Meetings Are Toxic
Excited to go to SEED tomorrow. Looking forward to more counter-intuitive wisdom from 37signals, Coudal et al.
Made use of some of that advice recently when an “emergency” conference call between about six parties in three time zones was deemed necessary. As the slew of “I’m available x. Whan are you available?” emails started flying I thought “This call is going to kill me. Just getting this call set up is going to kill me.”
Signal vs. Noise drew my attention to a Tim Ferriss post about Results-Only Work Environment (ROWE) with this great little anectdote introducing “blizzard goggles”:
One day, before ROWE, Phil was unable to come into work because of a snowstorm, which in Minnesota is perhaps the ultimate in socially acceptable excuses. Phil had six meetings scheduled for that day that were canceled because everyone was having trouble getting to the office. When he returned the next day, four of those meetings were never rescheduled. One was resolved with an e-mail, another with a phone call.
He had spent much of his “snow day” worrying about those six meetings. He was ready to drive in and brave the weather in order to have them. Now that he’s in a ROWE he thinks about that snow day a lot. When an invitation to a meeting comes up or when he’s thinking about scheduling a meeting, he puts on his “blizzard goggles.” Is this meeting really necessary? If there were a snowstorm today, would that meeting fade away, or could it be taken care of with an e-mail, or, would it in fact prove to have genuine
I avoided the headache and time suck of that conference call by drafting a quick email that addressed everyone’s concerns and answering all the open questions.
