Think Before You Sync
Before booking a meeting, the organiser runs five quick checks. Is it urgent? Is the goal to share information, or to decide, generate ideas or unblock? How many people need to be involved? Will one person do most of the talking? How complex is the topic? Depending on the answers, the topic goes to a meeting, an async update or recorded video, or a mix.
Use when calendars are full of meetings that could have been a message, and you want a simple rule people can apply on their own.
Solves: Teams default to booking a meeting for everything, so there is no time left for focused work.
- 1
Step 1: Urgency: if it can wait, it does not need to interrupt anyone. Go async (1 min).
- 2
Step 2: Goal: information sharing goes async; generating ideas, deciding and unblocking may need a meeting (1 min).
- 3
Step 3: Size: keep live meetings under eight people; invite the rest to contribute through comments or video (1 min).
- 4
Step 4: Presenter: if one person will talk most of the time, record a video instead (1 min).
- 5
Step 5: Complexity: simple topics go async; complex topics get async prep plus a shorter meeting (1 min).
- 6
Step 6: Tell people what you decided and how they can take part, especially if you cancelled a meeting.
- Run it as a team on all recurring meetings once, then let people use it alone.
- Ask for feedback after a few weeks; some meetings will need to come back, and that is fine.
- Combine sync and async: written prep makes the remaining meetings shorter.