If you're new to Continuous Coordination, start with this overview.
Spare the meetings
The answer to everything can’t be “have a meeting.” Zoom fatigue is real, and people need big blocks of time to do deep work. Save meetings for the high-value stuff — collaborating, team-building — and use async tools for the rest.
The theory
“Meeting hours” are the most precious commodity in a knowledge organization. They carry a high cost but are incredibly valuable when used correctly.
Meetings are expensive. Companies spend a disproportionate amount of payroll on meetings, to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars at large companies.
Meetings are zero-sum. You’re either talking about the work, or doing the work.
Excess meetings are draining. Too many meetings too much of the time leaves you with little energy for real work.
Meetings are flexibility killers. Rigid recurring meeting structures erase one of the biggest advantages of remote and hybrid work; flexibility.
Meetings erode deep-work. Knowledge workers like developers and designers need large, uninterrupted blocks of time to get into flow state do their best work. Nothing of significance is getting done in that 30-minute gap between meetings.
Despite the price, meetings are absolutely vital, especially in remote and hybrid teams. Rich human interaction — collaborating, spit-balling, celebrating, commiserating, etc — is the foundation that great work and strong team culture is built on.
Get rid of low-value meetings — status meetings, high-frequency all-hands, etc. — in favor of async updates and save your meeting budget for high-value collaboration and teamwork.
How Steady makes it happen
Reference Material
Laker, B., Pereira, V., Malik, A., Soga, L. (2022, March). Dear Manager, You’re Holding Too Many Meetings. Harvard Business Review.Research shows that 70% of meetings keep employees from doing productive work. Deliberate and asynchronous approaches can alleiviate the problem.
Rossi, L. (2023, February 9). How to Reduce Meetings. Refactoring.Strategies and practical ideas for better async communication, and a detailed case study.
Graham, P. (2009, July 5). Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule. PaulGraham.com.Graham posits that managers’ schedules are typically segmented into one-hour intervals for meetings, while makers (like programmers or writers) prefer long, uninterrupted blocks of time to be productive in their creative or technical work.
Boyle, M. (2022 September 26). Useless Meetings Waste Time and $100 Million a Year for Big Companies. Bloomberg.Employees say they don’t need to be in nearly one-third of the meetings they attend, a survey shows.