Article brainstorming - Why I significantly reduced my recurring meetings

Up: § Blogging Index
Related topic: § 1-1 meetings

There’s an article coming together for me, where I share the recent changes I’ve made to my recurring meeting cadences. I’m going to work on it a bit now.

I have shared these changes in a few different places, so I should grab that content. I also spoke the changes in the Leadership Roundtable, February 2023, so I could grab that audio and transcribe it. I’ve been meaning to try out Otter.ai

Background from roundtable:

• I’ve recently been adjusting my recurring meeting cadence, to allow for more real-time work throughout the week rather than most work and alignment happening in a 1:1
• What this has looked like for me: scheduled 1:1s are now monthly, however I am making an increased effort (and have more space) to be present in Slack, hopping into different channels and also 1:1, to work and make decisions together, including hopping onto zoom more ad-hoc
  • The benefits of switching from weekly to monthly 1-1s
• The monthly 1:1 is becoming a check in on the performance review feedback
• You may have heard about this shift, but I wanted to take a moment to allow us to discuss it as a group and see whether it is something we may more broadly try out
• Another benefit of this is that it allows more seamless collaboration across different groups, rather than skewing us towards a top down collaboration structured due to weekly 1:1s where we add many different items to the agenda, some of which could benefit from others involved

Overall article outline:

• Introduction
• Shifting to work more directly on Buffer
• Making space to do real work
• Weekly 1-1s force you to work in unnatural ways

Article outline idea:

• Introduction
• Background
  • Shifting to work more directly
  • Making space to do real work
• Problems
  • Working purely through others, vs doing real work
  • Meetings take up so much time
  • Weekly 1-1s force you to work in unnatural ways
  • Hierarchy can stop the right people meeting
• Solution
  • Monthly 1:1s
  • More ad-hoc meetings
  • More async work
  • More longer brainstorm sessions

Potentially relevant notes:

• Weekly 1-1s force you to work in unnatural ways
• Ad-hoc meetings allow you to capture the best energy of a topic
• Reduce recurring 1-1s to enable better collaboration
• Hierarchy can stop the right people meeting
• Hierarchy is useful but has many downsides
• Recurring 1-1s work best as high level check-ins rather than for real work