A Protocol for Effective Meetings

○ Before setting up a meeting, try async: send a voice message. Draw a diagram, photograph it, and record a short screencast of yourself explaining it [1]. Give people time to absorb it and think about its implications. In a synchronous meeting, you put people on the spot and ask for an immediate answer, which doesn’t result in an insightful answer. Async is also faster — you can communicate your message immediately, while it may take a week to schedule a meeting.

○ Every meeting should have a topic. Identify it explicitly: “We’re going to discuss how to scale our database.” If someone says something unrelated to the topic, ask, “Is that related to the topic of this meeting, which is scaling the database?” If not, interrupt them mid-sentence [2].

○ Don’t try to cram multiple topics into one meeting. You’ll reach clarity on none of them. We do this out of impatience, but it actually wastes time. If you discuss two topics in an hour and reach agreement on neither, you’ve wasted an hour. Whereas if you picked one, you’ve achieved something at the end of the hour.

○ Sometimes, as we discuss a particular topic X, we find that we need to agree on some other topic Y first. In that case, explicitly park the first topic, announce “Let’s part topic X and focus on Y. Can we do that?” This will let everyone mentally shift gears. Otherwise, you’ll have a disjointed conversation where different people are thinking that they’re discussing different topics. It will be like “Shall we buy a new sofa?” “Yes, let’s go to the park.” Once the topic X has been parked, it’s fine if you don’t have time to get back to X in this meeting. The focus is now Y, and you should focus on doing justice to Y. See the previous point about not cramming two topics into one meeting.

○ Use a shared Notion as a visual aid. Headline it with the topic.

○ If people are talking past each other, that means they need a visual aid to understand: write down the key points in Notion. Say you’re proposing two options, each of which has a pro and a con. Write them down:

Option 1: …
Pro: …
Con: …

Option 2: …
Pro: …
Con: …

Then the conversation will get back on track.

○ Capture decisions made, or action items, or insights obtained in a bulleted list in the Notion. At the end, email it to everyone. You should have a sense of progress in each meeting, not “We talk for hours and we don’t know if we’re getting anything out of it”.

○ Once a decision is made, everyone should adhere to it in subsequent meetings. Some dysfunctional companies have a dynamic of arguing about the same thing again and again. Say no to that. If someone objects, ask them, “Why didn’t you speak up last week when were discussing this topic?”

○ If you want to meet someone after they’ve done some pre-work, ask them, “Please do X and then set up a meeting”. Don’t set it up now. Sometimes people ask, “By when will you be able to do X?” “Wednesday” “Then shall I set up a meeting for Thursday?” “Sure”. Then Thursday comes and the they didn’t actually get time to do X, because schedules are unpredictable and estimates are guesses. Then the meeting is not productive.

○ Share a Calendly link, to let people schedule without unnecessary back and forth.

○ Schedule a meeting for an hour. My polls found that the majority of people can focus for an hour:

If you want a shorter time, go with 40 minutes. That works well with Zoom’s limit for free accounts, and the impending threat of disconnection will force focus on time. When it does disconnect, take a 10-minute break and only then reconnect.

○ Sometimes people ask for a “10-minute meeting”. It usually ends up overflowing, at which point both sides are impatient, and that causes the meeting to not be productive. It’s better to schedule it for a longer duration like an hour or 40 minutes, so that both sides are patient. I’d rather spend 40 minutes and achieve something than spend 20 minutes and achieve nothing.

○ Have a 10-minute break between meetings. Research has shown that it de-stresses people.

○ When the time runs out, hang up. Continuing will make you late for the next meeting, set up a domino effect, and disrupting many people’s schedules. Besides, you get impatient and annoyed, which derails the meeting.

○ Keep an eye on the clock throughout the meeting. If you need to do something at the end, like schedule the next meeting or discuss next steps or whatever, leave time for it. If necessary, interrupt and say, “We need to discuss the next steps”.

[1] Don’t be impatient thinking that this will take time. If you don’t spend the time trying to make it easy for the recipient to understand, they won’t understand what you’re saying and you’ll find yourself explaining it multiple times, which will waste time, too. Including other people’s time. And people may not implement what you’re trying to communicate because you didn’t communicate it well, so the purpose is not achieved.

[2] Don’t worry that it may come across as rude. It’s ruder to waste everyone’s time by letting people become unfocused.