Good process & systems can eliminate 90%+ of meetings

This is not me looking into a glass ball.. this is me concluding this based on the way i've actually worked the past couple years

For the past couple of years I tend to juggle things…. a mix of external clients, my own projects, blogging, etc.

And I just don’t have time to sit on lots of meetings. Nor do I like to.

Plus I generally find 95% of what is discussed could have been easily solved outside of the meeting if everyone was on a good system.

In a way I consider meetings to be “instruments of the disorganized” lol.

First… you need a strong foundational system before you can get rid of meetings

As mentioned many times on this blog in the past… I use Clickup in a very systematic and consistent way across everything i do.

So basically everything that takes more than 20 minutes to do is somehow reflected in a Clickup card, which has an assignee, a context & goal, a due date, and comment updates.

Plus all of these cards are organized into a tree-like, multi-level organizational structure from space to folder to list.

Some of my lists are around ideas or strategies that I want feedback on.

So if I have an idea…. I don’t organize a big meeting to discuss it. I simply throw the idea into my idea list on Clickup and add the folks i want input from as followers.

They put their inputs as comments and within a few days of interacting with each other via comments… we have a pretty good conclusion.

I also use standups to align quickly on more complex issues

In each of the projects I work on.. I run standups that last between 10-30 minutes. If its a big project where we’re progressing a lot daily.. than it will be a daily standup like in engineering teams.

If it’s less intense I might do once or twice a week.

During these standups everyone gives an update on their assigned cards. And any more complex issues are solved with a quick discussion during the standup.

If something really requires a lot more thinking… than we will do an add’l dedicated call..

But the mandate is that the person organizing the call should have laid out the issue clearly in Notion and sent it around as an update to the clickup card prior to the meeting.

When you use this system.. you find that there are relatively few things that you neet an actual call on. Fact is.. most things actually can be aligned via Clickup asynchronously.

With this process firmly in place… I have found the need for meetings to be rare

Think about it… when everyone is just creating clickup cards and getting fast feedback from all stakeholders.. why do you need a meeting?

Most times you don’t.

Everyone can just asynchronously add their views to the card, respond to one another, and then you set a deadline for the decision.

Its also a lot clearer who the decision maker is and what decision they make when its all written down in a card.

Gone are the days of listening to some dude drone on and on about his opinion when he’s not even the decision maker.

Let’s now look at this process to understand why it is superior to the ‘old way’ (ie. meetings)

1st: Its far more democratic

I call Clickup the “ultimate democracy in the workplace”.

Why? Because its not about who is the most senior, who has the loudest voice, etc. And all those things that have massive impacts on the outcomes of actual physical meetings.

Rather it’s all about logic and communicating your thoughts clearly. Responding clearly to others’ doubts and ensuring every stakeholder had a voice at the table regardless of whether they are the type of person that speaks up in meetings.

2nd: You downplay the infuence louder people have on a meeting

I actually have a running theory… that if you have at least one loud/charismatic person in the meeting… than this person will heavily influence the outcome of the meeting.

And your end result will stray further from the most optimal/logical conclusion.

I used to see this time and again in one company years ago where my manager had that fog horn type of voice that could cut through any room.

He would say these vague things that were often illogical, but in the end he had a knack for getting his way. In part because if you tried to disagree with him, he’d just cut you off with his foghorn voice.

And the end result was a shit ton of bad decisions (which eventually caught up with that company).

3rd: It leads to people having more context prior to giving their opinion

I don’t know how many times I have been in meetings where all kinds of folks are chiming in when it’s clear they didn’t do their homework on the topic.

But on Clickup everyone has access to the documents and thread of comments, and you’re not under any time pressure to get your response in.

So you read the materials and ensure you give a well-prepared response. Because you have no excuse not to.

4th: You get rid of the “busy calendar problem”

Many folks are very busy, particularly the more senior they are. And so important decisions will often get delayed by a week or more because its very hard to get a spot on everyone’s calendar.

I used to see this a ton in one large org I worked at many years ago that was in my view “meeting crazy”.

You spent the whole day shifting between the 100+ meetings rooms that the company had.

It felt like high school because at every 30 or 60 minute interval half the people in the company were shifting to the next meeting on one of the company’s six floors.

It also took about 3-4x the amount of time it should have to get any product feature out in that ‘anonymous company’. In part because of this need to always meet and discuss.

Needless to say.. that company has been struggling in recent times.