DEV Community: Justin Watt

“30 is the new 60”â€Š–â€ŠWhy your meetings can be cut in half

Justin Watt — Thu, 30 Mar 2017 20:02:21 +0000

How many meetings do you have per week at work? How many of those meetings are too long? Could 30 be the new 60?

Many are surprised to find out that 15% of an organization’s collective time is spent in meetings every week. Time is the resource in every organization that is most valuable but goes the most unchecked and we’re all guilty of wasting it.

The average employee attends 62 meetings per month. 73% of employees do other work while attending meetings with 22% of employees at one organization admitting to sending 3 or more emails, on average, for every 30 minutes of meeting time. More than 65% of leadership meetings aren’t called for the purpose of decision making, but instead, merely for information sharing or group discussion. Each organization is different and while I can’t define if a meeting is required or not for your organization, my aim is to challenge you to shorten your meetings.

Shorter isÂ Better

The sign of a great meeting isn’t the meeting itself, it’s the outcome of the meeting. When you and your team meet for a shorter period of time, your goal is to get to the outcome sooner and not waste time. Agendas with purpose drive decisions to be made. Taking just 5 minutes when sending out a meeting invite to create a few bullet points of topics to be covered in the meeting and noting the objective, you’ll make valuable use of only as much time is needed. In doing this, you’ll find that the time spent in the meeting is meaningful for all involved when everyone comes with a purpose. You can then make meetings shorter by not focusing on the fluff.

You’ll find other added benefits with shorter meetings too:

When people know a meeting is shorter, they tend to arrive on time.
Cutting your meetings in half, you’ll have far more opportunities to enjoy meaningful time with co-workers.
You’ll have more time to focus on your actual job. Mostly due to meetings and email, employees only spend 45% of their time on actual job duties. Think of all the time you’ll have back with shorter meetings.

Asking Others to do theÂ Same

While you can be mindful of others time by scheduling shorter meetings, it is key to rally others to do the same. Co-workers, like you, often have more work than can be done in a single day. Challenging the belief that meetings need to be longer in a positive way can shed light on something that many in your office may not even be thinking about. Time can be given back to everyone with shorter meetings and everyone has a part to play in making that happen

If an invite comes through for 60 minutes and it appears that the meeting can be shorter, reach out to the organizer personally. Ask that person for their thoughts on shortening that meeting. You’ll be surprised by how eager people are to agree that the meeting can be shorter. But what about leaders that schedule long meetings?

”I can’t tell my boss to provide an agenda for a meeting that also appears to be 30 minutes longer than is needed!”

Your boss is a support system with goals based around you doing great work. When done constructively, there is no harm in making it clear that your aim is to ensure you and others make good use of the time you have each day for the work you care about. Leader’s who care about you and your responsibilities will appreciate you showing initiative when it comes to being more productive. A leader who doesn’t care about that is…well, that’s a different conversation.

Myth: Meetings Are Key to Creating Social Bonds atÂ Work

Many believe that longer meetings are necessary to create better bonds and working relationships with teams. Others believe longer meetings improve morale as there’s breathing room for various conversations.

That belief is false. Meetings aren’t key to creating strong social bonds between co-workers, that’s merely a byproduct of being in the same room together. It is far more worthwhile to invest in truly social situations for you and those that you want to get to know better at work.

Take time to go for a coffee with a teammate at work. Invite someone to go for lunch. Get a group together for an after work drink. These activities will bring much stronger connections and the focus can be on getting to know one another. If those types of interactions aren’t possible, make time for a 1:1 call with no agenda here and there. Don’t make getting to know someone a byproduct of being together at the same time for something unrelated.

Your Mission

We know that time is wasted by all organizations with meetings being the main culprit. Now, what can we do about it?

For the next 4 weeks, I challenge you to do the following:

Question if any of your recurring meetings allotted time could be cut in half.
Before sending out a meeting invite, think about the possibility of cutting the time allotted in half. Can 60 become 30? Can 30 become 15? Can 15 be a quick IM or email?
Create a short, bullet-point agenda with an objective stated for the meeting. If you can’t do that, do you need the meeting at all?

Our scarcest resource is time. Value your time and the time of those that you work with. You’re going to be amazed at how much more you can accomplish.

This article was originally published on Medium. Lots more great information like this in my newsletter or say hi on Twitter.

How to Stop Letting Notifications Kill Your Workday

Justin Watt — Sun, 19 Mar 2017 19:51:11 +0000

“So insanely busy.” When's the last time you heard that phrase or a variation of it upon asking a co-worker how they're doing? I will bet it's within the last 7 days.

This past Monday, I decided to quantify where some of the “insanely busy” feelings came from for the work day when it came to notifications.

I received 41 emails. 23 of them came from humans, the rest were notifications or automated, redundant information. That's my fault for not unsubscribing to unneeded emails sooner.

I received 153 Slack notifications. 3 of them were critical enough that I needed to answer them within an hour. Another 20 of them were important enough that they needed an answer the same business day. The rest were informational but not needing a notification.

Chrome alerted me to 14 different Google Drive comments to engage with. And this is all after customizing notifications to be less intrusive.

Sound familiar?

Teams I work with day to day are respectful of each others time. When it comes to notification overload, it's not people that cause the bulk of the issues, it's the products we use to get work done.

“I'm busy.”â€Š–â€ŠToday's Air Horn of Hyperbole

Many argue that in our personal and business lives we sound the air horn of hyperbole in regards to how busy we are. To an extent, people aren't wrong when they claim that many are feigning how busy they are as a badge of honour. But these people certainly aren't right either; people are busy AF. We pride ourselves on our ability to multitask, to ebb and flow as needed by our co-workers and leadership teams. Many pride themselves on having “more on the go” than the person beside them. This article isn't about that bullshit. This is about the deluge of interruptions we experience on an individual level in our work lives that our organizations and software providers have unknowingly thrust on us.

There are endless articles about dealing with notification overload in our personal life, but what about our work life?

Notifications or GTFO?

You sit there each day experiencing the deluge of pings, dings, and rings that notifications propel at you. Outside of the multitude of personal notifications you get, you're pestered by email, Slack, texts, calendar invites, Google Drive, Dropbox, Jira, Office365, Trello, Basecamp, Salesforce, or the abundance of other applications that you may use in your organization. We're lead to believe that we need to be up to date and current on all of the information flowing in and out of these applications at all times and each products notifications are built around this assumption.

While each individual service tries to be respectful, the compounding effect of all these notifications is crippling each day. It is easy to get caught up in these notifications, but we need to learn to accept that not all of them are a high priority. Many are barely a low or medium priority. The acceptance of this overload is half the battle though. Dealing with the deluge is the next step.

Some Solutions

While it often feels easier to embrace the anxiety and time wasted that all of these notifications produce, there is a better way. Here's some tips to think about:

For Yourself:

Ask yourself what apps or services provide the most important notifications? Which apps provide the least important? Use these answers to customize or remove unneeded notifications.
Use Do Not Disturb mode on your Mac (Windows has it now too)
Slack (or the workplace IM platform of choice) is often the main notification overload culprit but has solid notification customization to weed out the important information from the noise. Take the time to take advantage of this.
Discuss the notification overload issue openly with teammates at work. Many others face this issue. A common understanding will help everyone to be more respectful of pings and help to set the tone culturally.
Head to Google and let it help solve your notification overload. A quick search for "customize notifications for [insert app here]" will do wonders.

For Business Leaders:

Encourage your teams to summarize information in single messages, not a barrage of information that creates a large amount of notifications.
Create a culture of focused work by encouraging teams to turn all notifications off for a while with features like Do Not Disturb.
If you're responsible for a business or team and wondering where a weakness lies, look closely at the cracks and crevices where information is currently trapped or overloading people and make time to discuss ways in which to address this with your teams.

For Those Making These Fantastic Products:

Bundling: Start embracing bundling of non-high priority notifications like 37Signals has done with Basecamp.
Keep some best practices in mind when designing notification systems and hierarchies in your product.
Design to reduce anxiety.

Keep Yourself in Check

As new software is implemented in your organization or teams create new workflows, you'll start to see more notifications coming your way. Don't fall into the trap of being overloaded and overworked because of the deluge of information coming your way. Recognizing the issue and keeping yourself in check when it comes to notifications is time well worth spending. Your sanity at work depends on it.

This article was originally published on Medium. Lots more great information like this in my newsletter or say hi on Twitter.