The importance of async work and cutting down on meetings to allow for more Deep Work time won’t be new to regular readers of the blog. And yet I can’t resist sharing another article about it… How Asana and Slack’s meeting purges have paid off has the usual methods and recommendations in it (although “Meeting Rest” is a new one to me—read the article for details).
Instead what I want to focus on here is a few pull quotes about the results companies report once they were able to successful reduce their meetings. Here’s Asana:
A few months later meeting lengths had shrunk. Most 30-minute meetings were converted to 15 minutes, some weekly meetings were moved to every other week or month, and others were deleted entirely. That meant each person was saving an average of 11 hours per month, totaling about 3.5 workweeks per year.
And:
The 60 participants saved 265 hours per month in total when reducing unproductive recurring meetings. In the aftermath of our meeting reset, employees are much more strategic and thoughtful about removing items from meeting agendas that can be effectively handled asynchronously.
From Remote:
By cutting down on meetings, we’re not just saving time. We’re also empowering our teams to work on their own schedules. This gives our employees a sense of autonomy and keeps them motivated, fostering a culture of productivity and efficiency.
And finally, Typeform:
We sent another engagement form to the team to see how they were feeling after we made these changes. The ‘ways of working’ score went up more than 10 points. Trimming our meeting time has helped our employees and our customers, which is really satisfying.
It’s worth the effort, friends. Re-evaluate the need for all those meetings. Embrace async. It leads to happier employees and more effective communication in permanent places that can be referenced in the future. And, importantly, it leads to higher quality products because no one has to rush through “actual work” after all their meetings are finally done for the day.
