With CalenTask, I can easily prioritize tasks and focus on what matters. It keeps me on track and productive, day in and day out.
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In a study by Clockwise, people have ranked pointless meetings that could have been an email on the same scale of annoyance as an empty toilet paper roll, no turn signal usage, and even littering. Some respondents said they’d rather go to the dentist or call their cable company than sit through a bad meeting.
If you’re holding regular recurring meetings to get status updates and interrupting work for messages that don't need real-time discussion, it’s time to adjust the way you look at meetings.
When every quick question or update turns into a meeting, your team spends the majority of their workday in meetings talking about work (as opposed to getting real work done).
Professionals today average 21.5 hours each week in meetings (with “busy” professionals averaging 32.9 hours per week).
And this number is up from recent years. Globally, we now attend 13% more meetings since the COVID-19 pandemic began.
If your team doesn’t address its impending meeting overload, you will find yourself sliding down a slippery slope: losing out on productivity and deteriorating staff work-life balance.
Instead, ensure your team has time to be productive. Make time for deep work, set up asynchronous communication tools, and standardize communication processes.
Turning to asynchronous outlets can help revamp the way your team looks at communication, collaboration, and when meetings are actually necessary. (But more on async later.)
Repeat after me: Not everything needs to be a meeting.
To help you navigate this new anti-meeting revolution, we’re outlining six cases when you don’t need a meeting, as well as what you can do instead.
Let’s say you’re looking for a quick update on a task or the progress of a project. Typically, you might stop by someone’s desk for a brief one-on-one if you’re in the office. Or, you might schedule a progress update meeting.
Seems harmless, right? Not when it’s happening all day long.
Clockwise’s study revealed that the average worker couldn’t even go an hour without some kind of interruption, the majority of which are due to co-workers stopping by their desk to ask a quick question.
Take into account the hardship that context switching can have on your employees, even for “quick” questions.
After an interruption, one study showed that it takes an average of 23 minutes to refocus on the original task at hand. When your team suffers from regular interruptions throughout their day, even the quick ones, their focus time is cut back dramatically.
To get a quick update, consider sending an email. Or, better yet, send a message on your team communication app. Instead of interrupting their workflow, pop your question in Twist, Yac, Asana, or any of the other tools you use to communicate, so that team members can answer when they’re ready to take a break from focused work.
Just make sure you give team members adequate time to respond. Setting a standard to “respond at your earliest convenience” helps them get their work done without feeling the pressure to reply ASAP.
Similarly, how often does your team say: “let’s hop on a call” to discuss something non-urgent?
This need to jump into ad-hoc meetings plays into the “looking and feeling busy” working culture most organizations currently operate in.
While it can be easy to mistake busyness for productivity, spending too much time in meetings talking about work actually keeps us from doing those impactful, productive tasks.
Instead of requesting ad hoc meetings throughout the day, record a voice message that shares your thoughts or walks someone through an issue. Send it via a tool like Yac so your recipients can listen to it and then contemplate their response before replying.
Plus, Yac automatically transcribes your audio clips. This makes it easy to scan voice messages to see if it’s relevant to you right now or if it can wait.
There are times when feedback will require a synchronous (real-time) discussion. For example, performance reviews tend to be more sensitive and can be more productive when held face-to-face.
However, for small bits of feedback (e.g., a minor error on a task or a request to do something differently next time), share it sans meeting.
Provide feedback by using the commenting or suggesting features in your documents, leave messages in your project management software, or create a live document that feedback lives in.
Feeding back this way allows your team to accept and implement constructive criticism without wasting time in a “quick one-on-one meeting.”
When sharing information like company updates or new processes, or even some recent industry news, a quick email (or better yet, an async screen share) is much more efficient than calling an all-hands meeting.
This is especially the case if no decision-making or input from anyone is needed. Generally, one-sided conversations don’t need to be done synchronously.
If you have no meeting agenda or general talking points, you’re not likely prepared for a productive and effective conversation.
A meeting agenda is key for improving your meeting productivity, and they can be an asset to asynchronous meetings as well.
Putting together a brief meeting agenda will help keep team members on message, encouraging everyone to get involved without causing the meeting to veer away from focus points.
Or cancel the synchronous meeting in favor of an async method. Request whatever you want to learn from your team via a doc or async message, and let them get back to you when they can.
Access the meetings on your calendar and determine which ones are valuable—and which ones have participants that don’t need to join in.
If the meeting can be done asynchronously, great! But if not, invite only the people who need to be present, and share meeting minutes with the rest later.
After a while, recurring meetings become “part of the furniture.” They’re on your calendar every week, and eventually, they lose their purpose.
This also tends to happen because, as we said, these meetings become a comfort and habit. Many people feel that without meetings, they’ll fall behind, and productivity will suffer if they’re not having live discussions.
In fact, the opposite is true—live meetings that have no objective keep your team from moving the needle forward. Allowing time for impactful work helps your team make better progress.
To combat this issue, it’s a good idea to revisit all of your work meetings every quarter or so to see if they’re actually productive and working towards objectives and initiatives or if they’ve become stagnant and don’t affect your bottom line.
While these meetings could be emails, email overload is just as real. It’s a trap you don’t want to fall into when reducing the number of meetings on your calendar.
Email may technically be asynchronous, but not everyone uses it this way. In most workplaces, there’s a huge pressure to reply ASAP.
Voice and video sharing platforms like Yac are the perfect solutions to both issues, providing a method for communication that doesn’t need to interrupt everyone’s day. Async helps make people’s inboxes and calendars lighter while empowering flexible schedules and deep work sessions.
Plus, the ability to speak while going over a document removes the ambiguity from an email or Slack message. Recipients can hear the speaker’s tone of voice as the sender narrates the screen-sharing session.
This is why it’s key to invest in the right asynchronous communication tools and put parameters into place so that your team knows where to communicate what—and what their response expectations are.
The shift to modern asynchronous communication tools can take some adjustment; we’re so comfortable with the current methods of checking in with our teams.
However, with async, you’ll likely find productivity improves, and staff is happier, thanks to more available time to get work done and less pressure from distractions like emails and meetings.
“Async communication completely supports productivity on a team, first and foremost, it allows you to get into a deep work state. It gives us the ability to get into a flow state, avoid distractions, and craft our perfect workday. Each individual can build out the perfect way that they like to work, leverage their energy levels at different parts of the day and decide when they want to do certain types of work best.”
says Chase Warrington, Head of Remote at Doist.
For example, 91% of businesses using Yac had fewer meetings, resulting in over 35 minutes per person saved every single day.
There are a number of different types of async that you can use in different ways to help your team get the most out of their communication.
Test different types of asynchronous communication to find out what works best for your team and your startup. Then standardize these new communication methods, so your team knows what to expect from each other.
Don’t make your team purchase t-shirts and coffee mugs that say, “I survived another meeting that could’ve been an email.” Stop having unnecessary meetings and switch to async-first work culture. Your team and their productivity will thank you.
And Yac can help. Sign up free to start using Yac for your own asynchronous meetings and communication.
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With CalenTask, I can easily prioritize tasks and focus on what matters. It keeps me on track and productive, day in and day out.
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