Monday Strategy (1 hour): Please schedule 15 min sometime before the meeting to write up your update

• 5 minutes catch up and pleasantries

• 10 minutes of reading time, commenting and adding questions to Q&A

• 30 minutes Q&A & Ideas

• 10 minutes of asking CEO questions (What's happening? Can you explain X to me?) I’m not a fan of people asking me so many things in private chats instead of just in front of everyone so I can say it once

Friday Retro: (1 hour): An intentionally unorganised meeting for us to catch up and bond.

Outcome

You should have a maximum of 3 hours of meetings every week. 1 hour for the Monday strategy, 1 hour for the Friday hang session and an additional hour for unscheduled meetings as needed.

This worked really well! The only thing is without the inefficiencies of meetings / water cooler chats people started to feel a bit more isolated from the team. So we introduced intentional times for bondings, kudos, having fun, memes etc. It’s fine to waste time as a team for the sake of bonding - just be upfront about what you’re doing.

After some time I refined my thinking about meetings into a document called “What Warrants a Meeting?”.

Here is the document:

What Warrants a Meeting?

Making a Decision

A big reason for a meeting is to make a big decision that requires multiple stakeholders and the delivery of information. However, we need to make sure all the components are ready before we have a meeting. The worst thing you can do is try to make a decision but some key information is missing. (Deciding whether to launch a marketing campaign but the costs are unknown and need another week to find out)

• Key Decision Maker needs to be involved (the owner of the goal)

• All the information required to make the decision needs to prepare beforehand

• Set expectations at the beginning on what needs to be decided

Brainstorm: Coming up with ideas

If you’re stuck and want to get some ideas from a group of people you can run a meeting to make that happen. However, brainstorms should be time-bound and run with an agenda.

• Set an agenda and a framework for how you want to run the brainstorm

• Ensure that it’s run on time and efficiently (<1 hour)

• Use breakout rooms when necessary

Realignment: Making sure you’re on the same page

Realignment can require a meeting however most of this happens at a regular cadence. However, if you sense a large misalignment, a meeting can be used to alleviate it. However quick 10 minute huddles are best for this.

• Slack Message: Message the relevant channel with a quick message if you need to ask something

• Channel Updates: When you’re working on a big piece of work, please update the relevant channel on what is happening

• Long Form (1on1s, Strategy)

Education: Explaining a concept or teaching a team member something

• <10 minutes: Record a loom video and share it

• 10+ minutes: organise a group call and record it

So far this has worked really well for us! Hope you learn something from my hundreds of hours of inefficient meetings.

Cheers,

Ajay