3 team plays to shift left at speed
If you're looking for easy ways to reduce meetings and to shift left, try the following ideas on your team.
- Institute an inviolate four-hour block each day, when there are no meetings and everyone actively avoids distractions.
- Choose a day of the week to designate as a no-meeting day. I recommend Fridays.
- Delete all recurring meetings and from that point on, set up meetings that follow best practice.
If you’ve read the posts on this site until this point, I have something to say to you.
Thank you!
Most of the posts here are what you’d consider “long form”. That’s been a conscious choice, but I know that reading long form is a dying interest. On the flip-side, there’s no asynchronous work without reading and writing and you’ll often need to read long form. So kudos to you if you’re reading every detail. Oh, and if you jumped to this article directly, kudos to you even then. It shows that you’re choosing to spend your time on things that appeal to you. More power to you for that.
After reading a lot of long form advice, some of you may look for a ‘gimme’. The Cambridge dictionary defines a ‘gimme’ as “something that is extremely easy to do”. So this post is about three things that are relatively easy to do on a software development team that’s trying to be more asynchronous. Consider these as little plays that you can try independently. Sounds good? Let’s get started.
1. Inviolate half days
An easy way to give people a long stretch of uninterrupted time back for work is to make one half of the day “meeting free”. For example, you could decide that from 9am to 1pm there are no meetings. If you have recurring meetings, move them to the other half of the day, so that there are no exceptions. Here are a few tips to make this tick.
Make it predictable. Decide which block of four hours is meeting-free and stay consistent with that practice. This’ll help make things predictable for the team and everyone can settle into a routine.
Encourage productive behaviours. Having inviolate time is all nice and dandy, but if people get distracted by chat, email, social media or phone calls, you won’t get much benefit out of this. So people will have to employ their own productivity behaviours; for example, distraction blocking; to make the most of this time.
Sync your calendars. You can cut off distractions from within the team, but it’s no fun if you have distractions from outside the team. Set up your calendars so it’s clear to everyone in the organisation that this time is inviolate. That way, no one will block your time for an interview or other company commitments during these hours. You can even set up calendars to auto-decline invites during these hours.
2. No meeting Fridays (or any other day)
A few teams I know have designated a day of the week as “no-meetings”. I love Fridays as a no-meeting-day for a bunch of reasons. Let’s start at the end. Having a clear Friday allows me to end the week with a massive sense of accomplishment. If I don’t get work done that day, I know I only have myself to blame. I can’t tell you how happy it makes me feel to go into the weekend with the recency bias of having achieved something. The other little benefit of no-meeting Fridays is that it’s something you all can look forward to as a team - an eight-hour reward to end the work week.
Your mileage could vary, so pick a Monday if that floats your boat. Remember, all the tips I mentioned for inviolate hours apply here as well.
3. Purge all recurring meetings
Is this one really easy? Perhaps it isn’t. I understand, but let me explain. Actually, let me have David Heinemeir Hanson explain.
“How does your day accumulate mass? I have these three, four, five standup meetings. I check in one-on-ones with these people every week. Before you know it, you’ve created entitlements around 30 hours of your week. That’s just at the baseline. There’s 10 hours left now to do things. Not that the other stuff isn’t work, but that it’s already accounted for. I loath that sense. I get such an anxiety of feeling I’m being held down in such a way if my week is fully structured in a way that’s just accounted for, that I can’t get out of. No. Absolutely not.”
You see what I mean? Recurring meetings are problematic for a few reasons.
They’re meetings without an agenda. You dream up an agenda because you have the meeting. How messed up is that?
You usually mark them to the broadest audience possible, because of FOMO.
People don’t engage in these meetings because most of them are about “conveyance”. Remember the ConveRel spectrum? These should ideally be async.
Hard as it may seem, delete all these recurring meetings. If you’re leading a team and taking responsibility to shift-left, then consider sharing an email such as the one below with your stakeholders.
Hi ______,
As you may be aware, we are trying to make a few changes to our ways of working, so the development team has fewer interruptions during the day and can be more productive. One action we’re taking is to make our meetings more effective. We realise that our recurring meetings aren’t as productive as we’d like them to be, so we’re removing them from our calendars as the first step of our reboot.
I assure you that as and when we need a meeting, we’ll set it up with a focussed group and a clear agenda. Please expect us to prepare for these meetings and to share relevant materials ahead of time, so you also have time to prepare. And yes, we’ll check your calendar before we block your time.
Cheers,
Your Name
Change that email to your context and set up the meetings you absolutely need on a case-by-case basis. Once you get used to the time you buy back, you won’t regret this at all.
Clay Christensen
“It's easier to hold your principles 100 percent of the time than it is to hold them 98 percent of the time.”
That quote is true for work as much as it is for life itself. Remember that we talked about “Meetings as the last resort, not the first option.” That’s a principle you want to follow 100% of the time. The strategies I’ve outlined above shift you left on the spectrum of synchronousness so that you can gradually align your team and stakeholders to that principle. You won’t get there on day one and that’s ok. Baby steps matter!