Every time I travel, just before I leave the house, I do a weird thing. I stop at the front door of our house, look myself in the mirror, and say out loud: “Remember, no running in airports today”. Travel is inherently stressful and I’ve found that once it boils over into having to run to catch a flight, I lose my ability to deal with things well. So I try to remind myself to keep calm and walk on.

Of course, there are a lot of variables in the “no running in airports” equation that are out of my control. A delay might cause a tight connection. A messed up security line could take longer than expected. I could miss a gate reassignment and try to board the wrong flight (yes, that happened). And yet, that statement helps to ground me in the two most important things I can do to stay in control of my travel day: be prepared (know when to go where, renew my Flighty subscription, etc.), and pay attention to detail (um, just, you know… read the gate assignment right).

I was thinking about this as I was getting ready to head into another workweek. There seems to be a lot of “running in airports” going on in the tech world right now, and it sometimes feels like it gets too much to handle. So what would it mean in a work context to look in the mirror on Monday morning and say out loud: “Remember, no running in airports today”? Yes, lots of variables are out of our control, but how could we be prepared and pay attention to detail in a way that reduces some of the likelihood of that happening?

For me? I could be prepared by looking ahead at my calendar and making sure I am spending my time in the right meetings—and that I go into them knowing exactly what is expected of me and what we expect to get out of them. I could try to anticipate “delayed flights”—those unexpected wrenches in projects—and what I could do to get things back on track if that happens.

I could pay attention to detail by listening intently when people speak, by hearing the meanings and feelings underneath the words in meetings where things seem a little wobbly. By noticing when “a gate assignment changed” (no, I’ll never stop being embarrassed about that one) and preemptively figuring out how and why it happened and what I can do about it.

There are, of course, no guarantees. But I still firmly believe that teams make better products in calm environments. Just like in travel, we can’t really create calm. The planes are going to do what they do. But we can remind ourselves that the goal is not to run, and that we have some agency over that.

Here’s to not running in airports this week.

Anne Helen Petersen brings some much-needed clarity to the meeting overload debate in The Root of Over-Meeting Culture. It’s worth reading this one in full because she takes her time to lay out the argument logically, but a few of things especially stood out to me.

When their team was fully in the office, managing probably felt straightforward. Most people managed by, well, looking and walking around. That was the heart of it. Now, figuring out what your team is doing, and how they feel about doing it, it’s a lot more work. So managers not only feel like they’re doing more work — and less productive themselves, as workers — but they also feel like they’re doing a worse job, and have less insight into what their reports are doing.

This is a good point that I don’t see talked about much. One of the reasons that RTO policies have become so prevalent is the lack of visibility that managers feel about the work their teams are doing. There are way better solutions to this problem than forcing a return to the office (regular async updates, clear priorities, etc.), but that seems to be the default approach to deal with what is essentially a communication problem, not a presence problem.

More talk about prioritization = more manager confidence (that their reports are doing the things that matter most) and more employee confidence (that they’re doing what they should be doing). It’s difficult to understate just how powerful this sort of clarity can be.

Related to the previous quote, +1 to this! No one on the team should be wondering if they’re working on the right things, and what they should be doing next. This is, in my opinion, the most important job of the 1:1 meeting, and why that meeting has to be (at least) weekly.

I have all the reservations about AI that other smart people do, but one of its real potentials is summarizing meetings in a way that makes people feel like they understood what happened and whether or not their input is needed after the fact without having to attend the actual meeting.

Another big +1 to this. Gong does this incredibly well by summarizing sales calls, pulling out action items, providing searchable transcripts and call insights, and more.

There are some pretty wild stats in the post about how meeting time has increased 252% since 2020. Some of that is necessary because of the shift to remote work, but not all of it. We somehow still view meetings as the default solution to figuring out what’s going on in an organization. I wrote Good / Bad Remote Worker before the pandemic, but I think this principle is more important than ever:

A good remote worker always thinks about collaboration through the lens of asynchronous communication. Remote work naturally creates great environments for deep, focused work, so it makes sense to optimize for asynchronous communication. This lets everyone get involved when it works best for them — and when they are ready to give something their full attention.

A bad remote worker tries to recreate an open office environment through too many meetings and other forms of synchronous communication. Meetings aren’t inherently bad. But unnecessary meetings and synchronous feedback sessions undermine one of the most significant benefits of remote work and should be used sparingly.