Async meeting

Smart use of digital tools to reduce the need for meetings

This article is part of a series called Less Meetings, More focused work.

Many of the problems with the meetings stems from the fact that they are synchronous:

• You have to maintain focus for a long period of time even when it’s irrelevant

• If you miss the meeting, you’re out of the loop by default

• It’s hard to get airtime to raise your concerns, especially if the meeting is not well-moderated and/or there’s a loudmouth in the room that just loves their voice 🔊

• It is hard to contribute meaningfully, especially if the meeting didn’t have an agenda or you didn’t have enough time to prepare

Inspiration

System Reliability engineering has an inspiration! In this case it is queues and messaging. We need to take a quick side track to tightly coupled systems. Particularly the “cascading failure”.

Suppose System A depends on System B. Every time any of them fail, both fail:

Now suppose we use a queue in between where System A sends a message and System B processes it whenever it is up and sends the results back to the queue:

That’s the core idea: instead of expecting everyone to be at the meeting, let people contribute at their convenience. In other words: asynchronously.

Over the past years, I have been using this technique for almost all meetings that I’m hosting and there are a lot of tips and tricks that I’ll share in a future posts.

Over the past years, I have been using this technique for almost all meetings that I’m hosting and there are a lot of tips and tricks that I’ll share in a future posts.

The idea is simple to explain but takes practice to master:

• Use the higher communication bandwidth of meetings to kick start the initiative and have a dialogue around that

• Continue the work on a live doc where everyone can comment at their convenience

• Have a dedicated async communication channel (e.g. Slack or Teams) for conversations that are not urgent but could use a dialogue

• Use the meetings as needed (for example when there are long comments on the doc or Slack)

• If a decision needs to be made, use meeting if needed

My experience

• Async setup gives more time to think and generally yields more thoughtful conversation as opposed to the rushed setup of the meeting. The quality of the async discussions is usually higher because one gets the chance to think things through and do some research if needed. The written words tend to have a higher bar than spoken words blurted under the pressure of a meeting.

• People who typically don’t speak up in the meeting (e.g. introverts or marginalized groups), have a fair chance to raise their concerns or questions in the async channels and contribute. This provides a more inclusive collaboration setup.

• The downside of this method is that it takes longer to make a decision. That’s a general problem with async communication, especially if the organization hasn’t built the habit of taking Slack/Teams/Live docs as seriously as the meetings. You may find yourself poking and nudging people more than you’re comfortable with.

Other articles in this series

Meeting budget

Calendar Defragmentation

Meeting-free days